黑料吃瓜网

The Wang Yangming school is a school of Confucianism that was propounded by the Chinese thinker Wang Shouren (whose pen name was Yangming) in the early sixteenth century, and it is said to have criticized the Zhu Xi (Zhuzi) school of philosophy, which had until then been the main current of Confucianism. Eventually, its texts were introduced to Japan, and in textbooks Nakae Tōju and his disciple Kumazawa Banzan of the seventeenth century are classified as scholars of the Wang Yangming school.
 
This book introduces a series of thinkers and activists who possessed sensibilities aligned with the Wang Yangming school in modern Japan, starting with the armed uprising led by ?shio Heihachirō (Chūsai) in Osaka in 1837 and ending with Mishima Yukio’s ritual suicide in Tokyo in 1970, and it discusses both the merits and demerits of these individuals.
 
Past research on people deemed to have belonged to the Wang Yangming school has generally been limited to introducing their biographies and writings. In contrast, this book discusses how and why these individuals were “Yangmingist” in the context of their respective historical backgrounds and the environments in which they were raised, and it attempts to explore common elements that led them to disagree with Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianist thinking. I wrote this book motivated by a desire to help those who have merely memorized the formula “The Zhu Xi school emphasizes the unity of inner nature and principle, while the Wang Yangming school emphasizes the unity of mind and principle” to understand the appeal and danger of Wang Yangming’s ideas. For further details of the content of his ideas, reference may be made to my earlier book, An Introduction to Zhu Xi’s School and Wang Yangming’s School (currently published in the Chikuma Gakugei Bunko series).
 
This book was originally published in 2006 in the Kōdansha Sensho Mechie series. At the time of writing, Koizumi Jun’ichirō was prime minister of Japan, and diplomatic relations with China were fraught because of the issue of visits by politicians to Yasukuni Shrine, and my aim was to provide a historical explanation of the mentality of those who glorify Yasukuni Shrine, as was also the case with my book A View of History Centred on Yasukuni Shrine (introduced on this website), which I wrote after the present book. About twenty years have passed since then, and the power dynamics among East Asian nations have changed significantly, but there remain vast differences between Japan and its neighbours regarding historical perceptions of Japan’s actions from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century.

As noted in the afterword of this paperback edition, a Korean translation of this book has been published, but plans for the publication of a Chinese translation in the People’s Republic of China were halted because of concerns about its content. During the past twenty years, my focus has shifted from pointing out the dangers of Japanese “Yangmingism” to questions concerning freedom and independence in East Asia. In light of this, four additional essays on the Wang Yangming school, written after the original publication of this book, have been included in this paperback edition as a supplement. The final essay is about Shibusawa Eiichi. In his youth, Shibusawa was Dionysian, just like the protagonists of this book, but in the Meiji era, he brilliantly played an Apollonian role in order to modernize the Japanese economy. To commemorate the fact that he became the face of the 10,000 yen note this year (2024), I included this essay in order to apprise readers of his ideas on freedom. I hope that readers will compare him with his “predecessor,” Fukuzawa Yukichi, who was consistently Apollonian throughout his life (not becoming a proponent of “revering the emperor and expelling foreigners” and not closing his private school Keiō Gijuku on the day of the battle between the shogunate’s former retainers and the new government’s forces at Ueno) and was therefore a favorite thinker of the political scientist Maruyama Masao.
 

(Written by KOJIMA Tsuyoshi, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2024)