Aizawa Yasushi, also called Aizawa Seishisai (born July 5, 1782, Mito, Hitachi Province—died August 27, 1863, Mito), was a nationalist thinker whose writings helped provoke the movement that in 1868 overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and restored power to the emperor.
Aizawa’s fief of Mito, one of the branches of the great Tokugawa family, was a center of Confucian learning and loyalty. Indeed, early in the Tokugawa period Mito scholars had been entrusted with the task of compiling an official national history, the so-called Dainihon shi, a task that would be completed only after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunal dynasty. Given its status as a key collateral domain and unique ideological role, it is not surprising that the threat to received notions of political order posed by growing contact with the West was keenly felt in Mito. In 1825, a string of Western encroachments into Japanese waters had led the shogunate to reaffirm its policy of seclusion. In response, Aizawa presented his Shinron (New Proposals), one of his most influential works, to Tokugawa Nariaki, his domain lord and patron (too dangerous to publish, for some years the work had to circulate in manuscript).
The new “barbarians,” Aizawa argued, had to be dealt with decisively. Coining the slogan, sonnō jōi (“revere the emperor and expel the barbarian”), Aizawa urged that Japan adopt certain Western military techniques and develop her armaments and defenses. Even so, contact with foreigners should be limited, according to Aizawa, for to encourage trade would undermine the Japanese nation. From the information he had gathered concerning conditions in the West (and already convinced that China could no longer claim the status of universal exemplar), Aizawa had concluded that the unifying force of Christianity had welded together the states and peoples of Europe. By corollary, the real threat to his own country was a weak, apathetic citizenry; strength could be ensured only through the sedulous promotion from above of nationalistic sentiment, including loyalty to the emperor as the real sovereign.
Along with the enduring slogan sonnō jōi, in Shinron Aizawa developed what was undoubtedly the central conception in Japanese political orthodoxy: the notion of kokutai or national polity. According to Aizawa, Japan’s natural supremacy and its unique position at the center of the world resulted from its kokutai—the fact that the Japanese ruling line was directly descended from Amaterasu (the sun goddess), and the basis of morality, which had become confused by the introduction of the false doctrines of Buddhism, was loyalty to the emperor. As Maruyama Masao noted, by linking the notion of national polity to the systematic analysis of concrete exigencies, Shinron assured for itself the status of a nationalist “bible,” one whose influence extended well into the 20th century.
September 2, 2014