From Shishi Loyalism to Yakuza Shakedowns: The Ryushi shinron and Yamamoto Shugoro
Prefatory Remarks
Most Japanese learn most of what they know, or believe they know, about the past from sources other than scholarly publications and government-approved school textbooks. So when trying to gauge the sociocultural impact that historical texts and thinkers have, we must examine how they are depicted in popular media such as novels, films, television, anime, manga, and most recently, game software. In 1995, I unwisely ignored sources of that type when analyzing Yamagata Daini (1725-67) and his political treatise, the Ryushi shinron (Master Ryu's new thesis) of 1759.1 By contrast, in the Introduction to this online version of its English translation, I try to remedy that mistake by showing how one prolific writer of historical fiction, Yamamoto Shugoro (1903-67), portrayed this thinker and text during Japan's transition from emperor worship in the 1930s and 1940s to “my-home” pacifism in the 1950s. Yamamoto was a novelist writing to entertain the masses, not an academic out to impress learned specialists. Although he consulted the secondary scholarship and primary sources available in his day, he could not escape the limitations therein, and thus commits what we now deem to be errors of historical fact and interpretation. Thus, for example, he characterizes Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) as an imperial loyalist, whereas a highly influential strand of scholarship today holds that Nobunaga planned to make himself “king” of Japan and perhaps depose the imperial house as well. It is fine and good to point out mistakes of this sort, but we can also appreciate Yamamoto's fiction for the pleasure it gives. Admittedly, given Takeda Shingen's (1521-73) towering presence, the Ryushi shinron and its author will never become household historical names even in Daini's home prefecture of Yamanashi. Yet Yamamoto's novels should still be credited with having reflected and in turn as having helped to shape the changing popular Japanese images of Daini, his polemical tract, and most importantly, of the shishi or “patriots of noble resolve” in mid-twentieth century Japan.
Yamamoto is an iconic figure in Japanese literature whose complete works span thirty volumes. As well, inexpensive pocket-sized paperback editions (bunko) of his fiction total over sixty volumes and continue to sell briskly at new- and used-book stores. In 1970, NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, adapted his Mominoki wa nokotta (The fir tree still stands) for its weekly “Taiga Drama”- a year-long TV series devoted to historical biography. This novel, originally written in installments from July 1954 to April 1955, won the Mainichi Newspaper Prize for Cultural Publications in 1959 for its empathetic view of Harada Kai (1619-71), conventionally cast as an arch-villain in the Sendai domain succession crisis of 1660-71. Director Kurosawa Akira (1910-98), a fan of Yamamoto's works, converted several of these into box office hits. The best known to Western audiences are: Tsubaki Sanjuro (1962), Akahige (1965), Dodesukaden (1970), and the posthumously produced Ame agaru (2000). These are based on Yamamoto's “Hibi heian” (1958), Akahige shinsatsudan (1958), “Kisetsu no nai machi” (1962), and “Ame agaru” (1951). Three of his postwar short stories related to the Ryushi shinron formed the basis of a 1967 film, Namidagawa, not directed by Kurosawa.
Loyalist Adulation - 1934-41
Yamamoto serialized Meiwa egonomi (A Meiwa pictorial almanac) from 21 January to 15 July 1934 in the Ni-roku shinpo, a newspaper existing between 1893 and 1940. “Meiwa” refers to the Meiwa era of 1764-72 in which the Edo bakufu executed Yamagata Daini, a purportedly loyalist anti-bakufu scholar-educator. Yamamoto revised his original manuscripts and reissued the work in book form on 10 December 1941, two days after Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor, through an obscure publishing house, Okugawa shobo.2 In 1974 a business-oriented publisher, Jitsugyo no Nihonsha, reissued Meiwa egonomi in Yamamoto Shugoro Koshu shosetsu shu (Novels set in Kai Province), and the mass-marketing Shinchosha reprinted the 1941 Okugawa version as a 521-page bunko in 1997. The Shinchosha edition is the text I used.
Meiwa egonomi unfolds from 1766 to 1767 - the year of Daini's arrest and execution - amid deadly factional strife in Obata domain, now located a part of Gunma Prefecture. In bare outline, this struggle pitted incumbent daimyo Oda Nobukuni, supported by Yoshida Genba and his followers, against retired daimyo Oda Nobue (Nobukuni's father) led by Matsubara Gundayu and his “reformist faction” - a label that Yamamoto applies with no hint of irony. Apart from allegations like vice and favoritism typical to intra-domain factional struggles in the Edo period, this rumble in Obata stands out for its conceptual roots. Nobukuni and Genba had their own reform agenda premised on appointing Yamagata Daini to high office. The novel depicts him as a heretic who denounced the Hayashi School of Zhu Xi Learning - thought by historians in 1934-41 to have been the bakufu-sponsored state orthodoxy. Nobukuni and Genba, however, favored Daini's imperial loyalism and socioeconomic egalitarianism - ideas inimical to the discriminatory status quo - as putatively expressed in Ryushi shinron.
This political feud holds Yamamoto's plot together, but his main focus is on low-echelon members of the two factions - their romantic longings, idealistic appeals to principle, sordid worldly strivings, and lethal vendettas. A greatly abbreviated list of key protagonists in Meiwa egonomi would include:
A) Anti-Daini supporters of Oda Nobue/Matsubara Gundayu: 1) Momonoi Kyuma 桃井久馬, a former ashigaru and unscrupulous man on the make; 2) Kai Matabei, a hotheaded, youth naively in thrall to “reformist” ideas; 3) Miyazawa Junso, a physician and Daini student who turns traitor; 4) Matsudaira Terutaka, bakufu roju in 1761-81, who as Kyoto Magistrate in 1756-58 had prosecuted Takenouchi Shikibu (1712-67) for plotting the Horeki Incident, a loyalist uprising by Kyoto courtiers in 1758; and 5) Matsumiya Kanzan (1686-1780), the crusty doyen of Hayashi School establishment intellectuals, suborned to discredit Master Ryu's radical “new thesis.”
B) Pro-Daini supporters of Oda Nobukuni/Yoshida Genba: 1) Momoi Sakuma (百三九馬 not Momonoi Kyuma), a master swordsman and Genba-confidant; 2) Yachio his younger sister ill-fatedly betrothed to Kai Matabei, an erstwhile friend but now would-be killer of Sakuma; 3) Kamiya Ofusa, who is so enamored of Sakuma that she absconds to join him in Edo against the pleas of her live-alone father; 4) Fujii Umon, a Kyoto courtier-turned-ronin, a master-tactician, and a devotee of black magic banished from the capital for complicity in the Horeki Incident; and 5) Daini's students: the ever-faithful Fukushima Denzo, a blind priest and master lute player Toju, and the impressionable Tominaga Michio who secretly yearns for Yachio.
We find no truly detestable knaves in this tale except Matsubara Gundayu who is bent on killing Genba on the pretext of reform in order to take over the Oda house, and Momonoi Kyuma who rapes Ofusa - as if this were a self-evidently justified perk - given his impending climb up the greasy pole of worldly success with Gundayu. True enough, gullible recruits in this faction torture and assassinate political foes, but neither of these two deeds was seen as an indefensible transgression of morality in the Meiwa era, or even in 1934-41. Deceived by Gundayu, rank-and-file “reformists” act from heartfelt loyalty and strive to purge their domain of vice by practicing Confucian virtues eschewed by Tanuma Okitsugu (1719-84), who attained power in the bakufu one month before Daini's execution in 1767. Both pro- and anti-Daini faction members protest: “We're not crooks or brigands.”3 To the contrary, they risked life and limb for the good of their domain and the realm. Kai Matabei, no less than Momoi Sakuma, severed his vassalage to Obata domain (dappan) - which cut off his stipend and life income, exposed associates and relatives to the threat of reprisals, and endangered the domain's very existence if he incurred the bakufu's wrath. Although Yamamoto does not explicitly mention this fact, the Oda house was deposed as daimyo in 1767 as punishment for the Meiwa Incident. Adherents in both factions - above all, the women - resolutely forsook loved ones in earnest pursuit of a noble cause. Ofusa chooses to become a fugitive helping Sakuma spread Daini's teachings, but this decision consigned her widowed father to a life of dementia and homelessness “wandering the streets of Edo like a dog”4 until he set fire to an inn and died in the flames. Yachio brings herself to affirm Matabei's “reformist” cause - despite his verbal abuse and annulment of their engagement - and does battle with Sakuma who had raised her after both were orphaned as small children. She also spurns Tominaga Michio's love in order to live out her days praying for Matabei's soul after he dies at Sakuma's hands. Such nobility of resolve, displayed by both factions, earns Yamamoto's undifferentiated adulation. In sum, a sincere pursuit of righteousness that scorns calculated pleas for personal happiness is the guiding principle of conduct for shishi and their supporters.
The author has Daini rail: “Even a two-year-old knows that all territories under Heaven belong to the emperor” and the bakufu administers these as a “deputy.” But warrior regimes “put even the Yellow Turban and Five Rice Peck bandits to shame” by pilfering imperial lands and taxes. Ever since the Kan'ei era (1624-44), the bakufu froze funding to the court such that nobles had to substitute fried tofu for crane meat in key rituals; and, when Sakai Tadayoshi5 was Kyoto Magistrate in 1752-56, Edo cut already niggardly outlays, forcing nobles to make do with rotting sea-bream. Such insolence toward “Heaven's sole Sovereign” called for “Heavenly chastisement to destroy the bakufu” - a goal which Daini openly espoused.6
Yamamoto ascribes shrewd insights to Daini's foes. 1) As roju Matsudaira Terutaka put it: “There's an ongoing 2400-year tradition of popular reverence for the emperor” that, if deftly exploited, could prove lethal to warrior rule. 2) Yui Shosetsu (?-1651) was blind to this latent pro-imperial sentiment; his ronin uprising in 1651 sought only to replace the Edo regime with a similar bakufu of his own. 3) Having been told by Miyazawa Junso of Daini's impending plot, Terutaka realized it would differ decisively from Shosetsu's; the danger posed by Daini lay in ideas, not military force. From those premises, Terutaka inferred that: 1) to summarily indict and execute Daini on charges of imperial loyalism would be sacrilegious and thus out of the question. 2) A smarter way to thwart Daini's express aim - “to revive imperial rule as in high antiquity” through a “Kenmu Restoration” - would be to rob him of supporters. 3) To that end, Terutaka decided to: a) collude with Nobukuni and Gundayu and crush the Nobue/Genba faction, their common foe, by fabricating routine charges of venality like bribing “Lord Tanuma”; b) arraign Fujii Umon on suspicion of raising a conventional ruckus by disaffected ronin and execute him for having killed a Yoshiwara courtesan which Umon, agreeably enough, had done in a drunken fit; and c) plant an agent provocateur, the sycophant-scholar Matsumiya Kanzan, at a talk given by Daini, with orders to discredit his ideas and make his students desert their sensei. Terutaka, then, schemed to deprive the uprising of loyalist content and thus render it harmless.7
Daini saw past this scheme and prepared to side-step it. He knew that immediate victory was beyond hope, so he will forfeit himself as “a sacrificial go stone” in order to inspire others yet to come. Thus he refused to halt spies from tattling to the bakufu and even gave incriminating evidence to abet its work, but he instructed supporters to refrain from self-immolation and not to follow his example of inviting arrest. Instead they should teach later generations the proper path, firm in the belief that: “Heaven does not have two suns; a people does not have two sovereigns.”8 His hope to make sordid reality comport with ideal norms depended on devoted followers who, bestirred by his noble defeat, would one day carry out his will.9 As one critic notes, Yamamoto read his own philosophy of life into Daini's endeavor: “A man's true worth lies not in what he actually achieved, but in what he strove to achieve.”10
“My-Home” Revulsion - 1949-51
Yamamoto's postwar works pertaining to Daini are: “Otafuku” (A plump-faced cherub) in 1949, “Imoto no endan” (A marriage offer for my younger sister) in 1950, and “Toji” (A hot springs cure) in 1951. Kawade shobo published these three originally separate yet chronologically and thematically linked pieces as Otafuku monogatari in 1955. Kadokawa Haruki jimusho reissued it along with two other short stories under that title in a 2008 bunko, and this is the edition I used. Below, I disregard minor discrepancies in the original short stories; e.g., as to names and ages, and instead treat these works as sequential chapters as if written in a single novella that runs to 140 pages in bunko format.
In contrast to Meiwa egonomi, which dealt with the world of samurai and domain politics, Otafuku monogatari describes commoner Edo townsfolk, their heartwarming family bonds, and their painfully suppressed loves. From internal textual evidence, I would judge that Yamamoto set his story in 1780 or 1781, a little over twenty years after Daini wrote Ryushi shinron in 1759, and a little less than fifteen years after the bakufu executed him in 1767. The plot centers on two sisters who presumably lack a surname, for it is never revealed: the pear-faced cherubic Oshizu - otafuku in the title - aged thirty-two, and Otaka, twenty-six. Despite keenly desiring marriage at their advanced age (according to notions of that day), both were forced by circumstances to remain single, yet cheerfully accepted their sad fate and made the best of it to get on with life. Oshizu, however, was so earnest and unselfish about finalizing a match between Otaka and Shinanoya Tomokichi, the man she longs for, that their go-between remarked: “If everyone in this world were like you; it would be so much nicer to live in.” Neighbors as well said: “it would be full of peace and joy.”11 After years of tribulation, Oshizu's self-abnegating devotion to her family received its just reward in a happy if at times bumpy marriage to the long-time target of her secret affections, Shimazaki Teijiro, an apprentice to a master craftsman.
Penury was one reason for the sisters' long delayed marriage. They had to support elderly parents because two older brothers, Ikichi and Eiji, had forsaken their filial duties. Ikichi left to set up an independent household of his own. In the case of Eiji, an ex-convict, darker forces cast a pall over the family that precluded offers of matrimony. Unable to endure the social ostracism and shame rooted in Eiji's sordid past, his parents and sisters had relocated to a different part of Edo twelve years earlier. Writing in the narrative voice, Yamamoto explains why:
Bakufu officials had arraigned Eiji when he was eighteen and imprisoned him for three years
for possessing a copy of the Ryushi shinron by Yamagata Daini, who had been executed
roughly ten years before. This book was strictly prohibited for its incidendiary statements and
criticism of bakufu rule.… Eiji simply had a copy on his person. He had never read it, and in
fact couldn't read it. The police realized this, so they let him off lightly, but they told the
accompanying magistrate's aide: “Normally, he'd be executed or exiled to a distant island.”
Eiji was released from custody at the age of twenty-one and banished from Edo for five years,
so he took off for the Kamigata region (Kyoto-Osaka).12
Now aged thirty-five, Eiji was not keen on redemption and rehabilitation. Before his arrest, he was friendly with a “mysterious ronin”13 - unnamed but reminiscent of Fujii Umon - and Eiji rekindled the tie after being released from prison. With his five-year banishment over, he went back to Edo, but not to any fixed address or known workplace. In the next twelve years he would occasionally return home to extort money in support of life on the run from the police. If family members demurred at his importunate demands, he would turn violent, seize any valuables on hand, and hock these for cash. Eiji's incessant exactions ensured that, no matter how hard his sisters worked, they had to skip lunch and visit pawn brokers to make ends meet; but, despite striking him name from the family register, they invariably acceded to his demands out of sisterly pity.
Eiji “had never read” Ryushi shinron, so his grasp of its contents relied on elucidation by the “mysterious ronin.” In any case, Eiji adopted Daini's thought with gusto, and as Oshizu noted, he truly believed that it justified extorting cash not only from family but strangers as well: “I'm no crook or armed robber, you know. I don't spend this money on myself to play around.” “I work for the good of the realm and nation”; i.e., “to save the destitute masses” and “make this world better” by “turning it upside-down so that everyone is happy.” By way of elaboration he said: “All people are equal; politics is what created the rich and poor.” And, his clincher was: “Do you see two suns in Heaven? We have two in Japan now, so we need to get rid of one.” Eiji conceded that his actions caused his family trouble but avowed: “for the cause of virtue and the good of nation and realm, a man does not begrudge sacrificing his parents and kin.”14
The denouement came when Eiji tried to make off with Otaka's betrothal gifts, which the sisters had scrimped and saved to pay for. Oshizu had always accepted Eiji's seemingly deviant conduct as “my fate since birth,” and acquiesced to his demands in deference to the noble cause he claimed to be advancing. But this was the last straw. She drew a dagger, swore to “defend our home with my life,” and raged: “If you really wanted to 'work for the good of nation and realm,' you'd start here, at home. We're poverty stricken too; we have barely enough to squeak by.” “So, aren't we part of the downtrodden masses?” And, she derided his Daini-inspired logic as “a falsehood to mask robbery and blackmail.”15 Jolted by her harsh rebuke, Eiji vent his spleen and dashed out the door, but sibling affection yet again got the better of Oshizu, so she soon ran out after him with garments in hand to pawn. We are not told if she ever caught up.
Final Thoughts -
In Meiwa egonomi, Yamamoto makes Daini expire in 1767, striving for an imperial restoration 100 years too soon. He insisted that the nation, not one trivial daimyo domain (the Oda), should be the focus shishi loyalty.16 In this, he foreshadows Yoshida Shoin (1830-59), who called for somo kukki - “a spontaneous, unreflective uprising by lonely grassroots heroes”; i.e., dappan-ronin who had all cut ties to their domains throughout Japan. Precisely because such lone wolves cast off the shackles of family, home, and domain, they were enabled to assassinate officials and overthrow the bakufu. That would someday pave the way for others to restore direct rule by the emperor, which somehow would make life better for commoners. This Narodniki-style terror took on renewed popularity in at least eight major incidents starting with the Taisho Restoration led by Asahi Heigo (1890-1921) in 1921, and ending with the 2.26 Showa Restoration pursued by renegade young officers in 1936.17 Ethics teachers lauded the kinds of behavior displayed by characters in Meiwa egonomi; i.e., “obliterating personal self-indulgence (shi) for the common public good” - messhi hoko (滅私奉公). According to their lessons, “the common public good,” or ko, meant Japan under imperial rule - not any other communal or occupational collectivity.
Those ethics teachers embraced a Hegelian view of human life. People lived in a rarefied world of lofty ideals oblivious to mundane matters - like obtaining food, clothing, and shelter - besmirched by association with materialist conceptions of history. Yoshida Genba had entrusted Sakuma with funds to buy smuggled Western arms at Nagasaki in support of Daini's uprising, but after spies foiled that plot by informing Edo, Sakuma gave this cash to Yachio so she could live out her years tending Matabei's grave.18 He did not return it to lessen tax burdens or to pay down debts borne by downtrodden Obata masses. But ignoring the issue of embezzlement, his unselfish deed left nothing for himself, Ofusa, Fukushima Denzo, Tominaga Michio, and Toju to live on. Having severed their incomes from Obata through dappan, these shishi could now advance the loyalist cause only by resorting to shakedown methods adopted by Eiji. But in 1934-41, shishi racketeering for the emperor's sake was seen as virtuous conduct. It would not remain so for long.
The critic Takezoe Atsuko tells us that Yamamoto's first wife Kiyoi died in 1945 and his second wife Kin had a brother named Ei, the model for Eiji, who was a Communist operative on the run from the prewar Special Higher Police; this is what closed off the possibility of marriage for Oshizu and Otaka.19 If Takezoe's point is valid, Daini's Ryushi shinron morphed from being a loyalist bible to a source of “dangerous thought.” However, this Cold War labelling of Daini and his work as “communist” soon abated. A more weighty point to note here is that, apart from any specific political creed, whether communist or capitalist, shishi behavior is identical in these two novels, but the values against which Japanese society judged it changed drastically. Oshizu awoke to realize that shi or the inward-looking, family-oriented, self-indulgent pursuit of private happiness is an ethical good; i.e., it's OK to be selfish. This repudiation of the shishi ideal was part of a major watershed in modern Japanese cultural history.
However, one now detects a pendulum swing away from shi back to ko; and, despite its dated character, the Meiwa egonomi sheds light on this reversion to collectivist national values transcending “my home.” Yamamoto has Daini lambast Edo commoners, wealthy merchants, and even daimyo who seek distraction from life's cares in wine and women, “with no anxiety about tomorrow” and who mistake the realm's seeming “lack of problems” (buji) for “great peace” (taihei) under bakufu aegis.20 In other words, pax Tokugawa, much touted for delivering personal happiness and comfort (shi), was not an absolute good. Instead, direct action under the emperor's brocade banner (ko) through political strife at home and wars abroad is elevating and ennobling in certain circumstances. Such sentiments have gained in popularity over the past two decades since Kobayashi Yoshinori's Senso ron (On warfare) in 1998, its reissue in an expanded version in 2001, and subsequent innumerable sequels under different titles. At the time of this writing in June 2016, right-of-center journalists such as Yasumoto Toshihisa vigorously carry on this theme of “forgotten public virtues” (ko) which they seek to revive through a proper study of history. In Yasumoto's case, this study centers on Kusunoki Masashige (?-1936), a loyalist who battled for the restoration of imperial rule under the Go-daigo emperor in 1333-36.21 That, too, was a cause known to be hopeless from the start. Who can say that Daini will not regain a similar measure of fame in this capacity?
June 22, 2016