The Aizu Nisshinkan Dōjikun of 1803: Translator’s Introduction
Text and Translation –
The author of this work, Matsudaira Katanobu (1744-1805), was fifth in the daimyo line of Aizu domain which corresponds to parts of present-day Fukushima and Niigata Prefectures. He traced descent from a grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hoshina-Matsudaira Masayuki (1611-72) later enshrined as a deity at Hanitsu jinja, strategically situated in a protective position northeast of Aizu-Wakamatsu castle town. Katanobu wrote the fifty-three item Aizu Nisshinkan Dōjikun (Nisshinkan School Injunctions, hereafter cited as “Injunctions”) translated below. It boasts an Afterword by a Kumamoto Confucian scholar, Furuya Sekiyō, and a Foreword by the Edo bakufu leader who led its Kansei Reforms (1787-93), Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1829), both of which are dated 1803.
Aizu used this text as a primer in ethics and etiquette at its official domain school the Nisshinkan, a name adopted from the term “virtue daily renewed (徳日新)” in the Book of Documents which, as noted in Injunction 53, tells the school mandate—to prepare boys for future careers serving Aizu as samurai-administrators. Enrollment at the Nisshinkan, founded in 1801, remained constant at about 1000 students until Aizu’s defeat and liquidation by Satsuma and Chōshū in 1868 during the Boshin Restoration wars. Samurai boys aged ten to fifteen read this textbook in class.1 The domain also distributed a copy to all samurai households in Aizu, so girls as well received instruction in Katanobu's Injunctions.
I have seen no mention in Japanese scholarship about revisions to the text, so we can assume that it remained unchanged from 1803 to 1868. The grip that its moral precepts had on their young minds is discernable in Niijima (neé Yamamoto) Yae, wife of Dōshisha University founder Niijima Jō, who could recite passages from memory in 1932.2 Katanobu’s Injunctions thus played a role in Aizu domain somewhat like that by ethics and history textbooks used up to Japan's defeat in the Asia-Pacific War of 1931-45 under its nation-wide system of compulsory schooling inspired by inspired by "Imperial Rescript on Education" of 1890.
I rejected strict literalism in translating the text, and at times altered its sentence structure and word order, in order to improve its logical narrative flow as well as to enhance readability in modern English. For the most part, I inserted supplementary information and interpolations into the text as seamlessly as possible. Thus I limited bracketed material mainly to the sequential Arabic numbering affixed to Katanobu’s injunctions and to years converted into the Gregorian calendar, which make identification easier.
People, events, and institutions that receive oblique reference through peculiar uses of kanji in the original have become more explicitly clear in translation. I retained and translated office titles, ranks, and other purely honorific indicators of nobility—ostensibly derived from the Kyoto court—because Japanese in that era greatly prized those imperial status symbols. Readers, however, should know that someone in the text called “Head of the Imperial Palace Kitchen” did not actually oversee food preparation there, and with rare exceptions, a “Provincial Governor of X” had no more to do with that region than Charles, Prince of Wales, has to do with Wales. Misleading turns of phrase may have slipped in and subtle nuances may have fallen out while polishing later drafts. In sum, I took certain liberties with the text while striving to preserve fidelity to its meaning and “feel” in modern English. Academic specialists are urged to check the original text provided below if doubts arise about the translation.
Katanobu grounded his primer in maxims taken from the Chinese Confucian classics, for which he supplied illustrative examples in Japanese history and contemporary society that Aizu schoolboys could easily grasp. In general, he quoted the Chinese maxims verbatim after transcribing or paraphrasing these into Japanese for each injunction. Perhaps he did this to give pupils a taste for the intensive education in classical Chinese they would later undergo, or perhaps to exploit the authoritative ethical backing that high antiquity provided for the points he wished to convey. Ten maxims derive from the Analects and many of the rest, from two sections in the Book of Rites; that is, twelve from “Household Regulations” (Nei Ce 内側) and ten from “Detailed Ceremonials” (Qu Li 曲禮). Despite the redundancies involved, I translated both the Chinese maxims and Katanobu’s Japanese renditions so as to illustrate the subtle differences in nuance that separated ancient Zhou society (1050-770 BC) from late-Tokugawa Japan.
To that end, I wish to acknowledge huge scholarly debts to the now-forgotten wartime work of Satō Toshio who laboriously tracked down obscure archaic sources, elucidated classical Chinese syntax, and defined abstruse terms.3 Lamentably he failed to transcend the emperor-centered ultranationalist ethos of his day. For example, in 1944 Satō was not above altering the original to portray certain emperors in a less unfavorable light than Katanobu depicted them, but to be fair, his expurgations may have stemmed as much from wartime state censorship as from personal inclination. In any case, I found his study to be indispensable, especially for understanding the insightful Foreword and Afterword to the text, which later Japanese scholars ignore.
Satō did not translate Katanobu’s text into colloquial Japanese, partly to conserve paper in a time of national emergency, but also because annotation alone enabled readers to grasp its meaning. Half a century later, however, this schoolboy primer was largely incomprehensible to most Japanese, so modern editors had to add colloquial translations to their annotations. Two such works, by Tsuchida Naoshige and Nakamura Akihiko, were greatly helpful in that regard, but caution of a different sort is needed with these postwar scholars.4 They made some mistakes due to faulty transcription; e.g., misprinting surnames or citing an event as having occurred in the “Tenpō” era (1830-44), long after the Injunctions appeared, rather than in the “Tenna” era (1681-84), which is correct.
No less than Satō in 1944, however, Tsuchida and Nakamura were products of their age—late-Shōwa to early-Heisei. They sought to improve Japanese society by remedying what they saw as grave defects plaguing it, and young people in particular, due to an uncritical postwar embrace of American ideas in public education and in popular manners and customs. For Tsuchida, Nakamura, and like-minded critics, popular egalitarianism had gone too far in Japan. They advocated reviving the spirit and values espoused in this Nisshinkan primer—above all their understanding of “Aizu bushido”—which calls for separate treatment in a different publishing venue.
Revelations and Reflections –
Katanobu conveys a wealth of fascinating information about Aizu domain and Tokugawa society for students of history. Contrary to widely-held assumptions, for example, wives who are older than their husbands, eldest sons and elder brothers who do not inherit the house headship and patrimony, life-long bachelors, and husbands who cooked and kept house, appear in this textbook. Katanobu cites and defines Confucius’s term “shishi” as men of high resolve or “noble aspiration” in 1803, long before the “revere the emperor, expel the barbarian” movement that would occur sixty years later. His inspiring tales of Japanese character building resemble those from the Victorian era in Samuel Smiles in Self-Help (1859), which had a huge impact on Meiji “civilization and enlightenment” after Nakamura Masanao, a former bakufu Confucian scholar, translated that book in 1871. Smiles directly echoes certain of Katanobu’s assertions about self-cultivation in boys, such as their need to associate with and learn from good friends while shunning bad ones.5
Some of Katanobu's rules of etiquette for children — such as stating one’s destination to parents before leaving the house and announcing one’s arrival on returning — are still practiced in Japanese homes today. His mealtime strictures against, for instance, secreting nasal mucous or talking out of turn ahead of seniors and social betters had a practical function in his day: to teach table manners at the Nisshinkan, one of the first schools in Japan to serve pupils lunch at mid-day. Sections in the text devoted to personal decorum, although based on codified manuals from Chinese antiquity, indicate that a late-Tokugawa ethos of refined courtesy had arisen similar to what Norbert Elias termed “the civilizing process” in Europe. Steven Pinker sees it as one decisive factor in the decline of violence endemic to society in preceding centuries and the concomitant rise of civility which make modern life safer and more secure than ever before in history.6
The relevance of other episodes in these Injunctions, however, is limited the era of its composition. Even Satō the wartime nationalist-traditionalist took issue with Katanobu’s adulation of brothers who commit perjury in trying to defraud the bakufu of money to support aged parents, or with his entreaty that dutiful sons should stay married to wives they hate or divorce those they love to comply with parental wishes as prescribed in the Book of Rites. Moreover, despite such episodes of such extreme filial devotion, Katanobu’s text betrays tell-tale hints that society is going awry. His ideal rural household encompassed three generations plus branch families under one roof, or twenty-nine people in all, who sublimate individual desires to the collective good (Injunction 43.1). But other accounts reveal market forces undermining this harmonious visionary society; hence the need for Katanobu to threaten fearful Heavenly punishment for those who would dare charge interest on loans, especially to parents.
In order to be filial sons and deferential younger brothers, indigent men join an emerging rural proletariat to work for wages as roof-thatches or plasterers or as day-laborers who till fields owned by others, but it also must be noted that some stories describe payment in kind for labor rendered. In the name of filial virtue, men sell their wives or themselves into debt bondage as household servants under almost slave-like conditions. In sum, the gap between rich and poor in Aizu shows through all-too clearly. The well-to-do consume luxury items such as tea, liquor, fish, meat, and tobacco while model sons cheerfully pursue the Confucian Way by toiling amid destitution.
In another vein, pupils broadened their geographic and social horizons by reading the Injunctions. Although Katanobu did not use the terms “Nihon” or “Nihonjin,” he clearly evinces the idea of membership in Japan in a distinct national unit forged from a common past. Thirty out of its sixty-eight provinces, from Mutsu in the north to Satsuma in the south, appear in this textbook. As we might expect, it contains as many as sixteen entries about areas and people in Aizu. But Kyoto, current seat of the imperial court, graces the text nineteen times, and Yamato where it was earlier located, warrants five references. These references communicated vague notions about the importance of those sites as national capitals in contrast with Edo, which merits only three explicit mentions. Katanobu's tales stretch from the Age of the Gods through the Yamato, Nara, Heian, Kamakura, and Muromachi periods prior to the Edo. Yet most stories in the textbook deal with events in the recent past; and, the merit awards mentioned in the text that Aizu bestowed to virtuous persons date from the latter half of the eighteenth century—though of course pupils did not calibrate time in those hundred-year Western units of measure.
Pupils read stories about persons in a wide range of occupations beyond their own samurai class. Roughly 110 major protagonists emerge in the text. Court nobles, imperial princes, reigning emperors, and retired cloistered emperors significantly account for thirty-two of the total. Thirty-one are warriors of various ranks: largely common retainers, but daimyo, generals, and domain elders are seen as well. There are twenty-five peasants, mainly of the poverty-stricken type; but village headmen, country tradesmen, and rural entrepreneurs also appear, as do eight urban-based merchants and artisans. Katanobu’s cast is rounded out by three deities, four scholars, five priests, three women, two men whom we would now call “visually impaired,” one musician, and an outcaste. All meet with lavish praise for overcoming deprivations and disabilities to carry out the Confucian Way, or with harsh condemnation for transgressing it.
Intellectual Background and Implications –
The thought of seventeenth-century Aizu domain founder Hoshina-Matsudaira Masayuki (1611-72) combined Shinto-Nativism and the Song dynasty (960-1279) Confucianism of Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Masayuki’s syncretic mix resembled that of Yoshikawa Koretaru (1616-94) and Yamazaki Ansai (1616-82) under whom he had studied. By contrast, Matsudaira Katanobu, who authored these Injunctions in 1803, was markedly Confucian. This turning away from Shinto-Nativism in Aizu reflected central bakufu efforts to establish Zhu Xi Learning as a pedagogic orthodoxy through its 1790 “Kansei Ban on Heterodoxy,” implemented by Matsudaira Sadanobu who wrote the Foreword to these Injunctions. This simultaneous attempt in Edo and Aizu to bolster the Zhu Xi School ran counter to overall trends in late-Tokugawa thought which favored Shinto-Nativism as propounded in Kokugaku and, to a lesser extent, Mitogaku.
The Injunctions are rooted in tenets of filial devotion to parents and humble deference for elder brothers, from which loyalty to political masters derives as a matter of course. Katanobu’s text stresses Heavenly intervention in earthly affairs to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked. Just deserts may not ensue for immediate relatives or individual lifetimes; but, extended lineal houses that accumulate merit for their good deeds will ultimately prosper, whereas those that amass demerit for evil deeds will meet with doom in the end (積善之家、必有餘慶、積悪之家、必有餘殃)—an idea in Book of Changes quoted verbatim.7 Earlier in the Edo period, Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725) and other Confucian historians used this normative concept—often linked to that of the Chinese dynastic cycle—to rationalize the rise and fall of daimyo families in tandem with the imperial house which, it was presumed, had forfeited ruling power to warriors.8 This sort of Heavenly moral determinism in politics was anathema to Kokugaku thinkers, especially Motoori Norinaga (1730-1802), who insisted that the arbitrary, amoral will of deities dictated the fates and fortunes of individuals, lineal houses, and political regimes.
Katanobu’s odd reference to the Taiheiki, Tsurezuregusa, or Japanese music notwithstanding, his main source of validation for precepts in the Injunctions lay in Chinese writings from antiquity. Unlike Kokugaku scholars, he did not prize literary Japanese classics such as the Manyōshū and Genji monogatari. He made no claims about the Kyoto imperial court being superior to the contemporaneous Qing, the preceding Ming, or any other past dynasty in China. True, Katanobu began his textbook with an account from the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, but he presents it as parable that reveals and affirms universally valid Confucian virtues. Thus the deity Amanooshi homimi “deferentially yields” the imperial succession (zenjō)” to Ninigi no mikoto—an act patterned on that by the sage king Yao to Shun in high Chinese antiquity—which Katanobu deems the highest virtue known to human society.
By contrast, Kokugaku thinkers repudiated “deferential yielding” as an alien “Chinese” custom that violated the sacred kokutai, or national essence unique to Japan, ruled by a divine imperial line unbroken for ages eternal (bansei ikkei). These core Kokugaku tenets of faith in Japanese moral exceptionalism find no expression in the Nisshinkan textbook. Katanobu did not denigrate Confucius and the ancient sage kings of China as a morally deficient, ethnically alien “Other.” He did not acknowledge the excellence of Japanese manners and customs as did Fujita Tōkō—if reluctantly and late in life—whose Mitogaku ideas were also anchored in Confucianism. Katanobu was unperturbed by Tokugawa ethnic, social, and cultural differences with Zhou antiquity; he saw these as minor and immaterial variations from timeless ethical norms revealed in the Confucian canon written by sages who just happened to be ethnic Chinese. He invited a Confucian rather than a Kokugaku scholar to teach future domain leaders and to compose a Postscript for the school the Injunctions in classical Chinese, not in Japanese.
Japanese historical figures earn Katanobu’s plaudits only by replicating or approximating the exploits of model Chinese heroes. Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), for example, “differed not from the worthy imperial servants of China (Kando)” in remonstrating with the Daigo emperor (897-930) even if it should mean incurring wrathful execution. Likewise, Murakami Yoshiteru (?-1333) did for Prince Ōtō Morinaga (1308-35) exactly what Qi Hsin did for the First Han emperor Gaozu (r. 206-194 BCE); i.e., invite certain death on the battlefield by impersonating and thus enabling his master to escape unharmed. Most tellingly, Katanobu disparages misrule by the Godaigo emperor (r. 1318-39) —whom latter-day loyalists extolled for his imperial restoration of 1333—through a negative comparison once again with Han Gaozu. This explicit denigration of a reigning emperor contrasted with a foreign monarch would qualify as lesé majesty under the pre-1945 imperial order.
Aizu was exceptional among Tokugawa supporters in 1868 after Satsuma-Chōshū (Sat-Chō) forces flaunted the emperor’s brocade banner to defeat Edo supporters at Toba-Fushimi. Its fervid fidelity was matched only by a few retainers in direct liege to the Tokugawa like the Shōgitai members, by rōnin or non-samurai seeking admission to that status like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Shinsengumi leader Kondō Isamu, and by a few small domains such as Nihonmatsu, Nagaoka, Kazusa-Jōsai, and Kujō-Hachiman.
By contrast, powerful pro-Edo domains such as Yonezawa, Akita, Morioka, Sendai, and Shōnai forgot long-standing Tokugawa blessings, deftly switched sides to join the Sat-Chō forces and thereby avert stigmatization as “enemies of the throne.” Very few Tokugawa allies or supporters went so far as to seek out foreign military aid, but recently discovered German sources show that Aizu offered to grant Prussia concessions by leasing or ceding land as a quid pro quo for armed intervention to support the bakufu cause. Aizu, however, suffered defeat and surrendered before Chancellor Otto von Bismarck could make a decision in 1868.9
One explanation for Aizu’s such obstinately uncompromising scruples—even after its defeat, dismemberment, and future demonization were beyond doubt —lay in its conditional form of imperial loyalty. As a sub-vassal to the emperor, Aizu’s loyalty was mediated through his direct vassal, the Tokugawa shogun; and, it also hinged on the emperor’s acceptance of remonstration based on the Confucian principle of rectitude. The last Aizu daimyo, Matsudaira Katamori (1835-93), insisted to his dying day that, as the shogun’s deputy-protector of Kyoto, he had exhausted loyalty to the Kōmei emperor by quashing insurrectionists, but after Kōmei's suspicious death late in 1866, Sat-Chō leaders installed a boy emperor whom they suborned into pliantly slandering Aizu as a traitor to be eradicated. Even after considering opportunistic overtures to Prussia, Katamori’s logic—that Sat-Chō was the imperial turncoat and Aizu, the imperial loyalist—enjoyed substantial grounding in fact.
Final Thoughts –
The Nisshinkan school complex boasts a conspicuously Chinese-style temple honoring Confucius—not a shinden-type shrine dedicated to Amaterasu, founder of the imperial line, or to the war god Hachiman. As well, Katanobu extols an imperial crown prince, the latter-day Kōbun emperor (r. 671-72), for his reverence toward four teachers from the Korean peninsula naturalized in Japan (Injunction 40.1). Katanobu’s penultimate moral paragon is Zengzi, a disciple of Confucius, who wins accolades nine times in the text. And, it bears repeating, during the Asia-Pacific War there was a need to bowdlerize Katanobu’s less-than flattering accounts of certain emperors.
Historians usually eschew conjecture based on what might have been, but if indulgence in it is permissible here, I contend that latter-day Japanese would have perpetrated continental imperialist aggression far less readily, or would have done so with far less contempt for the Chinese and Korean peoples, if Aizu’s non-nativist Chinese Learning and constraint-laden imperial loyalism had prevailed after 1868.