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Pure Will in Hagakure

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Pure Will in Hagakure View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by KnowledgeBank at OSU EARLY MODERN JAPAN 2010 Embracing Death: justify this placement of Hagakure through an analysis of its diverse meanings. Without being ex- Pure will in Hagakure haustive, I shall nevertheless try to grasp these ©Olivier Ansart, University of Sydney meanings through three very different approaches most likely to uncover them – historical, sociologi- Introduction cal and philosophical. In the standard approach of the history of ideas, In the prestigious Nihon shisō taikei collection, concerned with the “what did it say?” question, I Hagakure may seem an oddity among works of 1 shall reconstruct the apparently incoherent argument deep philosophical or literary significance. Au- of Hagakure around the unifying thread of the “pure thored in the early eighteenth century by a disgrun- will” (ichinen) – a will of no specific good, in fact a tled retired samurai of a small domain of remote will of nothing or nothingness, that is, of death. It Kyūshū, composed of heteroclite aphorisms and will be shown that “pure will” allows non-moral rants, inspired in peaceful times by a fanatic nostal- principles to coherently reposition notions otherwise gia for blood and battle, rescued from oblivion in contradictory or divided within themselves, like the early twentieth century to be used as propaganda honor and loyalty. material for a cause toward which its author did not In the perspective of sociology of ideas, asking show the slightest interest, it seems to be there only 2 the “why did it say it?” question, I shall explain the by virtue of some accident. In this article I shall social factors, as its author could apprehend them, that explain Hagakure’s focus on the will of death. Its author, convinced that the class of the samurai 1 Its companion in vol. 26 of the collection, the was on the verge of extinction, was imagining a Mikawa monogatari, although no philosophical or desperate “identitary quest” organized around the literary masterpiece, can at least claim great his- flaunting of the core item of the cultural capital of torical value. In the following footnotes all the re- the bushi – the act of death. ferences to Hagakure are to this Nihon shisōtaikei In a philosophical analysis lastly, I shall argue 26, Mikawa monogatari, Hagakure (Tokyo: Iwa- that the richest insight of Hagakure is, echoing a nami Shoten, 1974) edition. The page number is trope found in other authors of the period, a proto- followed by the number of the part or book and by existentialist pluralism in which there can exist sev- the number of the specific saying or anecdote in this eral very different forms of life, all of equal validity part. as long as they are sustained by a pure will. 2 A certain Tashiro Tsuramoto (1678-1748) is In various measure the insights I shall develop said to have written down the words of the putative are indebted to the huge literature surrounding Ha- author, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1719). A gakure. After all, not many years pass in Japan number of works have addressed the difficult without a book or two being published on Hagakure, problems of the authorship of the work. See and it is one of the Japanese works most often – especially Fujino Tamotsu, ed. Zoku Saga han no albeit partially – translated into English. The sōgōkenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1987) largest part of this literature is of little academic 89-113, and Sagara Tōru, Bushi no shisō (Tokyo: significance, being intended for what is today the Perikan sha) 1984, and “Hagakure no sekai”, main audience of Hagakure: the bushidō aficiona- Mikawa monogatari, Hagakure (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nihon shisōtaikei, 1974) 657-61. Tokyo. I Both Tsunetomo and Tsuramoto were samurai cannot delve here in this debate and the exact role of of the Saga domain, in northern Kyūshū, ruled by Tsuramoto in the composition of the book (there is the Nabeshima family. Ironically, given Hagakure’s no extant manuscript in Tsuramoto’s hand, only a stress on loyalty, it was the site of what was number of copies with many variations). Sagara arguably one of the most famous cases of usurpation concludes that even if there are reasons to believe of daimyō power in pre-modern Japan, when the that Tsuramoto directly wrote large parts of ruling family of the Ryūzōji was displaced at the Hagakure himself, it is safe to see it as reflecting end of the sixteenth century by their vassals, the Tsunetomo’s thought. Nabeshima. 57 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 2010 dos. Attracted by the “bushidō romance” or desiring subdued role.6 Takano Shinji (1997), while examin- to spread in today’s decadent world the moral values ing the polarity between autonomy and the urge of they believe to be extolled in the book, authors have self-destruction, also stressed the variety of mean- let their enthusiasm and moral zeal take over analy- ings and concepts of the work.7 When scholars did sis of the complexity of the work.3 Detached and attempt to go beyond the diversity in search of some scholarly approaches of the book are far less nu- organizing principle(s), they often chose to disre- merous. In fact a search through the well established gard whatever fit poorly with their solution. 8 Many journals on history of ideas, ethics, mentalities in of course have reduced the variety of ideas found in Japan yields next to nothing on Hagakure. This is Hagakure to loyalty, honor, courage or even simply even truer of Western scholarship, which, in the junshi, the ritual suicide upon the death of one’s words of Eiko Ikegami “tends to consider this fasci- master.9 Hurst (1990) offers a good English exam- nating book little more than an extremist presenta- ple with his analysis of the three threads of “loyalty, tion of the samurai ethic that does not speak for the honor, death.”10 Some have been more original. majority of “true” samurai and therefore refuses to The prolific Kasaya Kazuhiko revisited the bushido investigate it further.”4 discourse to stress the aspirations for moral auton- In the standard approach of history of ideas that omy.11 In recent years a great deal has been made this article will firstly borrow, one would think that by Ujie (1995) and Nakamoto (2006) of the remarks the main challenge for scholarly analyses would of Hagakure on the sexual dimension of the rela- have been to organize the bewildering variety of tionships between lord and vassal, an interesting themes found in Hagakure and to solve their nu- and previously often ignored dimension to be sure, merous, apparent or real, tensions. In fact many but probably not the most comprehensive perspec- studies have preferred to deal with those themes separately. Furukawa Tetsushi, coming back to Ha- gakure some decades after his classic Bushidō no shisō to sono shūhen, examined ten main topics of 6 5 Mishima Yukio, Hagakure nyūmon (Tokyo: Hagakure in his Hagakure no sekai . Mishima Yu- Shinchō Bunko, 2009). Especially 29 seq. kio had earlier, in 1967, presented forty-eight essen- 7 Takano Shinji, “Hagakure ni kansuru ik- tial principles of the book in his Hagakure nyūmon, kōsatsu – sono shisō keisei no shokeiki wo megutte”, a perceptive commentary in which the topics of loy- in Kyūshū bunkashi kenkyūjo kiyō, 40 (1997). alty, honor and martial spirits play, overall, a very 8 I do not mean that contradictions do not exist and that a unifying thread or an organizing principle is always waiting to be discovered. But whenever 3 Some of this literature is certainly worth we try to understand a text – like a conversation of studying, for scholars of considerable knowledge everyday life – we need to start with the principle of and analytical skills have succumbed to this mys- charitable interpretation: with the assumption that it tique. Inoue Tetsujirō (1855-1944) does so in his makes (one) sense. For a theoretical explanation of introductions to the anthologies of bushido literature such need, see Donald Davidson on the principle of (Bushidōsōsho, Tokyo: Hakubunkan 1905, and Bu- charity in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation shidōshū, Tokyo: Shun Yōdō 1934). Probably the (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 153. It is best example mixing sound scholarly knowledge often the case that contradictions are more apparent with a nostalgia for something that never was is pro- than real, and that context and other remarks make vided by Furukawa Tetsushi, Bushidō no shisō to sense of them. Only when we fail to produce a plau- sono shūhen (Tokyo :Fukumura Shoten, 1957) sible unified meaning should we resort to the con- which set the tone for later bushidō fans. clusion of inconsistencies. 4 Eiko, Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: 9 Furukawa, Bushidō no shisō. Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern 10 Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), The Bushido Ideal”, Philosophy East & West 40, No. 279. 4 (October 1990): 511-527. 5 Furukawa Tetsushi, Hagakure no sekai (Kyō- 11 Kasaya,Kazuhiko, Bushidō to Nihongata nō- to: Shimonkaku Shuppan, 1993). ryokushugi (Tokyo: Shinchō sensho, 2007). 58 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 2010 tive through which to approach the book.12 Much “ethno-mentality.” 16 I shall comment on her ap- rarer have been the attempts to seriously reconstruct proach and interpretation in my analysis of the text. the variety of ideas and intuitions of the book The third, philosophical, approach that I shall around one or several organizing principles. The take up does not seem to have inspired much re- most remarkable is that of Sagara Tōru (1921-2000) search – the apparently widely held perception that who re-articulated Hagakure’s argument through the Hagakure is the product of a semi-deranged mind two concepts of bushidō and hook (service).13 Op- probably discouraged much goodwill toward the posing for his part the concepts of bushi and hōk- work.
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