Civil society,the public sphere,and modernity in Japanese political thought

Abstract

How fruitfully can the notions of civil society and the public sphere be applied to non-Western societies that do not share the socio-historical characteristics that generated them in Western Europe? Critical examination of the particular versus the universal in the construction of modernity in the civil society/public sphere framework highlights the antinomies of Western-defined modernity, particularly that between the imperatives of effective centralized political authority and freedom of expression. Despite the virtual absence of any discussion of the Japanese public sphere, claims by some scholars that the concepts of civil society and the public sphere are inapplicable to non-Western societies, and assertions by Japan’s Civil Society School that Japan never developed a vibrant civil society, this study demonstrates that socioeconomic development in the Tokugawa era was accompanied by the emergence of autonomous associations and claims by merchants, other commoners, and samurai to a voice in deliberating on public matters. Such claims were both reflected in and encouraged by significant developments in Japanese political thought, revealing a new political consciousness among these groups. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions regarding pre-Meiji Japan and demonstrate how democratizing forces were forged in a context quite different from that described by Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor in Western Europe.

Since the 1980s, as the notion of civil society became hegemonic in the discourse on democratization, it has increasingly penetrated East Asia scholarship (e.g. Alagappa, 2004). Its ascendency in the West can be attributed in part to the impact of the publication of portions of Gramsci’s (2024 [1948–1951]) Prison Notebooks on the state, civil society, and hegemony and Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991 [1989]). ¹ Given China’s similarity to the State Communist regimes that collapsed in 1989–1991, the study of China has been most influenced by this trend. The Tiananmen Square massacre inspired scholars to see its victims as counterparts to East European freedom fighters and search the Chinese past for analogs to civil society and the public sphere in Western Europe (Huang, 1993; Ma, 1994; Rankin, 1993; Rowe, 1993; Wakeman, 1998).

The civil society concept was adopted more slowly among Japan scholars in the West (e.g. Mitani, 2004; Pekkanen, 2006; Schwartz and Pharr, 2003; Steinhoff, 2015; Tsujinaka and Pekkanen, 2007), because the study of Japanese political development has been dominated by its prewar authoritarian legacy. Their efforts were preceded by the work of prewar Japanese Marxist scholars who endeavored to explain the divergence between Japanese development and that of England and France. It was they who first argued that the key to German and Japanese exceptionalism lay in the subordination of their weak bourgeoisies to landed nobility and to the activist Bismarckian and Meiji (1868–1912) states respectively. ² Both factions in the debate on Japanese capitalism—the Kōza-ha, stressing Japan’s backwardness, symbolized in the “absolutist” emperor system (tennō-sei), and the Rōnō-ha, emphasizing Japan’s advanced industrial capitalism—cited the state-society dualism in their analyses (Hoston, 1986).

This scholarship encouraged postwar Japanese scholars to focus on the notion of civil society, which they did well before publication of Gramsci’s and Habermas’s work. Japanese Marxists boasted, citing Capital, that Marx regarded Japanese feudalism as even “purer” than that of Western Europe (Hayakawa, 1933: 81–85). Despite its similarities to German “backwardness,” in contrast to Germany, Japan had limited experience with Christianity. Japan also shared commonalities with the quintessential “Asiatic” society (in Marx’s terms), China, including its Ruist (Confucian) and Buddhist heritage.

Western philosophers have noted that the rise of civil society and the public sphere in the West—as social imaginaries and socio-economic constellations leading to liberal democracy—is considerably more nuanced and problematic than Habermas’s (1991 [1989]) idealized account would have it (Cohen and Arato, 1994; Taylor, 1990). Dussel (1995) has argued that the European conception of “modernity” self-described as the triumph of the rational ego is flawed by both its irrational underside of genocide and colonialism and its characterization of history as moving from East to West, from immature peoples to “civilized cultures (pp. 20ff).” How legitimately, then, can the civil society and public sphere concepts be applied as standards for judging non-Western societies (cf. Chatterjee, 1990)? How can these features apply to societies that have not been shaped by the same socio-historical forces that helped to engender them in Western Europe? In particular, the hyperindividualism of this Western, especially Anglo-American, discourse (cf. Habermas, 2001: 125; MacPherson, 1962), conflicts with communitarian impulses that Japanese scholars have long claimed prevail in their society (Hamaguchi, 1985). In Kant’s schema, such inclinations would have condemned Japanese to perpetual “immaturity,” unable “to make use of one’s own understanding without guidance of another (Kant, 1996: 11).” Could one nonetheless find evidence of the emergence of civil society and a public sphere in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868)? If so, what are its implications for Western understandings of political development and modernity?

In later industrializing societies, the modern project “is at once a quest for a certain kind of society as a collectivity and . . . an endeavor to establish a particular relationship of the individual to society. In the first sense, modernity refers to the collective ability of a society to mobilize its resources to provide for the well-being, autonomy, and security of the social unit, usually a national state.” In the second sense, modernity refers to human beings regarding themselves as active, self-conscious subjects of history, capable and deserving of participation in discourse regarding public affairs (Hoston, 1992: 289–290; Habermas, 1989). If civil society and the public sphere, associated with this second aspect, did emerge as ideals and realities in pre-Meiji Japan, did they result from the confluence of religious reform and the rise of commercial economic relations and a bourgeoisie, as in the West; and what was the interaction between them and the development of Japanese political thought?

None of the existing literature on Japanese civil society addresses these questions; and there is virtually no mention of the public sphere at all therein. Japanese Marxists pioneered the comparative study of Japanese development, but both factions regarded the Tokugawa era as that of high feudalism, cut off, in a sense, from the “modernity” inaugurated by the Meiji Restoration. Kōza-ha scholar Hirano Yoshitarō’s work on bourgeois-democratic revolution stresses the importance of civil society but does not identify its roots in the Tokugawa era. Beginning in the late 1950s and peaking in the 1990s, the Civil Society School (Shimin Shakai-ha), which emerged from the Kōza-ha, claimed that Japan had never developed a vibrant civil society. Combining the Hegelian and Marxian notions with Adam Smith’s understanding of civil society as a sphere of spontaneous collective action, these scholars attribute the weaknesses in postwar Japanese democracy to that deficiency (Hirata, 1987; Hirata et al., 1987; Uchida, 1981; Yamada, 1987; Yamada, 1994; Yamada et al., 2018). Uchida Yoshihiko observes, citing pioneering Marxist Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946): “In Europe, God created human rights, then human beings created the rights of the State, whereas in Japan, first God created the rights of the State, and then the State created human rights (Yamada, 1987: 39).” Kawakami found persuasive the kokutai legitimating myth devised by the Meiji oligarchs, which was taught in schools and remained hegemonic through World War II. This family-conception of the state (kazoku kokka) precluded any structure mediating between the family and the state, discouraging anyone who would seek nascent civil society prior to the Meiji industrializing revolution. ³

Such mythology does not necessarily reflect reality, and some preconditions for the successful Meiji industrializing revolution must have predated the Restoration. Yet, with few exceptions, the current Western literature on Japanese civil society is focused almost exclusively on non-profit organizations (NPOs) and their inability to influence bureaucracy-dominated policy making in contemporary Japan (Aldrich, 2013; Ogawa, 2010). Malo’s (2022) analysis of the “onto-epistemological developments” in the notion of civil society in Japan begins with the Meiji period. Hann (1996) and Kumar (1993, 1994) dismiss the concept as so ambiguous as to be “specious” (130), particularly applied to communitarian societies like Japan, despite its affinities with communitarian liberalism (Sandel, 2018). This objection also disregards the correspondence between the normative value of civil society in bridging individual and social interests and Neo-Confucian individualism harmonizing inner- and outer-directed (social) obligations: One engages in self-transformation in order to transform the world for the public good (Great Learning, 1971, chap. 4: 357–358). Nevertheless, Ikegami pronounces both civil society and the public sphere inapplicable to Tokugawa Japan, despite her claim that the era saw the spontaneous emergence of “publics” related to artistic networks (evocative of French enlightenment salons) and commercial publishing (Ikegami, 2005: 13), hallmarks of the emergence of the public sphere in the West. The latter is corroborated by Berry (2006), but neither study relates the import of these trends to Japanese political thought.

This article offers a reinterpretation of the Tokugawa period, demonstrating the interplay between an emerging civil society and public sphere, on the one hand, and new developments in Japanese political thought. It describes how merchants, financiers, peasants, and samurai saw themselves as historical subjects, spontaneously organizing social activities, claiming a public voice, and eventually challenging public authorities “in a debate over the general rules governing relations” in an increasingly commercialized society (Habermas, 1991 [1989]: 27). This article adopts White’s definition of civil society as the “intermediate associational realm between State and family,” “populated by organizations which are separate from the state, enjoy autonomy in relation to the State, and are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values” (White, 2004: 10). This definition encompasses Aristotle’s vision of the “good society,” the social goods of sociability and virtue stressed by Richard Hooker, its basis in trust (John Locke), and its connection to the needs of a market economy (Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Francis Hutcheson and Adam Ferguson, as well as G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx). This study demonstrates that there were both at least nascent civil society and a “public sphere,” in which “private people come together as a public” in Tokugawa Japan. It then shows how these developments were reflected in and reinforced by Japanese political philosophy, where a new political consciousness associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West was articulated among merchants, peasants, and samurai.

Antinomies of modernity and the origins of capitalist society in Tokugawa Japan

Japan’s development trajectory involved two intersecting sets of competing notions regarding modernity. Within Japan, there was the tension between the centralizing aspect of the modern project, the mobilization of resources to ensure the wellbeing and security of the national state (Hoston, 1992: 289–290), articulated in the slogan fukoku kyōhei (“Enrich the nation and strengthen the military”), on the one hand, and its democratizing aspect, on the other. This is universal, not specific to Japan. In order to exercise one’s freedoms to express oneself in the public sphere, one must rely upon rule of law to ensure against encroachment on those rights by others, the state, and external forces.

The second tension arises in the relationship between Japan and the West. With modernity defined with reference to an idealized West European past, Japanese Marxist scholars relied upon Western terminology describing the link between bourgeois revolution and modernization in order to examine Japan’s past critically. The 1925 Peace Preservation Law prohibiting any intent to seek to change the kokutai left them no place to stand within Japanese orthodoxy to mount such criticism (Hoston, 1992). Anxious to establish Japan’s moral equivalency with the West, they dated the establishment of Japanese feudalism as early as the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1180) eras to coincide with European feudalism (Hoston, 1986: 157ff). Yet, with Western Europe as the standard, their estimation that Japan was “backward” was a foregone conclusion, the only issue being the matter of degree.

Was there any notion of modernity in the Tokugawa period? The term comes from the Latin modernus, which means “these times,” as opposed to the past. There was certainly a sense among early Tokugawa leaders that their times were new and different compared to earlier epochs, a view that spread to merchants and samurai. The same year as the Battle of Sekigahara, Japan had its first contact with the Dutch. Fifty years earlier, Francis Xavier had arrived with two Spanish Jesuits to proselytize Roman Catholicism, which the Tokugawa shogunate would regard as sufficiently threatening to necessitate a ban on Christianity. Under its isolation policy (sakoku seisaku), only the Dutch remained, who introduced Western scholarship (“Dutch learning”), which was viewed as consistent with the rationalist humanism of Neo-Confucianism. Fully aware of the dangers posed by these foreign forces, the Tokugawa moved purposefully to consolidate centralized authority, legitimated in the emperor’s name.

Besides its centralization, what most distinguished Tokugawa feudalism from its European counterpart was its philosophico-religious context. Japan had long imported Chinese thought and shared its emphasis on the political order. Japanese philosophers inherited from China the notion of gong 公 (ōyake in Japanese), the term most commonly identified with the notion of public, as opposed to private 私 (pronounced (wataku)shi in Japanese). The etymology of these characters reveals key differences between Western, on the one hand, and Chinese and Japanese thought, on the other. Wang, Lee, and Fischer explain:

Gong traditionally refers to a fourfold conception of the cosmological and imperial, patrimonial order of the world. The ideograph [公] itself already provides a mnemonic of the underlying conceptual structure. The top radical [八] –meaning “give, part with; divide; fairness, justice”—is the Chinese character for the number eight and originates with the idea of “the four and the eight” or warp and woof of the cosmos. It conveys a moral-cosmic sense of justice and fairness. The bottom radical [厶] which means “not shared” and thus “private” has the nuance of selfish desire and selfish possessiveness of land. Hence the ideolograph gong [公] means to part with the nonshared, with selfish possessiveness, to be fair and just. Its semantics ramify, then, into a fourfold conception of the cosmological, imperial and patrimonial order of the world. ⁴

These dimensions of the Chinese term were transmitted to Japan and are intact in the Kōjien classical Japanese dictionary. We also find in this definition elements that are shared with the history of the notion of public in the West: Ōyake was that which was not private; it appertained to “the public” in the sense that they were those who were ruled in a hierarchical political order.

Furthermore, in classical Chinese thought, the realm of the political was not separate from the social, economic, natural, or religious spheres. Although there eventually emerged the Rationalist School of Zhu Xi (1130–1200; Shushigaku) and the Idealist School of Wang Yangming (1472–1529; Yōmeigaku) of Neo-Confucianism, in both schools the political was always connected to a normative order associated with Heaven (tian or ame 天), a term interpreted theistically or non-theistically (Schwartz, 1985: 48). Thus, in Japan (as in China), there was no clear demarcation between the concepts of sacred and secular power nor virulent disputes over the boundaries between them. Accordingly, it was much more problematic to articulate a sharply delineated notion of the secular state in Japan than it was in Western Europe.

There, the Protestant Reformation supported the disintegration of centralized authority in the pontiff, as Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and other critics of the Catholic Church supported claims of secular kings and princes to rule on the basis of “divine right.” This new legitimating device resembled the Ruist Socratic lie of the Mandate of Heaven conferred upon the emperor; but such European kings in turn protected their theologians from authorities charged with enforcing Catholic orthodoxy. Moreover, in asserting individual responsibility for one’s own salvation, including the right to read the Bible in one’s own vernacular, with forgiveness of sins unmediated by a priest, Reformation theologies contributed to the individualistic orientation undergirding the notion of civil society in the West (cf. Taylor, 1989: 216–217).

Despite this divergence, there were more similarities with the West than indicated in the literature regarding the role of the bourgeoisie in the dissolution of Tokugawa feudalism. In the Tokugawa philosophico-religious context, as their numbers and economic influence increased, merchants (chōnin, literally, townspeople or bürghers), like feudal lords (daimyō) and samurai, contemplated their respective social roles in terms of the self-cultivation of virtue (Najita, 1987; cf. Bellah, 1970 [1957]: 184–185). In other words, what Habermas claims was distinctive about the emergence of the public sphere in Western Europe also characterized Tokugawa feudalism. As in Habermas’s account, the notion of public underwent a metamorphosis in Japan as the Tokugawa order was transformed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Japan, as in China, ōyake or gong came to refer to “public order” by virtue of political authority associated with feudal rank: Ōyake (like gong in China) was originally a feudal title and assumed a broader denotation that eventually incorporated commoners, those subject to the authority of those with that rank (Kōjien: sv. ōyake). This evolution of the notion of public is similar to the transformation thereof in the West described by Habermas (1991 [1989]: chap. 2).

The Tokugawa era also saw a transmutation of the notions of public and private among the burgeoning merchant class. Before the establishment of the bakufu, under conditions of constant warfare, the merchants defined the free market towns they inhabited as “places of separation—muenjo; engiri basho” from problematic relations with military leaders. “[B]ecause these sanctuaries welcomed individuals of whatever social background to buy supplies, trade, create and sell wares, they also sometimes called their towns ‘public places’– kugai – a term suggesting at the same time as a homonym a place of shared ‘suffering’” (Najita, 1987: chap. 2). The private sphere was the realm of the private affairs of the military elites. As the military dominance of the shogun was institutionalized politically, its affairs “now assumed ‘public’ form as a fixed legal entity.” Conversely, “what merchants had called their ‘public’ arena of ‘suffering’ now had come to be defined as ‘private,’” concerned with seeking personal profit (Najita, 1987: 20).

The Tokugawa adopted Shushigaku, the Rationalist Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi, as its legitimating orthodoxy. In this political philosophical universe in which virtue was the dominant value, the merchants’ focus on “private” profit marketing expensive but useless goods, inducing peasants to expend resources on them rather than on their basic subsistence, earned them the same dishonorable position as the lowest class that they always had in China. Not surprisingly, then, Kōza-ha economist Hirano Yoshitarō argued that Japan’s bourgeoisie shared with China’s an “Asiatic” backwardness that inhibited its development into a potent liberal force like the English and French bourgeoisies. Citing Max Weber, Hirano asserted that Asiatic societies lacked the kind of moral principles that constrained Western business dealings. While the Qing legal code limited the amount of interest that could be charged by money-lenders to 100% of the original loan principal, there were no fundamental ethical constraints on Chinese merchants based on a philosophico-religious ethos analogous to Christianity, holding one accountable in the afterlife (Hirano, 1948: 174–177). Furthermore, while Protestant ethics could be traced back to the theological writings of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas (Hirano, 1948: chap. 6, 174), the true liberal-democratic potential of the bourgeoisie was most evident in the anti-clerical French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man, of which Hirano could find no analog in Japan (Hirano, 1959 [1934]: 139–148).

That the Tokugawa order was, in fact, not a strictly classical feudalism, as Marx claimed (Marx, 1967: 1:718n.), was reflected in other features, such as the placement of castle towns (where daimyo, samurai, and merchants resided) under the direct administrative control of the shogunate. This terminated their status as “free” cities, severely limiting the activities of their inhabitants. In the late Tokugawa era, certain production activities were likewise placed under the control of domain (han) production offices, limiting the primary economic activity that might have propelled the evolution of Japan’s merchants into full-fledged independent industrial capitalists (Hirano, 1982 [1932–1933]: 3–7). Given these restrictions, it is not surprising that, with the exception of Hattori Shisō’s path-breaking work identifying the indigenous origins and growth of manufacture in the Tokugawa era (Hattori, 1935; 1955a; 1955b; 1955c), Hirano and most other Marxist scholars have emphasized that Japan’s industrial growth was primarily attributable to state tutelage after the Meiji Restoration. This emphasis has complicated the task of distinguishing not only bottom-up from top-down political and economic initiatives, but also internal sources of growth from the cumulative effects of exposure to the industrial West. It has also obscured the role that entrepreneurs, merchants, and artisans—the bourgeoisie—played in dynamic social and economic change in Japan prior to the Meiji era and muddled the question of whether the Meiji Restoration constituted Japan’s bourgeois-democratic revolution or not (Hoston, 1991).

As postwar studies have demonstrated, dynamic economic growth in the Tokugawa era laid the groundwork for Meiji economic success and the significant role Japan’s expanding bourgeoisie played therein (Andō, 1958; Hanley and Yamamura, 1977; Hauser, 1974; Hayashi, 1967; Hirschmeier and Yui, 1975; Kodama, 1965; Nishiyama, 1997). As commerce expanded, so too did efforts by merchants to influence the political framework in which they operated. Sake and cotton merchants competed for the shogunate’s favor, as did rural producers who gained significant influence in the mid-Tokugawa era (Kitajima, 1962). Moreover, as secondary networks spread into rural communities, merchants’ and producers’ associations were organized to articulate their views and attempt to influence policy in their favor.

Such initiatives intensified the strains on the bakufu that were already apparent within the first century of Tokugawa rule. Although merchants alone would not constitute a strong enough unified force to play a leading role in ending the shogunate, their growth helped to erode its basis of legitimacy. Merchants steadily expanded trade and commercial culture into rural areas (Hauser, 1974; Smith, 1988; Hanley and Yamamura, 1977), aided, unintentionally, by government measures. As Louis XIV did in France, the shogunate implemented policies to reinforce its central control that strengthened the bourgeoisie and ultimately helped to undermine the regime. The sankin kōtai alternate attendance system enacted to ensure the loyalty of the daimyo to the shogun resulted in the establishment of a highway system linking the castle towns among the roads radiating out from the shogun’s castle in Edo. The system enriched merchants who opened shops to sell rice and other provisions along these routes. As a result, commerce flourished, and as merchants gained wealth, there soon emerged a persistent pattern of indebtedness to them among the daimyo struggling financially because the financial burden of the mandatory travel to and from Edo and on the samurai and local peasants to whom they shifted that burden through reduced stipends and higher taxes. The shogunate regularly cancelled all merchant debts in an effort to preserve the privileged status of the samurai. Nevertheless, by the early 1700s, these forces had produced a national rice market and a thriving commercial bourgeoisie. One prosperous rice merchant, Honma Munehisa, invented the Japanese candlestick system to predict changes in rice prices, a stock market charting method that is ubiquitous in international financial markets today (Nison, 2001: 15ff; Homma, 2002).

As both commerce and the bourgeoisie expanded, the rigid class boundaries between samurai and commoner that the Tokugawa enforced to ensure the stability of its samurai political and military base gradually diminished, as samurai and peasants increasingly turned to handicraft production and trade to supplement their incomes in difficult times (Oka, 1967). Beginning with the shift of publication of office rosters from daimyo households themselves to commercial publishing houses, commercial publications proliferated during this period, marking the passage from a society in which public communications were the monopoly of the shogunate and daimyo to one in which self-designated authors communicated to multiple regionally or interest-defined publics (Berry, 2006; Ikegami, 2005). These transformations were not the result of Western influence; they originated from within Japanese feudalism itself and were reflected in Japanese political thought well before Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships arrived.

Political thought and the emergence of civil society and a public sphere

The most significant of these intellectual changes was the decline in the hegemony of Shushi Neo-Confucianism. Contributing to this was the rise of the rival Yōmei School, other independent schools of thought, and a new national consciousness reflected in the Kokugaku (National Learning) School, culminating in the Meiji Restoration. These innovations in Japanese political philosophy at once reflected and promoted the development of civil society and the public sphere in Tokugawa Japan.

Maruyama emphasizes the philosophy of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), which represented the “disintegration” of Shushigaku because he opposed both Neo-Confucian schools as heterodoxy, openly challenging the very legitimacy of Tokugawa ideology and the Hayashi family’s monopoly on interpreting it with impunity. Condemning Shushigaku’s focus on Principle/Reason as useless, Sorai ⁵ advocated (as Wang Yangming had in Ming China; Wang, 2016: 129) a more active application of Ruist principles in practice. Sorai’s call for a return to Kongzi’s and Mengzi’s ⁶ teachings also constituted a demand for the primacy of the public realm:

. . . [T]he human nature of humanity naturally tends toward mutual kinship, mutual love, mutual livelihood, mutual completion, mutual assistance, mutual nourishment, mutual protection, and mutual help. Therefore, [Mengzi] said, “In acting humanely (ren/jin), we are [fully] human (ren/jin).” (7B:16) Accordingly, the Way of humanity must be discussed not in terms of a single person but rather in terms of trillions of people unified (Ogyū, 1973: 415). ⁷

Notably, Sorai included merchants among all persons to be embraced under the paramount Ruist virtue of humanity/humaneness (jin): “Samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants all mutually assist one another and so are able to eat. If they did not, they could not subsist” (Ogyū, 1973: 415).

Maruyama argues that Sorai’s distinction between the public and private spheres qualifies his thought as “modern.” That distinction “is rarely found in . . . premodern modes of thought, [in which] [t]he ruler’s public financial outlay is not distinct from his personal consumption (Maruyama, 1974: 102–113).” Sorai adhered to Ruist tradition in prioritizing “public” affairs, but for him, what was private was internal to an individual, while what was public pertained to relations among individuals. Given Habermas’s definition of the public sphere as a “space” where “private” persons come together to form a public—as in the case of the founders of the Kaitokudō merchant academy (see below)—Sorai’s emphasis on the public sphere gains added significance.

Sorai’s philosophy never gained a large following because it was idiosyncratic and internally inconsistent. He insisted that Ruist classics be read only in classical Chinese and departed from the Neo-Confucian elevation of Mengzi as Kongzi’s greatest disciple, rejecting any generalizations about human nature except Xunzi’s observations regarding the need for laws and punishments. This view diverges from the Neo-Confucian insistence that such reliance upon laws is undesirable based on Kongzi’s assertion that reliance upon laws encourages people to forget their natural sense of shame of their wrongdoing (Legge [Kongzi], 1971: 146, 2:3). In Shushigaku, what concerns the private, inner life of human beings is based on human desires, which it attributes to the impurities found in the Material Force (氣 Ki) of all phenomena (ki 器, literally, equipment with functions), which hinder our fulfillment of the full principle/reason with which we are endowed by Heaven (our noumenon; Zhu, n.d: §49, 1a-b). By contrast, the “public good” is based on universal Heavenly Principle/Reason (Ri). Denying the possibility of self-cultivation to attain sagehood (which he maintains is strictly inborn), Sorai claims that rites “based on private intellect” cannot realize the public good, which is paramount (Maruyama, 1974: 102–116). Like Machiavelli, then, Sorai severs private morality from the public realm, signaling the collapse of Shushigaku as the Tokugawa legitimating myth.

Sorai himself was not a representative of the bourgeoisie, but his biography illuminates an important pattern in the emergence of the new strands of Japanese political thought described here. Son of the personal physician to Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (the future fifth shogun), Sorai’s father incurred his daimyo’s ire and was exiled to a small village, where the family endured financial hardship and Sorai was schooled independently (Konsaisu jinmei jiten: Nihon-hen, 1974: sv. Ogyū Sorai). During the Tokugawa period, increasing numbers of scholars and artists opened private schools (shijuku) to educate those who, because of their status or gender, could not attend bakufu- or domain-operated schools. These private schools, like that founded by Sorai, became vehicles for spreading new ideas, increasing the proportion of the literate population and thereby expanding the market for commercial publications. By his time, the rising influence of merchants was evident and alarmed Sorai, who urged the bakufu to stockpile rice so that the samurai could control rice prices and thus their own destiny (Ogyū, 1962: 59–63). He also stressed the urgency of implementing rationalizing reforms by legal measures and bureaucratic authority in order to address the shogun’s endemic financial issues.

Other philosophers were more representative of the Tokugawa bourgeoisie, as merchants undertook efforts to engage in moral and ethical reflection. Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), son of a lumber merchant and Sorai’s student, co-founded the “Study of Ancient Meaning” (Kogigaku) school of thought with his son, based on Jinsai’s commentaries on the Analects and Mengzi (Gōmōjigi, 1683). These they propagated in the Kogidō, their private school located in Kyoto across the river from Yamazaki Ansai’s private Shushigaku school. Another Sorai student Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), son of a cotton wholesaler descended from a samurai family, produced an annotation of Japan’s ancient classic the Kojiki [Records of Ancient Matters] (Motoori, 1844 [1798]). Critical of Sorai’s exaltation of Chinese civilization, Norinaga joined Kamo Mabuchi (1697–1769) to found the nativist Kokugaku (National Studies) philosophical school that exercised such great influence on the Meiji Restoration. Seeking greater security in the changing environment, these merchant philosophers manifested a new “bourgeois” consciousness, challenging the hegemonic rhetoric of hierarchy in the Tokugawa order as early as the prosperous Genroku era (1688–1704), marking the end of the first century of Tokugawa rule. Samurai, who had eagerly embraced the vision of them as samurai-gentlemen in the Way of the Warrior theorized earlier in Ruist and Shinto terms by Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685; Yamaga, 1911) now also engaged in intellectual pursuits, as civil rather than military actors, in a civil(ian)—as opposed to military-dominated—society.

In that context, Ishida Baigan (1685–1744) articulated a Way of the Merchant—a Way of righteousness (sei) and justice (gi) in the practice of the merchant’s vocation (Hirano, 1948: 185; Hoston, 1991: 570ff.). Born of peasants but educated while residing with a merchant family (Konsaisu jinmei jiten: Nihon-hen, 1974 sv. Ishida Baigan), Baigan personified the emerging social mobility in Tokugawa Japan, despite the shogunate’s efforts to maintain rigid class distinctions. Baigan founded a meditative philosophical School of the Mind-and-Heart (Shingaku 心学) ⁸ that he popularized as an itinerant teacher, primarily among merchants. His philosophy advocated the attainment of a state of mind-and-heart liberated from the acquired (not “natural”) propensity of human beings to focus on material things and from their self-centered impulses, through meditation and devotion to the Way of the Five Ruist Human Relationships. ⁹ His promotion of selflessness explicitly refuted the popular view that “merchants are extremely greedy and make their living by constantly coveting things,” seeking profits through deceit. Instead, Baigan elevated the merchants’ social status by equating their profit with the samurai’s stipend. “[T]here is only one Way. However, warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants each have a path to fulfill; even beggars – not to mention merchants – who do not fall within the four social classes – have a Way.” In advocating the self-cultivation of virtue, Baigan remained within the Ruist framework, quoting the Analects and Mengzi extensively. In the spirit of Mengzi’s insistence that everyone has the innate capacity to become a sage ([Mengzi], 1971, 6B:2, p. 424), Baigan emphasized that everyone, even the merchant class and peasantry, can be virtuous. Some merchants might be consumed by greed, but they could still elect to follow the “Way of the merchant,” “abandoning desires, cultivating humanity, and regarding prosperity in accordance with the Way, which is the virtue of learning” (Ishida, 1966–1968: 420–422).

The yearning among merchants and financiers to engage on equal footing with the discourses conducted by Ruist scholars in nearby Kyoto was institutionalized in 1726 with the establishment of the Kaitokudō merchant academy in Osaka. Sorai’s student Dazai Shundai (1680–1747), of samurai background, noted the increasing financial dependence of daimyo and samurai on merchants that threatened the Tokugawa order. He embraced the economic aspects of Sorai’s thought, especially the utility of commerce to promote economic reforms (Dazai, 1729, 1972 [1730]). Such critical thinking about political economy would become characteristic of the Kaitokudō.

The Kaitokudō evolved out of literary groups (benkyōkai) organized by Ruist scholars in the Osaka area to promote learning and respond to needs of the broader public than the Buddhist Gansuidō, which was formed in a similar manner but was devoted to charitable activities (Najita, 1987: 61–63). In its early years, operating under a legal charter, the Kaitokudō devoted itself to promoting virtue, seeking scholarly excellence, and asserting the legitimacy of merchant learning and participation in public discourse. Its first leader Miyake Sekian (1665–1730) incorporated unorthodox ideas such as Wang Yangming’s Idealism and Buddhism into his teachings, but by the time the academy’s influence peaked in the late 1700s through the 1820s, Sekian’s eclecticism had been replaced by principal instructor Goi Ranshū (1697–1762; Konsaisu jinmei jiten: Nihon-hen, 1974: sv. Goi Ranshū) with a rationalist Shushigaku philosophical basis that enhanced the Kaitokudō’s prestige. Ranshū’s Shushigaku was not uncritical: He had significant reservations about Neo-Confucian metaphysics, and the contrast he drew between the limitations of the human mind-and-heart and the vastness of the universe encouraged empirical evidentialism throughout the academy (Goi, 1911: 12: Bk 2, 22). Ranshū became the first of a series of distinguished Kaitokudō scholars who promoted political and economic reform. He advocated local self-government for peasants with regard to fiscal matters with peasant leaders replaced every 3–5 years (Goi, 1911: 12: Bk 1, 28). His political reformism was endorsed by his disciples the brothers Nakai Chikuzan and Riken, whose prestige would soon outshine Ranshū’s.

The bourgeoisie’s aspiration to be part of the public sphere was articulated explicitly by Chikuzan, who endorsed Mengzi’s claims that all have the ability to become a sage and that the purpose of government is to assure the wellbeing of the people. These views led Chikuzan to denounce Sorai for his “misinterpretation” of the Ruist classics and elitist insistence that sages are born, not made, and that only those capable of reading classical Chinese could become learned. Chikuzan developed a political economy that stressed the importance of assessing available resources accurately before allocating them. In his most celebrated work Sōbō kigen, he developed a plan of national scope to stem the country’s decline. Attacking the alternate attendance system as inhumane, expensive, and impractical, leaving domains unprotected in the event of unrest, he recommended that daimyo in distant domains be required to be in Edo no more than 3 months every 5 years, while those closer to Edo would go every 3 or 4 years. Such reforms would have negative implications for Osaka financial institutions, but merchants would be permitted to purchase vacant daimyo manors in Edo to manage as hotels. Merchants would also manage the facilities lining the major highways, and peasants would find relief from increased taxes and the burden of producing additional rice to finance daimyo journeys to Edo (Nakai, 1966 [1789]: 444–455, 458–468). Similarly, Yamagata Bantō, financier and the academy’s last great philosopher, advocated that merchants, with their superior knowledge of trade and finance, be entrusted with controlling prices to ensure the smooth operation of the market in the national interest (Yamagata, 1973 [1802–1820]: 372–385). Thus, despite the interdependence between the shogunate and the bourgeoisie, merchants did not feel compelled to be passive. The academy was not authorized to establish multiple locations, but Kaitokudō ideas spread rapidly along the Tōkaidō, the largest of the five major routes between the emperor’s palace in Kyoto and the shogun’s in Edo.

Finally, one must not underestimate the role of Yōmeigaku, introduced into Japan by Nakae Tōju (1608–1648) early in the Tokugawa era. Tolerated despite the shogunate’s ban on teachings other than the Shushigaku as interpreted by Hayashi Razan and his successors, its embrace by generations of philosophers revealed the fragility of the shogunate’s ideological bulwark and no doubt emboldened Sorai. Wang asserted that universal Principle/Reason (Li) could be found not in external things, as Shushigaku claimed, but within the human mind-and-heart, endowed with “innate knowledge of the good” (liangzhi; Wang, 2016: 174). Wang, whose followers included merchants, peasants, and even women, as well as gentry in China, insisted that self-cultivation was an intuitive, not an empirical, matter. This, with Wang’s teaching regarding the unity of knowledge and action, was both more accessible and increasingly attractive to lower-level samurai as their economic position deteriorated. Its most notable adherents included Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691), Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685; both lower-level samurai), and Satō Issai, a student of Chikuzan. Wang’s emphasis on practice and intuition, consonant with Japanese sensibilities emphasized by Kokugaku scholars, attracted men of determination (shishi) who appreciated Wang’s stress on “making the will sincere” and endorsement of Zen mental discipline as they resolved to engage in practical action in a time of crisis. As a philosophy that “set Chinese thought free” in Ming China (1368–1644; Fung, 1952–1953: 2:553), Wang’s thought reinforced democratic aspects of classical Ruism (Hoston, 2025: 98–109). Although it lacked an organized academic structure, in late Tokugawa Yōmeigaku inspired some of the most radical and nationalistic activists to oppose a shogunate that had failed to fulfill its most basic duty to defend Japan from foreign intruders.

Conclusion

The discussion here demonstrates that Japan’s development of a civil society and public sphere were indeed attributable to the growth of a bourgeoisie and the crumbling of philosophico-religious hegemony in the Tokugawa era. This suggests that Japanese political development is not as deficient as it tends to be regarded by the standards of the English and French bourgeois-democratic revolutions. The Meiji repression of free speech and association and establishment of bureaucratic dominance over civil society forces culminated in the rapid rise of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, contrary to the image of a weak, passive pre-Meiji bourgeoisie, this study highlights how dynamic commercial growth stimulated the expansion of the bourgeoisie and promoted the emergence of civil society and a public sphere manifested in and encouraged by new trends in Japanese political thought.

The shogunate’s policies undertaken to ensure its system’s survival impoverished daimyo and samurai, especially lower-level samurai, whose vocation was rendered obsolete by prolonged civil peace. They, along with tax-burdened peasants, increasingly joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie, contributing indirectly to the economic foundation for the Meiji industrializing revolution, and to the formation of civil society and a public sphere that eroded the Tokugawa’s political legitimacy. By early Meiji, progressive, “modern” aspirations among these groups accelerated the formation of associations to opine on public matters, including the Meiroku-sha, which published a political opinion magazine until it was suppressed by the government (Braisted, 1976), and similar associations fueled the subsequent civil rights and political party movements (Hirano, 1933). The rise of Meiji authoritarianism cannot, then, be attributed to absence of civil society and a public sphere in the Tokugawa era.

The Tokugawa prohibition on heterodox teachings was remarkably ineffective. The philosophies of Sorai, Baigan, Jinsai, Motoori, Yōmeigaku, and Kaitokudō scholars reflected the assertion by merchants—long relegated to the margins of moral teaching—along with peasants and samurai increasingly engaged in manufacture and commerce of their capacity and duty to make political judgments. These forces accelerated the demise of Tokugawa feudalism, offering bases for a new balance between the competing desiderata of modernity in the Meiji era, despite the differences with Europe’s classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions. The developments described here occurred before the 1854 confrontation with Commodore Perry, which were generated from within Japanese society largely independent of Western influence. Dutch learning influenced some Kaitokudō scholars, but its promotion by Fukuzawa Yukichi came a century after the new, progressive developments in Japanese political thought described here reflected and propelled the development of civil society and the public sphere. Some groups—particularly samurai—and philosophico-religious features differed but also overlapped with those in Western Europe. These findings confirm that the terms civil society and the public sphere accurately characterize phenomena that contributed to the democratizing aspect of Japan’s modern project by laying the foundation for the subsequent civil rights, political party, and anti-authoritarian movements.