Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859) and the Shoka Sonjuku

YOSHIDA SHOIN (1830-1859) AND THE SHOKA SONJUKU The life and writings of Yoshida Shoin, samurai of Choshu in western Japan, scholar, patriot and teacher, reflect the many diverse and turbulent aspects of the late Tokugawa period. In his personal relationships and activities Shoin anticipated the desperate nature of the crisis facing Japan in the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of foreigners on Japanese soil seeking trade and diplomatic privilege. He was executed for crimes against the state during the Ansei Purge in 1859, ten years before the same ideas and a number of the men who were his students propelled Japan into the modern world. Shoin has been the object of fascination to both Japanese and Western historians since the publication of The Life of Yoshida ShOin (1893) by Tokutomi Iichiro and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Yoshida Torajiro" in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1903). Interpretation of his life and work has been prey to a hundred years of changing historiographical fashion. Shoin has been cast in the role of archconservative, ultranationalist, messianic prophet of the Meiji Restoration, tragic failed hero, disaffected intellectual and "grassroots" radical insurrectionist. Within the encrustation of legend and interpretation the real Yoshida Shoin has been overlaid. This study re-examines Shoin's life and thought with particular emphasis on the Shoka Sonjuku. The students of this small community school at which he was principal instructor while under domiciliary confinement, included such later "Men of Meiji" as Ito Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo and Kido Koin. Ideas gathered during fieldwork helped to clarify Shoin's ideas and appear in the text where appropriate in the form of maps, charts andphotographic plates. Locations where he was active, including Hagi itself are pinpointed. His journeys are traced from Hirado and Nagasaki in Kyushu, through Kyoto and Nakasendo to IzuShimoda, Mito and Aizu-Wakamatsu, as far north as the Tsugaru Straits. The chronological listing of his major writings which is included, traces the evolution of his concepts of state and philosophy of education. This thesis sheds new light on Shoin's life, thought and activities, especially his relationship to the physical environment of Hagi, the domain castletown, to the Neo-Confucian and Yamaga philosophical traditions in which he was fostered and the intellectual movements to which he was exposed, notably, Mitogaku. Special attention is given to Shoka Sonjukuki, an essay written by Shin in 1856 in which he discusses the history and educational principles of the school which were transmitted to his deshi (disciples). The analysis of this vital text has not been carried out previously and challenges the existing inadequate but historiographically explicable interpretations of Shoin as a radical and extremist