The “Jitsu-gaku” of Yokoi Shōnan : A Cross Section of the Intellectual History of the Late Tokugawa Era

The aim of this essay is to bring to light the character of the Jitsugaku of Yokoi Shōnan (1809-1869), one of the greatest political philosophers in Japan in the last part of the Tokugawa period, and further, to inquire into the spiritual situation of the time. The reign of the Tokugawa Household was characterized by a thorough-going feudal system and an extremely isolationistic policy, but toward the end of the period great strifes and conflicts arose among people (especially among the Samurai) as a result of the disintegration of the social system and the impact of western powers forcing the country to open its doors. At this time Confucianism, still considered as the orthodox foundation of the Samurai learning, was found to be too weak to cope with the challenges of the day, for it had turned itself into an abstract system of ethics or into philological studies of the Confucian texts. Most of those young samurai who were dissatisfied with this situation, bccame rad cal nationalists, but there were a few intellectuals who could see things from world-wide perspectives. Among the latters was Sakuma Zozan, whose famous phrase ran : "The moral culture of the East and the technical civilization of the West" Shōnan was another of the kind. He lived in the tradition of Confucianism and believed that by its reform and by the renewal of its true spirit all the difficult problems of the day could be resolved. Such a reformed Confucianism is what he called jitsu-gaku (實學), which means a 'practical, real, and true learning' of Confucianism