Distinguished Legalist politician and historian of late Japan’s feudal society — Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725)
As the title suggests, the following is an introduction to Arai Hakuseki’s Legalist思想.
The life experiences of Arai Hakuseki in Japan were long overshadowed and rarely studied due to the severe influence of bourgeois reactionary idealist historiography and Confucian思想. During China’s socialist period, because of the cover-up by Japanese bourgeois reactionary historians, Arai Hakuseki’s works and related思想 were long ignored and not translated into Chinese. It was not until capitalism was restored in China that Chinese bourgeois scholars like Zhou Yiliang went to Columbia University in New York to obtain Arai Hakuseki’s autobiography “Zhe Fen Chai Ji” and translated it into Chinese for publication, that research on Arai Hakuseki appeared in China. However, only a few people like Zhou Yiliang paid attention to it, and naturally, no one in Japan or China, both reactionary imperialist societies, would study his Legalist思想 in detail.
But regardless, Zhou Yiliang at least introduced Arai Hakuseki’s思想 based on his works. Combining his introduction with Arai Hakuseki’s works, one can glimpse his Legalist思想. Arai Hakuseki’s思想 shows that Japan, like China, also experienced a struggle between Confucianism and Legalism. The history of Japanese Legalism opposing Confucian思想 is not only existent but also quite intense. Through analyzing Arai Hakuseki’s Legalist思想, an important part of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in Japan can be seen.
Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725) grew up during the period when Genroku culture emerged (1688-1704). In 1709, after his lord Tokugawa Ienobu succeeded as the sixth shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, he was heavily relied upon and carried out a series of Legalist policies.
During his time in power, Arai Hakuseki implemented some relatively progressive Legalist policies, which to some extent eased the sharp class contradictions in Japan at the time, promoted the commodity economy, and allowed Japanese feudal society to continue developing. Externally, he defended Japan’s national sovereignty, struck at the colonial aggression of Western missionaries, and established equal diplomatic relations with Korea. At the same time, he also used Western missionaries to actively learn about the advanced natural science and other research achievements of the West, opening up Japan’s „Rangaku” (that is, Western learning). Arai Hakuseki’s major policies included:
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Recasting gold and silver currency, opposing the minting of underweight gold and silver coins, eliminating inflation, and dismissing Ogiwara Shigenobu, who had been in charge of minting money and had engaged in massive corruption. This also struck at the speculative activities of the feudal big merchants behind him, stabilized Japan’s domestic economy, and provided a steady environment for the budding development of Japanese capitalism.
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Restricting land consolidation by the big landlord class, striking at large landowners who seized land illegally, and preventing them from falsely accusing peasants of encroachment. This eased, to a certain extent, the impoverishment of the peasantry.
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Easing the harsh criminal laws. For rebellious peasants, townspeople, and others, he adopted an accommodationist policy of reformist pacification: only the „chief culprits” were punished, while the rest were fined. Although it was still a reactionary repression policy against the people, it was nevertheless more progressive than the Confucian line of killing everyone indiscriminately.
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Proposed abolishing the long-standing policy requiring imperial princes and princesses to enter the clergy, a policy that had greatly increased the shogunate’s financial burden. To hollow out the emperor and restrict imperial power, the Tokugawa shogunate had stipulated that, among the emperor’s children, only the prince who was crown prince could inherit the throne; all other princes and princesses had to become monks or nuns, thereby pushing them out of politics and depriving them of the possibility of contending for power and threatening shogunate rule. But this required spending large amounts of temple land to support them, while the shogunate had to bear their expenses. For the shogunate this was an enormous outlay, making an already insolvent government, trapped in a fiscal crisis, even harder to balance its revenues and expenditures, and it was also a heavy burden on the people. Arai Hakuseki said that princes and princesses marrying was „human nature,” and in the name of ethics and morality he argued that the system should be abolished; in reality, this was because it would cut the shogunate’s expenses, and his proposal therefore improved the shogunate’s finances.
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Striking at the aggressive activities of Western missionaries, imprisoning Dutch missionaries and forbidding them from freely gathering intelligence in Japan or returning to their countries. But as a Legalist landlord, Arai Hakuseki could not fully grasp the missionaries’ aggressive ambitions, and he also had some misunderstandings about them; he did not believe that missionaries were truly the vanguard of Western colonial aggression, and only objectively had them imprisoned.
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Actively learning about advanced Western research achievements. Arai Hakuseki argued that the Italian and Dutch missionaries in custody should not be executed, but should instead be used to obtain all kinds of Western intelligence. He attached great importance to these opportunities to learn Western knowledge, so much so that he called his meetings with the missionaries a „once-in-a-lifetime encounter.” He personally went to the prison to ask the missionaries about the general political and economic situation in the West, learned geographical knowledge of the West and had the missionaries draw maps, and through the missionaries obtained many Western natural science research achievements of the time, foreigners’ lifestyles, social systems, and so on. In order to master this knowledge, he even personally learned several hundred Dutch words and gained some rough understanding of the language. For this reason, Arai Hakuseki was later also called the founder of Japanese Rangaku. Unfortunately, Japanese Rangaku later gradually degenerated into worship of everything foreign and contempt for Japanese national culture, becoming a servile school of foreign admiration that betrayed Arai Hakuseki’s original intention of studying Western knowledge.
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Establishing friendly and equal diplomatic relations with Korea. At the time, Korea had sent envoys to request stable diplomatic relations with Japan. Arai Hakuseki believed that Korea’s wording implied a lowering of Japan’s status and treated Japan as Korea’s tributary state, so he argued firmly and secured equal status with Korea. In addition, Korea repeatedly nitpicked Japanese diplomatic envoys on the grounds that Japanese documents violated naming taboos. Arai Hakuseki refuted the Korean side’s unreasonable demands with sound arguments and used Legalist materialist thought to criticize the Confucian idea of „taboo avoidance.”
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From 1709 to 1716, Arai Hakuseki experienced the sixth and seventh shoguns of the Tokugawa shogunate. Over a period of eight years he carried out the Legalist line, allowing the economic and cultural prosperity of the Genroku era to continue and develop. But after the seventh shogun, Tokugawa Ietsugu, died, the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune, representing the interests of Japan’s big landlord class and feudal big merchants, restored the Confucian line and dismissed Arai Hakuseki from office. Arai Hakuseki had no choice but to retire and spent the rest of his life on historical and linguistic research, making certain contributions to history and elucidating some progressive Legalist views of history.
In the field of historiography, Arai Hakuseki’s Legalist thought is reflected in:
1. Opposing the Confucian theory of the Mandate of Heaven and the idealist historical view preached by Shinto mythology.
Arai Hakuseki believed that history is determined neither, as Confucians claimed, by an incomprehensible Mandate of Heaven, nor, as Shinto claimed, by vague mythical figures, but has its own certain „circumstances” and „changes over time.” His view of history was basically historical evolutionism: he believed that historical development follows its own fixed laws, and that each generation is more advanced than the last. He believed that Japanese history could be divided into the emperor’s „nine changes” and the samurai class’s „five changes,” holding that Japanese history went through nine developmental stages in ancient times and reached the age of samurai rule and the shogunate after nine changes, while the shogunate period itself had five developmental stages and reached the present through five changes. Although this idea still contained many unscientific elements, and Arai Hakuseki’s understanding of „circumstances” was still limited to struggles within the ruling class, it nevertheless had a materialist Legalist color. Most notably, in his historical work „Dokushi yoron” he tried, in a manner similar to Liu Zongyuan’s „On Feudalism,” to demonstrate that Japan’s political transition from imperial rule to shogunate rule was a historical necessity and the result of the long-term development of internal struggles within the ruling class. With such achievements, Arai Hakuseki may be said to be the great synthesizer of Japanese Legalist historiography.
2. Opposing superstition and advocating materialism.
Arai Hakuseki already believed while in office that era names had nothing to do with the rise and fall of dynasties. At one point the Japanese shogunate changed the era name to Shōtoku, and Confucian big landlords, in order to preserve ritual and propriety, rummaged through old Ming dynasty historical books for materials and quoted Confucian dogma from Ming sources, saying that any dynasty whose era name contained the character „sei” would be unstable, and that changing the era name to Shōtoku was inauspicious. Arai Hakuseki refuted this in a forceful and reasoned manner, saying that both China and Japan had widely used era names containing the character „sei,” and nothing inauspicious had happened; the Ming people’s claims were all speculation. He also said that in ancient times neither China nor Japan had anything that could really be called era names, and this had not affected the length of people’s lives or the rise and fall of states. He further cited, from what he had learned from Western missionaries, Western political systems, pointing out that there were very few countries in the West that used era names, and that other countries had not had such a concept since their birth. Yet in recent times many wars had broken out among the Western powers over questions of succession, and many disorders had appeared in their states. How, then, should the rise and fall of those countries without era names be explained? Clearly, in the final analysis, the rise and fall of a state depends not on era names but on human affairs. This not only reflects Arai Hakuseki’s wide learning, but also his materialist thought.
In addition, Arai Hakuseki also tried to interpret Japanese mythology using a method with materialist tendencies. At that time, Japanese Shinto, in order to deceive the people, claimed absurdly that the emperor’s ancestors were Amaterasu Ōmikami, that the imperial family were descendants of the gods, and that ancient Japan was the age of myth. Arai Hakuseki questioned this view, which had long dominated Japanese historiography, and clearly pointed out that „the god is man,” and that „what is called the deity mitekto is in fact a masculine honorific,” implying that myth is an embellishment of human beings, and put forward open atheist ideas. In a Japanese society where the religious atmosphere was strong, Confucianism had long dominated the intellectual world, and Shinto and Buddhist superstitions were rampant, this was „shocking and unconventional.” Therefore, when compiling Japanese history, Arai Hakuseki also regarded myth as a reflection of real social history, trying to interpret myth through the logic of human history and to glimpse ancient Japanese history through myth. Although the results now seem childish, he was the first in Japan to dare to put forward such ideas, and perhaps even the first in the world to do so in historiography, preceding Bachofen, who similarly proposed such ideas in the West, tried to use myth to explain the history of primitive society, and argued for the existence of matriarchy, by two hundred years.
3. Advocating a historiographical view of „learning for practical use.”
Arai Hakuseki believed that history should serve a practical purpose and opposed blindly burrowing into old texts for textual criticism, similar to Yan Yuan’s idea of „practice” in his own time. Therefore, Arai Hakuseki spent much time studying historical topics that had long been ignored by Japan’s orthodox Confucian historians but were beneficial to preserving feudal rule, such as the historical and geographical conditions of the Ainu and Ryukyuan peoples within Japan, as well as Western social systems and rough historical conditions.
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Apart from history, Arai Hakuseki also had considerable achievements in other fields, as can be seen from his ability to teach himself Dutch. In addition to some textual research on language families and the characteristics of different languages, his achievements in linguistics also included a viewpoint that was quite advanced for the time. In the East Asian cultural sphere of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the script used was Chinese characters, an ideographic script, and Confucian linguists in those countries also stood firmly from an orthodox position to extol the superiority of Chinese characters, believing them to be the most advanced writing system and that they would never need to change. Based on the Legalist ideas of simple dialectics and simple materialism, and drawing on the reasons for alphabetic writing systems in Western European languages, Arai Hakuseki took the opposite view to Confucian linguistics and believed that phonetic scripts had certain advantages over ideographic scripts, thereby striking at the Confucian falsehood that used linguistics to promote orthodoxy and the feudal hierarchy system. In addition to the dispute between phonetic and ideographic scripts, Arai Hakuseki also believed that the languages of different peoples reflect the cultures of different peoples, and that languages among different peoples, such as Korean, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Japanese, influence one another. To understand Japanese from ancient times to the present, one needs to understand the foreign languages that influenced Japanese. He opposed the Confucian metaphysical worldview and believed that language is not fixed and unchanging; in fact, language has distinctions between ancient and modern forms (Old Japanese and contemporary Japanese), and also distinctions between „elegant speech” and „vulgar speech” (that is to say, the same language is used differently by the ruling class and the ruled class, and cannot be treated uniformly). In addition, the forms of a language differ under different historical conditions. Therefore, taking Japanese as an example, even if all Japanese people speak Japanese, it is necessary to distinguish a passage according to the era, society, and identity of the speaker, and to distinguish it from other utterances under different specific circumstances. Finally, because Arai Hakuseki acknowledged linguistic change, he also attempted to explore the etymology of Japanese, and although many of the results were inevitably strained and far-fetched, the attempt itself was also precious under feudal conditions. This is Arai Hakuseki’s historical evolutionist view of linguistics as a Legalist landlord class thinker.
Another point is Arai Hakuseki’s materialist view of nature. In his autobiography, he once recorded an event in which an earthquake occurred in the Kanto region of Japan where he lived in Genroku 16 (1703). After the earthquake, he neither prayed to gods nor Buddha, nor panicked; instead, he calmly checked on the safety of his wife, children, and lord, took fire-prevention measures for the fires that might follow the earthquake, and in the process tried to infer the规律 of earthquakes. In addition to having source value for later seismological research into Japan’s earthquake history, this experience also reflects Arai Hakuseki’s habit, as a Legalist and naive materialist, of treating disasters such as earthquakes as ordinary natural phenomena, showing that he did not believe earthquakes were caused by the Mandate of Heaven or some will; otherwise he would not have behaved in this way.
Finally, Arai Hakuseki also had considerable achievements in literature. He read Tang poetry extensively and could compose poems himself. His literary style was close to reality and lively, reflecting his Legalist literary thought. Arai Hakuseki’s autobiography, „Oritaku shiba no ki,” is a work with both historical source value and literary value, and after the Meiji era its first half was long selected as a language textbook.
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Zhou Yiliang’s introduction to Arai Hakushi and Arai Hakushi’s autobiography “The Record of Burning Firewood” can be referenced: