Customer Reviews

Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued: Yamagata Daini's Ryushi Shinron of 1759

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This book is about one Yamagata Daini, considered by Yoshida Sh'in and other bakumatsu imperialists to be an early loyalist and spiritual forbear. But Wakabayashi says they were misinformed about Daini - he was not a loyalist or anti-Bakufu at all. Basically, he held to a very orthodox, very (ancient) Chinese view of social/political matters, supported strict social hierarchy, considered the Japanese imperial family a "fallen dynasty" which no one, at that stage, ever expected to rise again. This book is an analysis of one of his writings that has been interpreted as supporting anti-Bakufu loyalism. It reveals a lot about the Chinese classics that educated Japanese were steeped in and also about the history of Japan as popularly understood, and the pre-Bakumatsu understanding of or attitude towards Japan's political situation/structure. He also discusses a little of Sh'in's ideas to contrast them with what Daini actually wrote. I can't speak to how valuable this book would be to a specialist, but as a layman who has done some reading about the intellectual history of pre-modern Japan I found it very interesting - in particular because it makes explicit a lot of pre-modern Japanese socio-political attitudes that other books refer to but don't detail. It's unlikely that a reader without that depth of interest or background in the subject would enjoy this book.