Dr. Kiri PARAMORE　キリ・パラモア博士

【発表テーマ】

近世日本中後期の政治と政治思想- その関係における儒教思想の射程

Politics and Political Thought in the Mature Early Modern State (1650-1830)

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This paper is a draft of chapter I have been commissioned to write as part of the New Cambridge History of Japan, scheduled for publication in 2020. It analyses the history of Japanese politics and political thought between 1650 and 1830. It is a part of a set of three chapters which chart the political history of Japan in the Tokugawa period. My chapter emphasizes the role of political thought in the development of early modern politics.

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The political and political thought histories of early modern Japan have often been analysed in separation, with political histories telling the story of a comparatively static political structure,[1]while political thought histories conversely tended to concentrate on the dynamism of intellectual development during the same period.[2]This chapter instead argues that politics and political thought were connected in early modern Japan through an increasingly public discussion in which the basic expectations of politics changed dramatically through the course of the long eighteenth century. This chapter links changes in the ‘horizon of expectation’ in political thinking, with increasing publicness in the conduct of politics, arguing that in tandem these can be seen to have brought about a general expansion of the political through the period. This accelerating broadening of the political between the mid-seventeenth and nineteenth centuries led to both increasing participation in politics, and an increased expectation of what politics and government should deliver. 

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In this chapter I define politics as the process of negotiation between different stakeholders at all levels in society which constituted governance, and political thought as the deliberate expression of political positions (opinions) in those processes of negotiation. The most complex and enduring expressions of political thought are often found in state proclamations, memorials, advice documents and political treatises, which is why these kinds of sources are so often the object of political and political thought history. But political thought in early modern Japan also found expression in lewd street performance, graffiti, and urban rioting, the content and claims of which both influenced, and were influenced by, more established genres of political discussion. Overt expression of the subjective political outlooks of the people occurred in all these genres. These subjective outlooks were often expressed in these sources in terms of expectation. This informs our choice to focus on what the historical theorist Reinhard Koselleck has called the “horizon of expectation”, a discursive field the sources of which tend to demonstrate agency, and which according to Koselleck’s theory grows in importance as the processes of modernization accelerate.[3]   The study of these kinds of sources of political thought aids us not only in understanding early modern Japanese politics, but moreover what early modern Japanese themselves thought about Japanese politics. Through the connection between the two, it further allows us, at least potentially, to cast light on deeper issues of temporality and historicity, seeing deeper historical patterns, for instance the expansion of the political that this chapter argues occurred during the long eighteenth century. 

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Confucianism went from being considered by state actors as a seditious political influence in the early 1600s, to being used by the shogunal state as the ideological justification for political economic reforms by the early 1700s. Through the 1700s its reach had broadened to the extent that it came to function as a medium for the open airing of increasingly public political disagreements. This change in government attitudes to Confucianism moved in step with more general attitudes and practices relating to broader issues of public expression and political involvement. 

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The social function of this kind of political discourse, particularly as it was practiced in the many private schools and academies of urban Japan in the late 1700s, has been compared in recent historical writing to a “public sphere”.[4]It is important to note, however, that in contrast to Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, rooted in nineteenth century assertions of European bourgeois class mobility, most histories claiming a public sphere in early modern Japan locate it in political discussion and thought not led by merchant burghers, but constituted from a rather wider pool, including all social groups in Japanese society, led particularly by lower class samurai and higher class peasants.[5]This difference to the typical class contouring of European historiography resonates with the depiction of class roles in Hayami’s theory of “industrious revolution”, in that both sets of Japanese historical theory demote the merchant middle-class (bourgeoise) from their positions in European historiography as drivers of historical change, replacing them with broader class constellations (in the case of Hayami’s theory, led by the upper peasantry, in the case of Mitani and Watanabe’s, the lower orders of the samurai caste). The history of the public sphere in early modern Japan thus serves to challenge some of the pseudo-universalist ideas of bourgeoise superiority so central to European historiography and modern social theory. This chapter’s linkage of ideas of publicness to ideas of expectation seeks to add another interpretive layer to analyses of the role of agency and imagination in the development of these kinds of alternative visions of global early modern society.

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This chapter is divided into five sections. Section One, “Civil Rule in a Military State”, describes the mature apparatus of the Tokugawa state, analyses its standardization across the country, outlines the ostensibly determining roles of class, status and gender in the apparatus, but also demonstrates how contested the apparatus was, even in the early stages of the shogunate. 

Section Two, “Confucian Debate and ‘Political Economy’”, analyses the rise to prominence of Confucian discursive forms in political debate, the significance of Confucian political thinking being based outside the state, and the massive change to the horizon of political expectation brought about by the general acceptance of the Confucian ideal of “political economy”, an ideal which held the state responsible for general social welfare. 

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Section Three, “Debating Reform”, examines the overt attempts to “reform” the Tokugawa political economy, analysing the economic factors behind them, their relations to Confucian political economic theorization, and to increasingly public instances of debate and performance which also employed political thought to comment on governance in the early 1700s. It shows the influence of private sphere Confucian political thinking on the central state’s reform policies, but also on the forms and arguments of political resistance to those reforms, forms of resistance which found expression not only in policy writings, but also in directly connected lewd populist publications, drunken street festivals and graffitti. 

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Section Four, “Debating Capital”, examines various forms of political responses, at both state and street level, to the increasing power of mercantile capital, particularly in the late 1700s. It discusses the concrete interactions between urban commoner street politics (riots) and state policy at this time. It also analyses the way the street interacted with other, non-state, yet organized forms of political expression. It demonstrates that political analyses emanating from private academies and schools in the urban areas outside Edo both influenced, and later in turn reacted to, the agenda of the urban rioters who affected both regime and policy change in the late 1700s.

Section Five, “State Building and the Institutionalization of Debate”, analyses the growing integration of merchant capital, popular sentiment and particularly the private academy intellectual specialists into state institutions as part of the creation of a state-led information order in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It concentrates particularly on the significance of the state’s integration and propagation of scholarly communicative methodologies which had earlier been employed by the politically influential private academies. It analyses the role of these methodologies in facilitating broader public debate on issues of governance, firstly outside the government, and then within it.

[1]Fujii Jōji, Totman etc

[2]Watanabe Hiroshi, Matsuda Kōichirō, Kurozumi Makoto, Maeda Tsutomu

[3]Kosseleck, Futures Past, 257-269

[4]Mitani, Maeda

[5]Habermas, Watanabe Hiroshi