[PDF] Visions Of Virtue In Tokugawa Japan eBook

Author : Marleen Kassel
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 49,16 MB
Release : 1996-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1438408420

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This book presents the world of Hirose Tansō, a late Tokugawa period (1603-1868) educator whose goal was to train men of talent in practical learning for the benefit of the country. Tansō founded a private academy called Kangien in Hita City of present-day Oita prefecture. Some 3,000 young men from 64 of the then total 68 provinces of Japan were educated at Kangien during Tansō's 50-year career as educator and administrator. Firm in his conviction that the problems he and others faced in contemporary society would be solved by setting right the moral priorities of the people, Tansō established an educational program at Kangien based on the Neo-Confucian philosophical construct of reverence for Heaven. Tansō's educational program taught students reverence for Heaven by engaging in moral self-cultivation in the practice of actions of day-to-day behavior. Students were required to adhere to stringent school regulations governing every aspect of daily life at the school and to engage in a systematic study of a Confucian educational curriculum with concomitant, rigorous testing exercises. Tansō believed that an educational program supported by the twin pillars of regulations and curriculum would, by its very nature, accomplish social reform. The microcosm of society Tansō created at Kangien provides a window through which the reader can glimpse the confluence of three important components of late Tokugawa society, institutional development; philosophical trends; and social structure. The values that Tansō stressed, study; hard work; frugality; and promotion based on merit, were, in many ways, responsible for the relative ease with which Japan emerged from hundreds of years of self-imposed isolation and became a powerful modern nation.

Author : John Allen Tucker
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 30,87 MB
Release : 2023-08-07
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9004644857

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This volume presents the first unabridged translation of Itô' Jinsai's (1627-1705) masterwork, the Gomô jigi (Philosophical Lexicography of the Analects and Mencius, 1705), into any western language. The extensively annotated translation opens with a brief textual study of the Gomô jigi and an intellectual biography of Jinsai. While highlighting the Neo-Confucian text, the author suggests that the Gomô jigi espouses a systematic philosophical worldview for chônin, or townspeople, living in the ancient imperial capital, Kyoto, even during an age of ascendant samurai power. The translation makes accessible to Western readers one of the earliest texts of Tokugawa philosophy. Those interested in Chinese and East Asian philosophy will find it enlightening since the topics that Jinsai addresses are also seminal ones in those fields.

Author : Ekiken Kaibara
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 43,31 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Conduct of life
ISBN : 9780231139229

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Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714) was a prominent Japanese Neo-Confucian scholar whose philosophical treatise, The Record of Great Doubts, is one of the central discourses in East Asia on the importance of qi, or the vital force that courses through all life. Available for the first time in English, this book emphasizes the role of the monism of qi in achieving a life of engagement. Ekken believes that moral self-cultivation must take place within the dynamic forces of nature and amid the rigorous demands of society and that the vitalism of qi provides the philosophical grounding for this vibrant interaction.

Author : Mary Elizabeth Berry
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 13,27 MB
Release : 2006-02-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520941465

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A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge. Japan in Print shows how, as investigators collected and disseminated richly diverse data, they came to presume in their audience a standard of cultural literacy that changed anonymous consumers into an "us" bound by common frames of reference. This shared space of knowledge made society visible to itself and in the process subverted notions of status hierarchy. Berry demonstrates that the new public texts projected a national collectivity characterized by universal access to markets, mobility, sociability, and self-fashioning.

Author : Federico Marcon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 46,76 MB
Release : 2015-07-16
Category : History
ISBN : 022625206X

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“Opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. . . . A must-read for historians of early modern science.” —New Books in East Asian Studies Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity—and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe’s but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation. The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era. “Marcon introduces to a Western readership for the first time the early history of natural history in Japan . . . Who those naturalists were, how they fitted into society, and what they accomplished, is Marcon’s beautifully told story.” —Archives of Natural History “A bold attempt to provincialize Eurocentric narratives of modernity’s relation to nature.” —Canadian Journal of History “An essential resource.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

Author : John Whitney Hall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 878 pages
File Size : 21,76 MB
Release : 1988
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521223553

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Volume 4 of The Cambridge History of Japan examines the turbulent period from 1550 to 1800.

Author : Brett L. Walker
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 22,55 MB
Release : 2015-02-26
Category : History
ISBN : 1107004187

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A comprehensive and engaging new history, charting Japan's development from its origins through to the present day.