Toju Nakae in Iyo-Ozu｜The Virtue of the Sage of Omi, Who Taught for the Sake of a Single Person

This time, in Ozu, Ehime Prefecture, I heard from people who study a certain great figure of history. That figure is the Confucian scholar Toju Nakae (中江藤樹).

Toju Nakae was born in Takashima in Omi Province, and since both his birthplace and the place where he died are in what is now Takashima, Shiga Prefecture, his virtue is still fervently praised there. Lately, I have personally come to suspect that the great figures of history told in ordinary textbooks are actually not so remarkable, and I often think that it is rather the people who are not talked about who show the way to a true way of living.

The reason is that living history is always the present, not a story of the past. History is what has lived uniquely in each place, has been told, has been handed down, and is still alive today. Of course, the teachings of those who came before sometimes fall into decline; rise and fall are the way of the world. But the virtue of a truly great person is always rediscovered at some point, reconsidered, restored, and eventually declines again, repeating this cycle.

This time, having heard many stories, I was once again won over by the virtue of Toju Nakae. But why Toju Nakae in Ozu, so far from Omi?

What lies behind this is his grandfather. His grandfather was born into a farming family, but in a turbulent age he became a samurai and distinguished himself as a spearman, and so he is said to have been an excellent warrior. His son, Yoshitsugu, however, though forced to live as a samurai, never took to the samurai life, and in the end became a farmer and lived modestly. To him was born his eldest son, Toju Nakae. In other words, Toju was not of samurai origin but of farming stock.

However, the grandfather, a retainer of Sadayasu Kato, worried that he had no heir, and asked to adopt Toju as his own son. Toju accordingly became his grandfather’s adopted son and went to the Yonago Domain, where his grandfather served. A year later, Sadayasu Kato was in turn transferred to Ozu in a change of fief, so Toju moved to Ozu along with his grandfather. He was just ten years old.

Behind this, it is thought, were the circumstances of the Kato family, whom his grandfather served. The Kato family had originally been on the Toyotomi side, but they bore a grudge because Sadayasu’s father, Mitsuyasu, had been poisoned by Mitsunari Ishida, the leading figure of the Western Army at the Battle of Sekigahara; Sadayasu, unwilling to fight under such a man, went over to the Eastern Army, a complicated history.

As a result, when Ieyasu Tokugawa won, the family was welcomed, but since the Kato were in the delicate position of being neither tozama (外様, “outside” lords) nor shinpan (親藩, collateral houses of the Tokugawa), it is said that they were sent off to remote places like Yonago and Ozu.

Partly because of the influence of his grandfather, who served a lord with these complicated circumstances, Toju ended up living in Ozu, and as a result spent there the whole of the impressionable years from the age of ten to twenty-seven. In other words, he has a bond with Ozu as the place where he spent the most active period of his life.

At the time, however, it was the very beginning of the Edo period. Samurai still lived in a world of force, and many rejected learning; it was an age in which those who devoted themselves to study were considerably despised as lacking the proper spirit of a samurai. The samurai of Ozu, where Toju lived, shared this temperament, but Toju devoted himself to learning nonetheless. The person who influenced him here was his grandfather.

Personally, I think his grandfather had an eye for the trend of the times. He himself had made his way with nothing but a sword and a spear, but he saw that from then on a samurai would not get by without learning. From childhood he had Toju learn to read and write and study the Teikin Orai (庭訓往来) and the Goseibai Shikimoku (貞永式目), which Toju mastered in no time. At eleven, he read the Confucian classic the Great Learning (大学) for the first time and was deeply moved, and from then on he kept reading it with his heart every night. His grandfather spared nothing to help Toju learn, even buying him books, which were still expensive at the time.

Because he could not find a suitable teacher in Ozu, he was almost entirely self-taught. He also did not tell his fellow samurai that he was studying, and kept learning in secret. As mentioned above, this was because it would have interfered with his work and relationships as a samurai. So late at night, under his futon, he kept up a life of reading twenty pages of the Great Learning and other texts every night before going to sleep. Since the technique of kundoku (訓読, reading Classical Chinese as Japanese) had not yet been established at the time, he is thought to have read the texts in the original, and his way of reading is thought to have been his own.

Because Toju repeated this life of quietly reading just twenty pages late at night and then going to sleep for many years, he was chronically short of sleep. Eventually, when both his grandfather and grandmother died, he inherited the headship of the family and began a life of service to the domain. By day he did his work as a samurai and kept up his daytime face, while late at night he devoted himself to learning.

What he valued most in all this was “filial piety” (孝), so central to Confucianism. Toju, who had revered filial piety since childhood, worried about his mother, left alone in Takashima after his father died, and asked many times for leave to return home. But at the time, a samurai’s job was to serve the lord of his domain, and naturally it was not his job to go home and serve his mother. Still, unable to bear it any longer, Toju finally deserted the domain.

Deserting one’s domain in the early Edo period was a different matter from deserting it toward the end of the shogunate; it was equal to a death sentence. In fact, after deserting, Toju feared that if he went straight to Takashima he would have to commit seppuku in front of his mother, and so he stayed at a friend’s house in Kyoto for about a month. He then informed the Ozu Domain of his whereabouts and awaited its decision. But no word came from the Ozu Domain. He returned to Takashima as he was, and for the rest of his life he lived with his mother while teaching the people of the area.

What is interesting is that young, ambitious men of the Ozu Domain began, one after another, to come to Toju to study. This was because the times had changed and the idea had spread that even samurai must have learning, and the young samurai of Ozu flocked to Omi in search of Toju Nakae.

In this way, more and more people gradually came to be won over by Toju, but what made me groan in admiration was not his method of learning but the way he taught.

Toju’s way of teaching was to do everything for the sake of a single person. He wrote books for a single person, wrote commentaries for a single person, taught single-mindedly for a single person, and wrote letters, and he kept generously providing the ground on which they could continue learning even after they had left. For a disciple who was studying medicine, since Toju’s uncle had been a town doctor in Kyoto, he studied and deciphered medical books himself and compiled a medical book for that disciple alone. And for disciples who had to return home for various reasons, he went on, day after day, explaining earnestly by letter whatever they did not understand.

On the journey back to his hometown, however, perhaps because the strain and stress he had borne until then took their toll, he developed asthma, and this ultimately became the cause of his death at only forty.

After that, Toju’s virtue came to be known as if shining with light. For despite much slander and contempt, a few people believed in Toju and showed their understanding of him.

In Ozu, one of the chief retainers of the time was on close terms with Toju’s grandfather, and it is said that because of this he may have interceded with the lord over matters such as Toju’s desertion, and he is thought to have arranged various conveniences when the disciples went off to study. This first current laid the groundwork that would later have a decisive influence on Ozu.

Later, after Toju had died, the situation changed completely in the time of the fifth lord of the domain, Yasuatsu Kato, in the first half of the eighteenth century. This lord, who loved learning, invited Shissai Miwa, then known as a scholar of Yangmingism, to the domain’s Edo residence to hear him lecture, was deeply moved, and asked him to come to Ozu. But since Shissai was already elderly, they agreed that he would send an outstanding person from among his disciples to the Ozu Domain. The person sent to Ozu in this way was a born-and-bred Edo man named Yukin Kawada (川田雄琴).

After moving to the Ozu Domain, Yukin Kawada, together with his son and grandson over three generations, contributed to the domain’s educational undertakings and other work, and he is the key figure who quietly spread Yangmingism in Ozu.

But one must be careful here. Toju Nakae himself was not a Yangmingist. Toju obtained the Complete Works of Wang Yangming (王陽明全書) only about three years before he died. It is true that he was deeply moved, but he actually used Wang Yangming’s famous phrase “the unity of knowing and acting” (知行合一) only once.

This is because he was keenly aware of the danger that if the unity of knowing and acting is taught to learners who do not yet understand it, it can become the motive for a radical activism that holds that one need only act. In fact, quite a few of those in Japan who advocated Yangmingism had this tendency, and it is undeniable that at the end of the shogunate, for example, it turned into a typically action-first, violent logic.

And so, in the quiet basin of Ozu, the virtue of a man named Toju Nakae shines quietly but deeply, and still supports the land from somewhere deep within.