Imagining Harmony: Poetry, Empathy, and Community in Mid-Tokugawa Confucianism and Nativism (review)

What is one to do with the Shi jing, or Book of Odes, a Confucian Classic so unlike the others, which deal with history, ritual, and divination? Because tradition followed the Han-dynasty Grand Historian Sima Qian in attributing the compilation and editing of this anthology of verse to Confucius, the work has always been impossible to ignore. But the difficulty for Japanese Confucians of past eras, much as for those of us today who teach undergraduates about "Confucianism," was how to account for the canonical status of this work when it so obviously lacks any consistent didactic message, and this despite the best efforts of Confucians to discover one.

Prior to the Tokugawa period, the easy way around this problem in Japan was to ignore it, since didactic literary criticism was amply addressed by the moralistic approach of "praising the good and castigating the evil" (kanzen chōaku) in literary and poetic compositions. But this approach became less tenable during the seventeenth century, when intellectual circles gravitated toward the new Confucian teachings from China and Korea, and as scholarly inquiry in general attained greater levels of pluralism and diversity. Yamazaki Ansai (1619-1682), the most influential Japanese interpreter of the orthodox Confucian teachings of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), went so far as to recommend that his students ignore the Shi jing and instead focus on the study of classical historical documents and ritual conduct. Ironically, this is not unlike how the work gets treated today in many introductory classroom discussions of Confucianism.

Most Tokugawa Confucians instead chose to affirm poetry's, and hence the Shi jing's, importance as one of the hallmarks of the gentleman, while debating just what made poetry so special. At one end of the spectrum was the traditional proposition that poetry had a civilizing ameliorative effect on the rough edges of the human personality, while the other and more avant-garde argument held that poetry was fundamentally to be appreciated as one of life's finer joys. Furthermore, one's attitude toward poetry tended to align with one's attitude toward the emotions, and specifically whether one thought of them as inherently problematic and hence in conflict with an originally good disposition, or as part of that disposition and hence themselves inherently good. This in turn begged the question of whether it is more properly stoic not to express emotion at all, or to express emotion appropriately in both degree and kind? The classic statements in favor of poetry found in the prefaces to both the Shi jing and Kokinshū spoke of the art's distinctive capacity to convey emotion, implying that its capacity as an emotional medium had to be good for Confucian and nativist alike, but is poetry virtuous because it ventilates potentially disruptive emotions and thereby smoothes life's rough edges, or because the expression of emotion is appropriate irrespective of its consequences?

There is in such questions considerable room for interpretation, and in a sense this is precisely the subject of Peter Flueckiger's exceptionally fine study of the attitudes toward verse of some of the eighteenth century's most important thinkers in Japan, including the Confucians Ogyū Sorai, Hattori Nankaku, and Dazai Shundai and the nativists Kada Arimaro, Kamo no Mabuchi, and Motoori Norinaga. Flueckiger's intention is to show how these writers, "by describing poetry as a vehicle for emotional expression and a source of linguistic and cultural knowledge, integrated poetry into their visions of political community" (p. 3). His book is well written and subtly argued, and though I shall have a few nits to pick here and there, Flueckiger is to be commended for elevating the study of this aspect of the cultural and intellectual history of the eighteenth century to an altogether new level.

Flueckiger regards the diversity of mid-Tokugawa theories of poetry as one product of a discourse on "the role of culture as a unifying force," and in this...