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

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Tokugawa intellectual history was the hot field of the moment as scholars such as Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, Herman Ooms, Victor Koschmann, and Naoki Sakai published important books that cast new light both on the cultural and political discourse of this era and on the relationship of Tokugawa thought to Japan’s modernity. Ordering this body of work was the critique of modernization theory, which had sought in the “early modern” period evidence of the origins of modern political consciousness. All of those who took up the study of Tokugawa thought engaged, directly or indirectly, with the work of Maruyama Masao, arguably the most important Japanese intellectual of the postwar era. Maruyama had famously argued that an incipient modern consciousness, the roots of which were apparent in the work of Ogyū Sorai, was cut short with the emergence of Motoori Norinaga’s nativism, with the result that Japan’s modernity was flawed and incomplete. By the end of the 1990s, however, the boom in Edo studies was over, so much so that when my own work on nativism (kokugaku) was published, in 2003, one reviewer took note of its “retro” sense of problem.¹

Peter Flueckiger’s Imagining Harmony: Poetry, Empathy, and Community in Mid-Tokugawa Confucianism and Nativism reminds us of the continuing significance of Tokugawa intellectual history and of the issues of sociality and subjectivity that had oriented the earlier wave of scholarship. Framed overtly as a critique of Maruyama’s work, it also adroitly navigates the extensive literature on Tokugawa thought that emerged in Maruyama’s wake, authored by both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars. The form of the work is conventional. It analyzes well-known texts by canonical figures: Sorai, his two disciples Hattori Nankaku and Dazai Shundai, Kamo no Mabuchi, and Motoori Norinaga. Flueckiger departs from the work of previous scholars and focuses on the discourse on poetry. He argues persuasively that poetics cannot be regarded as a peripheral concern within intellectual discourse at this time. Rather, he insists, poetry was the means by which Sorai and the others explored the interaction of cultural norms, social constraints, and individual emotions. His attention to poetic discourse allows Flueckiger to discern continuity where others have seen change: he argues that Confucianists and nativists alike viewed emotionality as a political issue that was implicated in the formation of cultural communities and the assimilation of individuals into ideological systems.

Flueckiger’s analysis of Sorai’s work is at the center of Imagining Harmony. In contrast to Maruyama, who characterized Sorai as liberating human interiority when he broke with Song Confucianism by asserting that ethical principles and social norms were human creations rather than the product of nature, Flueckiger portrays Sorai in far less heroic terms. Not only does he acknowledge Sorai’s “reactionary streak” and the “elements of authoritarianism” in his thought (pp. 76–77, passim); he also sees a far less decisive break with Song Confucianist views of human nature. According to Flueckiger’s rereading of Benmei, Sorai in fact argued that although social institutions and cultural norms were originally human creations, they subsequently acted on human beings to transform them from within, with the result that at some point they began to be experienced not as artificial impositions from above, but as genuine and natural. At the same time, these institutions and norms could only become second nature because they recognized and responded to the aspects of human nature that were inborn and universal. Flueckiger terms this mutually constituting relationship a “feedback loop” (p. 5).

What then of poetry? Flueckiger looks carefully at Sorai’s poetry in Chinese, which he characterizes as taking a “patchwork” approach, in which whole lines were lifted directly from Chinese source poems (p. 100). Originality was not the point, nor was intelligibility for a wider audience unfamiliar with the Chinese poetic canon. Rather, writing poetry in Chinese...