Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confucian Victorian

Abstract

IN EARLY 1868, shortly after toppling the Tokugawa house, the leaders of the new Meiji government issued a proclamation known as the Charter Oath. The common people, no less than the civil and military officials, it declared, be allowed to pursue [their] own calling[s] so that there shall be no discontent.' This statement implied that the new government was dedicated to dismantling the social structure of the previous regime, a structure based largely on hereditary succession. That regime had been bolstered by legal restraints on social mobility and supported by ideologues who advised that, since wealth and honor were determined only by heaven, the individual ought not to seek to alter his status.2 Despite its implied commitment to reform, the new Meiji government maintained the restrictions on personal activities, especially as they applied to members of the samurai class, with little change. Samurai continued to receive their hereditary stipends and to move about, wearing the two swords that were the symbols of their membership in a hereditary ruling class. And, on all levels of society, the distribution of wealth and rank remained essentially what it had been during the last days of the Tokugawa house. In the face of this apparent continuity, there was one early indication that Meiji Japan would not simply be Tokugawa Japan with a new set of rulers. In early 1871, members of the samurai class,3 especially government officials and educators, were lining up-even camping out overnight-to buy copies of a work that attacked hereditary wealth and power from its very first line,