Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) was a Japanese Confucian scholar influential in the Tokugawa period. His most influential work, Discourses on Government (Seidan), laid out a vision for reform of the government along Confucian principles. Sorai’s impetus for writing Discourses on Government was a growing sense of Japan’s moral degradation. According to Sorai, the natural hierarchy of Japanese society was being flipped on its head with the merchant class getting richer than the Samurai and Daimyo.[1] Sorai observed that the Daimyo had become moral debased, corrupted by luxury and decadence. The Daimyo had become sedentary in Edo and started to expect the state to pay for their decadent lifestyles. Sorai observed that this occurred because there were not institutions (seido) regarding clothes, housing and food, so there was no established way to suppress luxury.[2] The situation was doubly tragic according to Sorai since the lifestyle of the Daimyo became a financial burden for the Shogunate and, by becoming accustomed to luxury, the morally debased Daimyo were not less efficient rulers of their territories. In fact, Sorai recommended that people from the lower classes, who had endured many hardships should regularly be rotated into bureaucratic roles. He wrote “Why is that during a period of prolonged peace, men of ability are found only in the lower classes, while men of the upper class grow increasingly stupid? As far as I can see, men’s abilities are developed only through hardship and tribulation.”[3] In my opinion there is a clear aspect to which Sorai’s language is gendered. With the trend of Daimyo marrying women from the Kyoto court nobility, they had adopted feminine luxury, and had become emasculated by the now more economically successful merchants. I’ve noticed that there is a recurring motif not just in the history of the Sino sphere, but world history, that of the upper/ruling class becoming gradually, over generations, accustomed to foreign luxuries, becoming morally/sexually debased as a result, and then the state, which was founded on according to high moral principles, inevitably collapses. This motif most strikingly appears in explanations for the collapse of the Roman Empire, which was founded on such pure virtues like the rule of law and equality between citizens. Once the empire stopped expanding, military and political rules became sedentary accustomed to Persian luxury goods and lost their civic and military virtue. In Chinese dynastic history a recurring motif is that of the early rulers of a dynasty winning the mandate of heaven due to their pure morals and sagely ways. However, over generations, the emperors become sedentary, become sexually deviant, and lose the mandate of heaven because of their lax morals. Until modern Western enlightenment political theory, I believe it was taken for granted by most that the state was at its core a moral entity, and the health of the state was a matter of adhering to rule that was morally virtuous (however defined). I believe Sorai wrote the Discourses on Government with a sense of urgency for this reason, that he did not want to he the Tokugawa Shogunate descend into unrecoverable moral chaos and collapse.
[1] Lidin O.G. (2014) Ogyū Sorai: Confucian Conservative Reformer: From Journey to Kai to Discourse on Government. In: Huang C., Tucker J. (eds) Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht p.178
[2] Ibid. p.175
[3] Tiedemann, Arthur. Sources of Japanese Tradition : 1600 to 2000, edited by Wm. Theodore De Bary, et al., Columbia University Press, 2005. p.236