135“Other Visions of Virtue” in Ordinary Economies
in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750 1950
Tetsuo NAJITA*

While studying the Osaka merchant academy, the Kaitokudō, I became
keenly aware of the considerable commercial activity and discourse among
commoners outside the academy during the Tokugawa period, including
writing and publishing in the surrounding environment. The teachers at the
Kaitokudō had high scholarly ambitions and addressed their thinking to other
scholars at the more prestigious academies of the time. Mainly to overcome
the prejudicial view often voiced among competing schools that denigrated
their teachings as merely “Osaka-style merchant scholarship” (Ōsakaryūchōnin gakumon), they answered their critics by writing and publishing at alevel of excellence that forced scholars elsewhere, especially in Edo (presentday Tokyo), to take note.
Accordingly, I decided to extend the scope of my book Visions of Virtue
in Tokugawa Japan (1987) to include a history of that commoner thinking
about the political economy taking place outside the academy. I should makeclear that my objective of identifying certain themes in the Kaitokudō thatmight shape a history of ordinary economies should not be seen as an intent
to redefine Tokugawa Confucianism as an ideology, which the modern state
mobilized to reinforce the ethics of loyalty, diligence, and respect for hierarchy. As taught at the Kaitokudō, the study of “virtue”—toku, as indicated in
the academy’s name-included epistemological approaches to complex naturaland social phenomena. I understand these approaches to knowledge as
broadly comparative and universal rather than as confined by ideologicalform or by historical boundaries such as “traditional” and “modern.”
My decision, however, turned out to be a prodigious task that could not
be completed in just one study. I therefore have concentrated in this book on
the commoners’ thinking about commerce, their writing about it for other* Tetsuo Najita is Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus ofHistory and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in the department of History,
the University of Chicago

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commoners rather than for scholars, and their strategies for meeting emergencies and reconstructing villages and, indeed, for entering a variety of enterprises, all with an ethical understanding of virtue. Several themes shaped mycuriosity as I stepped outside the walls of the merchant academy, which arerevealed in a variety of ways in the narrative. Although it is unrealistic to
expect exact correlations, these subjects helped me decide to focus on certain
topics that may seem to be an arbitrary selection.
One of these themes is the relationship between economics and morality.
This was a central emphasis in the inaugural lecture given in 1727 at the
Kaitokudō by Miyake Sekian (1665 1730). Speaking to Osaka’s leading
merchant houses, Sekian insisted that morality and economics were inseparable (a premise that remained basic to all instruction at the academy), and heanchored his propositions to two fundamental Confucian texts, the Analects
and the Mencius.
Referring to ideas familiar to his audience, Sekian discussed the distinction between what scholars studied and what they learned that actuallyaffected what they did. Scholars studied valuable teachings outside the self,such as the moral knowledge found in the classics, and they practiced them
regularly in their everyday lives. In Sekian’s words, “‘To study’ means
following examples or received knowledge from without. ‘To learn’ means
doing things on one’s own and becoming familiar with them. The word
‘regularly’ means doing things steadily and not abandoning them.” In otherwords, merchants could study at the academy and acquire valuable moral
knowledge. But this would mean little unless the knowledge was regularly
and voluntarily put into practice. Through practice, merchants would realize
their true moral nature and their humanity, as the sages had. According to
Sekian, “the sages were human,” and “we here now also are human.”
Sekian strengthened his presentation with an important insight from
Mencius: All humans possess the intellectual capacity to analyze and distinguish external events and to make decisions about them (wakimaeru).
Humans also have an innate sense of the inner moral human nature in others(mono no aware, or jin). Sekian concluded that humans should respect these
universal qualities in others and that therefore economic competition should
not mean annihilating their opponents, as birds and beasts do. Instead,competition should be based on accuracy and fairness and not be aimed atdomination, Sekian drew on Mencius’s advice to the warring kings of ancient
times that “profit” and “advantage” (ri) should not mean engaging in wars to
end all wars and thus to build a military regime. The metaphoric lesson to
Osaka merchants was clear: economic competition must be accurate and fairand be based on respect for others’ humanity and not on a selfish desire for“Other Visions of Virtue” in Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750 1950 137

aggrandizement. Addressing the merchant leaders in the audience, Sekian
concluded: “The spirit of humaneness and rightness must be made to prevailover the desire of selfishness. This desire is pervasive in the social world. It
is manifested even in small acts at the individual level. Although the acts
appear the same as when emanating from one’s rightness, subtle shifts in
attitude take place in which those acts are pursuits of one’s willfulness. Deep
reflection is required here.” As this lesson came to be articulated at theacademy, profit must never be arbitrary and one-sided but must be righteous(ri wa gi nari). Objectivity and precision without recognition of the moral
worth or humaneness of others would not be condoned. In short, economics,
however precise and accurate, must never be independent of morality.1
Another theme that remained in my perspective was the epistemologicalpremise that nature must serve as the first principle of all knowledge, towhich Goi Ranju (1697 1762) held firmly. That is, the natural universe isabsolute and infinite, with neither a beginning nor an ending. Because thisabsolute principle must serve as the basis of objective knowledge, geographies and cultural communities acquire meaning in relation to it. Being
absolute and infinite, however, nature is never totally knowable, and humanknowledge also is always limited and relative. Some people know more, andothers, less. Humans in the present know more than the ancient sages did,and people in the future will know things not known in the present.
Rendering human history and hence human knowledge as “relative” serves asa pedagogical device to emphasize human potential and intellectual agency.
Students in the present should be encouraged to acquire as much knowledge
as possible and to act accordingly. It was this action ethic (jissen rinri) thatmeshed with the work of merchants. Jissen rinri also served as the empowering basis for merchant intellectuals like Yamagata Bantō (1748 1821) tostudy astronomy and offer far-reaching hypotheses about geography, world
cultures, and the state of political economy.
Known among Osaka citizens as the merchant Masuya Kouemon,
Yamagata Bantō attended to details that some scholars would have considered
too trivial for human attention. Although probably apocryphal, the story wasoften told that when the powerful daimyo Date of Sendai Province asked
Bantō how he would like to be compensated for his financial services (hemanaged the province’s finances), Bantō replied he would accept as payment
the small amount of rice that was spilled at check stations en route to Edo
1 My translation of Miyake Sekian’s lecture Ron-Mō shusho kōgi is in Theodore W.
deBary et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001 5), 2: 271 81, esp. 272, 274, 279; see also my Visions of Virtue in
Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987; repr., Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 86 94.

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(this spilled rice was called sashigome). Date no doubt felt fortunate that thefee was such a pittance, but Bantō is said to have turned this spilled rice intoa handsome profit in the Edo market. Indeed, his point was that althoughseemingly small, the margin of profit in any long-term transaction was also
likely to be large in the aggregate. This view did not seem to concern thedaimyo but caught the unerring attention of Kaiho Seiryō (1755 1817, on
whose opinion we will draw at various places in our narrative), who recorded
this episode in his comments on Yamagata Bantō.2
Bantō took the nature-as-first-principle theory of knowledge to its fullest
extent, and it also was part of the adventurous intellectual spirit that permeated a good part of Osaka culture. Again, we do not expect to find a treatise
as sophisticated as Bantō’s In Place of Dreams (Yume no shiro) to satisfy ahistorian’s curiosity. But the question of how commoners used nature as aprinciple of knowledge and action piqued my curiosity and therefore also
influenced my choice of readings.
Bantō’s focus on the sun as the source of light and energy informing all
physical reality on earth led him to understand human actions as also being
relative; that is, some actions were better than others, and nothing was too
trivial for unprejudiced attention. As the source of all light and energy, theuniversal sun relativizes everything on earth, and so it also relativizes
humans’ capacity to know and see in large and small things significances that
inform what action they should take. Nothing is too trivial to be queried andassessed. This realization raises broader questions, especially in the economic
sense: How do ordinary people use what they know? What sort of epistemological role might nature have played in defining action initiatives? As I will
suggest in this book, the relationship was important, and ordinary merchants
wrote about it in everyday language to encourage individual initiatives. Iteven played an important part in the Hōtoku movement to reconstruct
villages.
Finally, in what turned out to be a first tangible stepping-stone, I was
struck by the egalitarian and cooperative ethic that prevailed as an ideology
at the Kaitokudō. Although the teachers at the Kaitokudō were speaking to thescholarly and intellectual communities, they also interacted with the cultural
practices of the time. Thus the academy was organized according to theegalitarian, nonhierarchical principle of the cooperative or confraternity (kō or
kōsha). This ideology was entwined with a widely held supposition regarding
how humans seeking to realize a mutual goal should organize themselves.
2 Kaiho Seiryō’s Masuko dan is in vol. 27 of Nihon keizai taiten, ed. Takimoto Seiichi(Tokyo: Meiji bunken, 1969), 355 88. See also Najita, Visions of Virtue, 222 27,
248 84.

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Here again, the teachers’ emphasis was that the interaction among moral
beings ultimately was equal in some basic sense. This idea was captured in
the few basic guidelines of the academy in the 1750s: “Students will interact
with one another as colleagues without regard to high and low or rich andpoor.” The organizing principle of such students in the academy was the kō or
kōsha, a horizontal principle in which all those with the common purpose of
seeking ethical and moral knowledge would be considered “comrades andcolleagues” (dōshi dōhai). Some students obviously would be more advanced
than others in their studies. But the basic humanity, or virtue (toku), innate ineach would prevail as the basis of colleagueship, compared with distinctions
between those who were advanced and those less so and also between
samurai and merchants. For example, samurai were expected to relinquish
their swords upon entering the academy and would not receive preferential
treatment in seating in lecture rooms.3
This ethic of a mutually shared purpose serving as a unifying ideal alerted
me to the broader social phenomenon of the cooperative known as the kō, awidespread organizing form among commoners for mutual aid and support. A
clue to such a phenomenon turned out to be closer than I had expected: thestone monument marking the site of the Kaitokudō itself. In my study of the
Kaitokudō, I noted that people were constantly walking to and from on the
sidewalk, barely noticing the stone marker. This included me as well, for
despite my many trips there, I had not noted that the marker was lodged in
the wall of the Japan Life Insurance Company, Nihon sōgo hoken kabushiki
kaisha or, in short, Nissei, or Japan Life, one of the largest companies of its
kind in Japan.
In my account of the Kaitokudō, I began at the monument marking its
former location and referred to the place where that monument is implanted
as an “imposing modern building” in the East District, or Higashi-ku, in thecenter of downtown Osaka. I reported that “a small, odd-shaped, stone slab
inscribed with archaic Chinese ideographs marks the site where the Osaka
Merchant Academy once stood.” It did not signify much to me then that the“imposing modern building,” to which in the past I had given only passing
glances and viewed as only one of many modern constructs, was related to
my current subject. But this was a company that traced its origin to the
Tokugawa ethical idea of mutual trust and aid (sōgo fujo), which in fact wasincorporated in its title. It was from here that I began what turned into a longand circuitous journey into the field of ordinary economies.
Tracing the origins of Japan Life required a visit to the regional township
3 Nakai Chikuzan’s brief “Items of Understanding” is in deBary et al., Sources ofJapanese Tradition, 2: 280; also see Najita, Visions of Virtue, 154 55.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 7 2016of Ōmi, north of Kyoto. In the Tokugawa (Edo) period (1600 1867), Ōmi
was a well-known and thriving merchant town. Indeed, the main street is still
marked with a stone pillar reading “Chōsen dōri” (Korean avenue), indicating, without prejudice, the stopover place for envoys and their entourages
from Korea on their way east to Edo to pay their respects to the Tokugawa
regime. Located along Lake Biwa in today’s Shiga Prefecture, this was thehome base of the “Ōmi, merchants” (Ōmi, shōnin) who gained widespreadfame during the Tokugawa era for their brisk trade in carefully selected goods
from different regions. These merchants served as a major mediating vehicle
for interregional trade, moving certain high-quality products from one part ofthe country to another and thus contributing to the distribution or circulationof “taste” throughout the country. Examples of such goods are indigo-dyed
fabrics from Kyushu, silks from Kyoto, tea from Shizuoka, and the dried kelp
(konbu) from Hokkaido that became the seasoning base of west-central
cuisine. Traversing a variety of coastal and overland routes, the Ōmimerchants gained great stature as diligent, wealth-creating traders who facilitated the exchange across domainal boundaries. Unlike the large merchanthouses in Osaka, the Ōmi merchants traded over long interregional distances,
uninhibited by physical or political boundaries. It is not surprising, therefore,that both modern-day trading companies and numerous other enterprises trace
their genealogies to this merchant community.4
The Ōmi merchant who first proposed the idea of a life insurance company
was Hirose Sukesaburō (1844 1913). The story often told about him is of ayoungster who took long treks during the turbulent days of the late Tokugawa
period to purchase and trade quality goods between one region and another.
He and other members of his house studied at the school founded by
Minakawa Kien (1734 1807), a distinguished Confucian scholar in Kyoto
who taught primarily empirical textual studies and also the ideals of “saving
the people,” a concept also emphasized at the Kaitokudō and the school of
Dutch Learning, the Tekijuku, in Osaka. According to this concept, the main
justification for acquiring knowledge must be that it would contribute toalleviating people’s suffering. Along with this ethic, Hirose absorbed another,that doing good for others was a “mutual” or cooperative process and that
therefore the action ethic of “mutual aid” or “assistance” was crucial.
Because this ethic of saving others was grounded in the idea of responding tocrises or emergency situations, it was not so much one person acting alone
4 Ogura Eiichirō, Ōmi shōnin no keifu (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1980); andWatanabe Morimichi, Ōmi shōnin (Tokyo: Kyōikusha, 1980). The Ōmi merchants
deserve a separate study yet to be undertaken, as their history includes such modern
companies as Marubeni, C. Itoh, and Seibu.

“Other Visions of Virtue” in Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750 1950 141

but many individuals contributing in some kind of organized way.
Still in his mid-twenties at the time of the upheavals of the 1860s that
led to the revolutionary Meiji ishin, Hirose was attracted to the practice of
mutual insurance as organized by the impressive Taga Shrine (Taga taisha),located nearby.5 A major site for pilgrimages during the Tokugawa period, theTaga Shrine had established a “mutual insurance” contract cooperative, theTaga kyōkai kōsha kiyaku, or simply the Taga kō. The purpose of this cooperative was to meet the emergency health needs of the pilgrims visiting a
network of related shrines, and it had a membership of several tens of thousands. Pilgrims making long journeys to Taga were assured of aid in case of
personal emergencies, and the insurance fund, drawn from contributions
throughout the country, carne to serve a major insurance need among theTaga communities. The special fund was explicitly set aside so that membersof the Taga society might “save and assist one another” in times of emergency (tagai ni hinkon o aitasuku beshi).6
5 Throughout this narrative I have used the term ishin rather than “Restoration” whenreferring to the revolutionary events of 1868. The ishin (literally, “the new”) marks
the beginning of the modern era and is a term used universally in Japanese historiography. Although it is not certain exactly when “Restoration” became the acceptedtranslation of the Meiji ishin, Ernest Satow (1843 1929), secretary to the British
legation in the 1860s and ambassador to Japan in the mid 1890s, offered an
important insight: “Restoration” was the term favored by the men who had gained
power following the civil wars leading to the Meiji ishin. But Satow and otherobservers of the actual events of the day referred to the ishin as a revolution, neveras a restoration. In a letter dated April 15, 1895, Satow commented to his friend andAsian specialist in London, F. V. Dickens:
On another point touched on in your letter, whether the events of 1868
constitute a Restoration or a Revolution, I am inclined to agree with your viewthat it is the latter that is most characteristic of the period, the other was what
the leading men of the time preferred to use as their watchword. But when you
think of the transfer of power from one class to another below it, and of
property also, it is difficult to say that there was not a revolution. Who are theleading men now? They were simple ordinary samurai, without rank or income.
However, I dare say you will agree with me that not much importance is to be
attached to a name. Only this is certain, that to the lips of those of us who
were eyewitnesses of what went on, the word “revolution” came spontaneously, never the other, till it was adopted out of courtesy to the Japanese, in thesame way as Tokyo [Eastern Capital] has been substituted for Yedo andEmperor for Mikado in European mouths, because the Japanese liked that
better. (Satow Papers, 30/33/11/6, Public Record Office, London, courtesy of
Hagihara Nobutoshi, author of Tōi gake, Arunesto Satow nikki shō,14 vols.
[Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1980 2001])
Andrew Gordon is an exception among Western historians in referring to the Meiji
ishin as the Meiji Revolution. See his A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa
to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
6 Shashi hensan, Nissei 100 nenshi (Osaka: Nihon seimei hoken sōgo kaisha, 1987),

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As Hirose Sukesaburō’s grandson Gen recalled:
According to the history of Japan Life, the Taga Shrine that worshipped
the kami of long life housed from ancient times a prayer group offaithful believers called the “Taga cooperative.”... In the early Meiji era[1868 1911], the founder of my company, Hirose Sukesaburō, fixed hiseyes on this mutual trust organization and, relying on the “Taga Society”
as the basis, set forth to establish an enterprise called the “Taga Life
Insurance Company.”
For various reasons the “Taga Life” did not materialize. But soon
thereafter, he used that very same project to establish a life insurancecompany for the Japanese people as a whole. This is today’s Japan Life.
In this way, from its beginning, our company and O-Taga-san wereclosely bonded together. We have kept our faith in O-Taga-san with great
devotion over the generations.7
In the early 1870s Hirose proposed using Taga’s mutual fund to establish theTaga Life Insurance Company (Taga seimei). Although the shrine’s leaders
initially received the proposal sympathetically, they eventually turned it downbecause they believed the Taga fund should be reserved for use within theshrine system. Hirose, however, had in mind a much more broadly conceived
insurance program, one that contained the ideal of “saving the people” as awhole, a goal that went well beyond the purposes set forth in the contract of
the shrine’s fund.
Leaving his established vocation as an itinerant Ōmi trader, Hirose inspiredby Taga’s mutual insurance, went on to organize dozens of local cooperatives
with credit funds and to establish a life insurance company in Osaka, the citythat for merchants like himself was still the merchant capital or, more derisively, the “kitchen” of the country. The life insurance company was formally
named Japan Life in 1896, while retaining, as noted earlier, the Tokugawa
ethical ideal of mutual aid.8
The story of Hirose Sukesaburō is integral to the transformational historyof the Meiji ishin that provided the conditions of revolutionary change.
Although not directly involved in the violent contests and civil wars of the
32 34.
7 Taga shinkō hensan iinkai, Taga shinkō (Taga machi: Taga taisha shamusho, 1986),
149.
8 Shashi hensan, Nissei 100 nenshi, 32 34. See also Morita Tsunemichi et al., eds.,
Hirose Suketarō ō (Osaka: Josui ō Eibōkai, 1940), 18 24; Nihon seimei hoken sōgokaisha, ed., Nihon seimei 90 nenshi (Osaka: Nihon seimei hoken sogō kaisha, 1980),
10 13.

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ishin, individuals like Hirose responded by organizing local resources to savethe nation. Hirose’s proposal to form a life insurance company for the country
as a whole, as well as his projects to establish a railroad line and a middle
school for girls, are modern ideas and thus part of modern history. But theimpulse “to save the people” based on local cooperative practice was anextension of Tokugawa ethics that commoners like Hirose had internalized aspart of their education and upbringing. The fact that the organizational
consciousness present in that ethic was articulated in the form of a mutual aid
cooperative, the kō, is well worth noting, as variations of this phenomenon
were widespread and will be a continuing theme in this book.
My return from Ōmi and Taga to Japan Life in Osaka gave me muchcause for reflection. That “imposing modern building” to which I had often
walked on the central Midōsuji Boulevard now represented something quite
different as other features of this history gained prominence. Through theintercession of Kōnoike―the largest financial house in Osaka in the
Tokugawa and modern eras and the leading philanthropic supporter of the
Kaitokudō―Hirose and his colleagues purchased the area where the merchantacademy had stood to build the life insurance company. The juxtaposition of
the Kaitokudō and Japan Life, and the stone marker lodged in the side of themodern Japan Life building, made eminent phenomenological sense to me ina way that it had not in my many previous visits. The confluence of theTokugawa merchant ethic and Japan Life and its linkage to the idea ofmutual aid at the Taga Shrine made me realize that intellectual history isembedded in a physical and material reality. Hence, by only minimal extension, other specific items located nearby became part of this intellectual
reality.
Only a modern city block away from the site of the Kaitokudō Japan Lifeis the elementary school that “loves the light of day,” Aijitsu shōgakkō. It was
founded by the House of Masuya that Yamagata Bantō had served. Bantō’s
impressive personal library is housed in that school, reminding us of thescope of knowledge that informs his work In Place of Dreams (Yume no
shiro). His emphasis on the sun as the source of universal nature called onhumans to discard their superstitions and the expectation of divine interventions and to leave behind the dreams of the night and embrace each day when
the human mind could be in accord with the reason of nature. The school isa restatement of Bantō’s celebration of natural light and reason, and it also
reflects the enlightenment movement, led by Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834 1901)
in the early Meiji era, that sought to end centuries of feudal darkness.
Equally close to the site of the Kaitokudō is the Tekijuku where Fukuzawa
and some six hundred others studied the Dutch language under Ogata Kōan

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(1810 63) in the 1840s and 1850s in order to become physicians and “tosave the people.” A return visit to the Tekijuku under scored for me theimportance of Kōan’s teaching that “precision,” the science of medical practice ( jutsu), must always be combined with moral purpose, the compassion tosave other humans ( jin). Reading and translating Western works on medicine
was part of the physicians’ training, and Kōan taught Dutch within theframework of this methodological precision. The constant goal was to extend
compassion in times of illness. Kōan worked hard to dispense smallpox
vaccinations and desperately fought the spread of cholera. His teaching thatthe exercise of reason and precision must have a moral purpose closely parallels the Kaitokudō position that economic accuracy or “method” must never
be devoid of moral content. In the ethical guidelines he posted for his
students, Kōan wrote that true “profit” derived from the moral purpose that
informed the physician’s scientific skills: “When encountering a patient, see
only the patient. See not high or low, poor or wealthy. Consider the gain to
yourself in comparing the tears of gratitude in the eyes of the poor with thehandful of gold given by the wealthy…. Reflect on the lack of wealth of thepatient. When seeking to extend life, if the capital that ties that life together
is taken away, what sort of profit will there be? Weigh this thoughtfully intreating the poor.”
To Kōan, therefore, the physician must regard method and moral purpose,or jinjutsu, as indivisible. Concerning his successful effort with twocolleagues to distribute the new method of smallpox vaccination, he noted:“From the beginning, the three of us…. agreed to a pledge. This project
would have compassionate healing as its sole purpose. The plan was tospread the new method of vaccination throughout society. Thus, no matter
how much money we received in gratitude, we would not take any of it for
personal profit, nor would we accept it as payment for compassionate treatment. That was the first principle we agreed on.” The phrase “a physician
practices compassionate healing” (i wa jinjutsu nari) was a basic value toevery physician in Tokugawa times, regardless of whether his specialization
was Asian or Western medicine.9
The inherent relationship between precise method and moral purpose that
we find in the teachings of Miyake Sekian and his successors Nakai
Chikuzan (1730 1804) and Nakai Riken (1732 1817) at the Kaitokudō wereclearly in accord with Ogata Kōan and his ethical instruction to students at
9 See my essay “Ambiguous Encounters: Ogata Kōan and International Studies in Late
Tokugawa Osaka,” in Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern Japan, ed.
James L. McClain and Osamu Wakita (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999),
212 42, esp. 231, 240.

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his Tekijuku. We find this relationship, too, in Hirose Sukesaburō’s perceptionthat the organizing method of the Taga kō might serve as the basis for amutual insurance program to save the people from unforeseen emergencies.
All these ideas belong to a common Tokugawa intellectual culture skepticalof objective knowledge that lacked some moral moorings to hedge theexcesses of scholarly arrogance. This skepticism was criticized and discredited by advocates of modern reason and progress as being “premodern,” asbelonging to the world that had failed and should thus be abandoned.
Accordingly, neither the Kaitokudō nor the Tekijuku survived the Meiji ishinof 1868. They are remembered only in museums as part of a world that has
been lost. Hirose’s venture, however, turned into a modern life insurancecompany, whose links to this intellectual culture are barely visible. Perhaps
with scrutiny informed by historical memory, the intellectual linkages
between the stone monument marking the site of the Kaitokudō, Ogata
Kōan’s Tekijuku, and Yamagata Bantō’s library in the Aijitsu elementary
school can be held together by the image of the modern insurance building
marked “Japan Life.”
The contrasting images often presented of the modern with the pre-modern―even those as dramatic as a modern insurance company and a Tokugawakō―are misleading because they conceal or suppress a certain kind of history
that individuals and institutions shared. Concrete physical evidence located at
the base of a modern building reveals in a sedimented way how fragmentswith no apparent coherence with one another are actually interrelated events.
Historians also tend to forget that Fukuzawa Yukichi, the proponent of individualistic modernity who rejected the burdens of tradition and favoredmodern commerce, was a contemporary of Hirose and, as a student of Ogata
Kōan, walked the same grounds in Osaka. Fukuzawa went to Tokyo to leadthe enlightenment movement and espouse the virtues of individualism andcommerce at his academy, Keio. Hirose, traveling from Ōmi to Osaka,brought with him the virtue of cooperative practice to establish a modern
insurance corporation. In retrospect, both Fukuzawa and Hirose were productsof, and participants in, the Meiji ishin, each taking bold initiatives undertrying circumstances: Hirose, toward an insurance company grounded in
Tokugawa values basic to the new nation, and Fukuzawa, turning from thetraditional cooperative to the new ideology of the individual in the modernera.
It is within this understanding that we find the young Fukuzawa encountering the world of cooperative mutual aid. In his autobiography, Fukuzawa
recalled his family’s economic difficulties following his father’s untimely
death. We learn that with the help of neighbors, his mother established an

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emergency mutual assistance kō, known as Fukuzawa’s tanomoshi, to maintainthe household’s emergency needs. Fukuzawa wrote:
When we moved to Nakatsu han after my father’s death, my motherneeded money to have repairs made on the family house, and she wasobliged to take the advice of friends to make use of what was known asa tanomoshi kō.
A tanomoshi kō is a kind of cooperative loan fund in which a numberof persons agree to deposit a small sum of two shu each for the benefitof other members, who are chosen by lottery until the round has been
completed.10
Thirteen years later, Fukuzawa’s mother instructed her son to repay her
debt to one of the participants, Ōsakaya Gorōbei, an Osaka merchant.
Gorōbei had taken part in the Fukuzawa tanomoshi, but since the sum
involved was insignificant to him, he did not claim his portion of the financial pool when it was his turn, a practice known as discarding one’s deposit(kakesute). Having thus accrued an extra two shu, Fukuzawa’s mother felt
obliged to repay that amount to Gorōbei, which Fukuzawa dutifully did
during a return trip to Osaka.
Fukuzawa’s commitment to repay his mother’s debt confirms the ethic ofpromise that held together the contract cooperative. In mentioning suchtraditional cooperative practices, Fukuzawa did not comment on whether they
were at odds with his ideas on modernity. He merely accepted such practices
as part of a cultural environment that had little bearing on the events of hisday.
The long time between events from the past into the modern era makes
it difficult to grasp their being in the present. As historians of modernity, ourinterpretive eyes are not accustomed to seeing these relationships. The traditional cooperative, such as the Taga and Fukuzawa kō, is perceived as a lag
on modernization and is presented as part of an unchanging feudal culture
rather than as being crucial, in its many varieties, to ordinary people’s
survival then and now. Japan Life, for example, does not advertise that it
stands on the ground once occupied by the Kaitokudō or that it gained
inspiration from the Taga kō.
Modernization is a stylized conceptual scheme that frames and determines
10 Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka(New York: Madison Books, 1992), 261 63; Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuzawa ō jiden(Tokyo: Keio tsūshin, 1958), 131 33: See also Najita, “Ambiguous Encounters,”
213 42.

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historical content. It is largely shaped from the outside looking in, or in
anticipation from within of such a view from without. According to Wlad
Godzich, when viewed from the outside, every company, nation, and society,though outwardly modern, is not truly modern but is viewed as the “other” ina limited way, “thematized . . . as a threat to be reduced, as a potential sameto-be, yet not same.”11 Such a cosmopolitan knowledge/culture generalizes
and dehistoricizes social processes and denies them an authentic place. Our
theoretical range is thus curtailed by epistemological boundaries, and as
Clifford Geertz pointed out, we comprehend the historical object in terms of
simplified formulas that permit little or no understanding of the problems inother societies in regard to knowledge and commitment, contract and practice.12
The countergaze to cosmopolitanism is nativism, which insists that asociety should view itself as a stable and unchanging identity rather than one
described as “yet-not-same.” By disavowing change, however, nativism alsodenies a country its history, and thus it too confounds our understanding ofsocial development. In its claim to a distinctive identity, nativism may refer
to an autonomous “language” as a society’s essential core and thus may relate
cultural identity to poetics and oral and mythic traditions. Or it may reduce
cultural essence to an absolute political identity. Or in the case of traditional
cooperatives, it may declare them to be unique to an unchanging Japaneseculture (which they are not) and to separate them from ever-changing modern
history. Both the hierarchical cosmopolitan view of societies, considered to be
in relative states of unreadiness, incompleteness, and unevenness, and thenativist insistence (with its nuanced gradations) on distinctiveness and militant
indifference persist as seductive sense-making devices. They perhaps areunavoidable. Yet to shape a perspective on social history of thought andpractice, we need to acknowledge these restrictive binary alter actives andthen put them aside.
The history of ordinary economies in this book lies mostly on the far sideof the public order, beyond the management of earlier regimes and, in modern
times, in only superficial ways. It is not a history that is integral to theformation of the modern authoritarian state or to the gross accumulation ofmaterial reason. Nor is it to be confused with an underlying and unchanging
native soul, for this history adapts and changes over time. As a broad social
experience, the history of ordinary economies is relatively recent, even
11 Wlad Godzich, foreword to Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xiii.
12 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic
Books, 1973), 3 30.

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though small points of origin can be traced back into time immemorial. It isa history of the social practice of commoners confronted by poverty and theever-present threat of famine in the far-flung money economy distinctive of
the mid-Tokugawa era, or, by general Western reckoning, the eighteenth
century.
This is a history, therefore, about commoners within a historicity ofhardship in which ordinary people were knowledgeable about commerce andskilled in putting that knowledge into practice over some two hundred years,
roughly from 1750 to 1950. But these dates are mere conveniences, as they
simply suggest the chronological frame extending from the middle to the late
Tokugawa, or “early modern” (kinsei) into the “modern” (kindai), which areformal designations of limited use in the case of ordinary economies.
Since the subject of ordinary economies is extensive, the narrative has no
linear development to trace, and so it might be tempting to state that here
there is no “history” to convey. What follows argues otherwise, that there isindeed a discourse grounded in history, and, accordingly, that it is worthy ofnarrative attention.
My approach is to preface the following chapters by calling attention to
the hidden markers in the present or recent past, as in the example of Japan
Life, that establish a basis for reentering history. Although spatially separated
and appearing to have relatively little significance when examined in isolation, these markers in the recent past nonetheless gain relevance when I referto them in regard to the study of commoners engaged in the thought andpractice of commerce. The approach from present to past also circumvents
the absence of either a specific and visible “event” that might mark a convenient point of entry or a single “biography” of a figure emblematic of thewhole that would be the starting point from which to proceed toward thepresent.
To say that the fragments of this history are widely scattered also suggeststhat they are not causally linked but are, nonetheless, discursively related.
Visits to different locales―such as Kyushu, Hokkaido, Okinawa, Chita
Peninsula, and the more familiar Osaka and Ōmi―allow historians to establish in broad strokes the basis for a history extending beyond particulars. Thisis a social history of a modernity that might best be understood on its own
historical terms rather than those of the prevailing narratives of modernization, such as Western progress and economism.
This is also a history of initiative and agency, of life and survival.
Presenting a coherent chronology would be misleading, since it is a history
that, though broad, is “uneventful.” Or perhaps the “event” consists wholly ofcommoners thinking and writing about commerce and engaging in the prac-

“Other Visions of Virtue” in Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750 1950 149

tices of this labor without political guidance and unaware of the probablesignificance for modernity. The phrase “beyond the public order” seems
appropriate to characterize the social history of cooperatives. It is a history
that was not shaped or dictated from above and was seldom regulated byjuridical instruments. Only when a “social problem” is anticipated does themodern regime bring the question of traditional cooperatives into the arena of
public discourse.
I am not, of course, the first to tread in this broad field. My work follows
and, I hope, adds to other scholars’ earlier work and is not intended to departfrom previous interpretations. I shall mention here especially the works ofRobert N. Bellah, Irwin Scheiner, Thomas C. Smith, and Anne Walthall.13 My
intent is to bring commoners into history without the determinations of“traditional,” as opposed to “modern” and “Western,” and without their being
considered uniquely “Japanese” or precursors of “capitalism” or, for thatmatter, of “fascism.” Is it possible to write about the social thought ofcommoners as history without the macro impositions of modern expectations
and determinations, and thus to give life to the thought and practices ofordinary people that “international” and “Western” observers outside as wellas inside Japan have often denied them? Can we evaluate this history as
having a modernity on its own terms and not as being a feudal residue
divorced from the “real” history that marches to the beat of economic
modernization?
I would like to add another historiographic note pertinent to my study.
Sakurai Tokutarō’s work on the “process” of establishing the kō is a classic
on the anthropological approach to the study of Tokugawa cooperatives.
Although he focuses on religious practices, especially pilgrimages, Sakurai
also discusses specifically economic practices. The theme of the cooperative
as a political movement and practice is woven into the writings of Irokawa
Daikichi and is well known to and appreciated by historians of modern
Japan.14
13 Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (Glencoe,
Ill.: Free Press, 1957); Irwin Scheiner, “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants:
Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness,” in Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa
Period, Methods and Metaphors, ed. Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 39 62; Thomas C. Smith, Agrarian Origins ofModern Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959); Anne Walthall,Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1986).
14 Sakurai Tokutarō, Kō shūdan seiritsu katei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan,1962); Irokawa Daikichi, “The Survival Struggle of the Japanese Community,”
Japan Interpreter (spring 1975): 465 94; and Irokawa Daikichi, “Nihon no minshū

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Two other works have been especially valuable to me, those by Mori
Kahei and Mori Shizurō (who are not related). A distinguished regional
historian, Mori Kahei accepted the assignment of writing a history of theNortheast Mutual Bank of Iwate on its twentieth anniversary, in 1960. The
study took him back into the Tokugawa past and to the contract cooperatives,
which in the modern era (the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) werereorganized into cooperative credit-and-loan companies and, later, mutualbanks. Therefore, although his book is about the history of a bank, it ispointedly historicized in terms of commoner political economy and is appropriately titled “a thesis on the history of mujin credit and loan cooperatives.”
Mori Kahei comments in his epilogue that the project was a broad social
history, not a history of the single “region” on which he had focused. The
story of Iwate’s mutual bank, he concluded, was part of a broad social historyof commoners.15
Mori Shizurō follows threads of thinking about credit from the Tokugawa
into the modern era and emphasizes the cooperative, the kō, as the decisive
form in which commoners fended for their lives and turned their efforts intobusiness ventures and savings-and-insurance associations in modern industrialized cities. Mori Shizurō’s work is of special significance to me because hetreats the history of commoner credit from the premodern into the postwar
modern era as “intellectual history”(shisōshi) and thus provides a thoughtfulness missing from the works of economic historians. His book has splendid
textual references and a narrative coherence that convinces the reader of its
fundamental importance.16
Both these scholars agree that historians have not given enough attention
to an indigenous, multiregional, economic history and have been swayed intheir perspectives on the past by a highly specialized sense of modern
economics, capitalism, and capital formation. This view has failed to explain
how ordinary people thought about and acted in economic history, particularly during periodic famines in the premodern period and during the rapid
industrialization that extended few favors to commoners. Both scholars feelthat too much attention has been given to such comprehensive explanatory
terms as feudalism and capitalism and not enough to how commoners
controlled their own lives under conditions of drastic commercial flux.
Scholars have always assumed that each Tokugawa village set aside a
certain small portion of its production, as through “by-employment,” asundō no tokuchō ni tsuite,” Sekai (February 1986): 195 205.
15 Mori Kahei, Mujin kin’yūshi ron, vol. 2 of Mori Kahei chosaku shū (Tokyo: Hōsei.
daigaku shuppankyoku, 1982).
16 Mori Shizurō, Shomin kin’yū shisōshi taikei, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha,
1981).

“Other Visions of Virtue” in Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750 1950 151

necessary for survival and that this portion would not be relinquished as a tax
to domainal regimes. Putting the village’s surplus or “savings” into a cooperative fund for an emergency was tantamount to establishing an insurance
fund within a kō, a safety net, which was the commoners’ protection against
famine (kiki taisaku).
Mori Kahei and Mori Shizurō thus provide insights into a practice intrinsic
to a history of commoners fending for themselves against polities interested
in taxation but not in the well-being of the local human community. Boththese historians argue that this history of commoners working out their own
economic destinies must be treated on its own terms and not in relation toagricultural productivity in the premodern and modern eras, even though thehistory affects and interrelates with both. Their histories also make clear thatthe source materials have been scattered about, buried, or discovered in
unexpected places like the archives of a regional cooperative bank or therecords of contract cooperatives involving vast numbers of people who signed
or affixed their seals to long-term agreements to give order to their lives.
Both historians, in short, write about the political economy from the groundup. The persistent theme in this history is that commoners refused in various
ways to sink below the limits of human endurance and, instead, formed
contract relationships that provided lines of self-governance that were notcovered by formal politics. These lines are the netting that commoners used
to save themselves from the Tokugawa system of taxation and the harshconditions imposed by the industrial revolution.
Based on a commoner or commonsense epistemology, commoners wrote
and published in the hope that other commoners would read and reflect on
how ordinary people were able to control knowledge and overcome poverty.
Such efforts were intrinsic to ethical practice and not demeaning to humanvirtue. The issues addressed here were fundamentally about trust and contract
relations that could save lives by means of initiatives taken without any
expectation of political benevolence. Everyone in the community understoodthat as a matter of common sense, as many people as possible had to join inthis self-help effort. Few formal scholarly works were written to explain thephilosophical principles governing what and how things were to be done andwhy. From this perspective, even the philosopher Miura Baien was relevant
not so much for his treatises about the ultimate meaning of nature as about
his use of village-level ethics to document why humans should help themselves and improve conditions close to home and not rely on the aristocratic
regime. Except for the few scholars like Baien, who will be discussed later,
this remains a history without names, primarily one about social thinking andaction and not about the scholarly debates that abounded in Tokugawa times.
Mine also is a history that discusses the theme of organization and practice in152

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the form of economic and insurance confraternities known as kō, termed mostcommonly as cooperatives of “inexhaustible compassion” (mujin kō) and oftrust like that between mother and child (tanomoshi kō), as in Fukuzawa’s kō,
which proliferated in the eighteenth century and persisted through the industrial revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The theoreticalimportance of the kō is that it emphasizes that ideas do not travel abstractly,
as in a vacuum, but in a form, or mode, of social organization and practice,which in our case is the cooperative and its inherent ethical values of trust,promise, and contract (shin, yakusoku, and keiyaku).
In the Hōtoku movement exemplifying the theme of virtue in work, thecooperative became part of an effort to reconstruct villages. Founded by thepeasant sage Ninomiya Sontoku, this movement played a prominent role inthe debates over mediating the traditional cooperative with the modern effort
to establish a national savings-and-loan program based on German models.
Later chapters in this book examine the Hōtoku movement and these debates,
which created an intriguing theme in Japan’s modernity.
In the early twentieth century, laws were passed to regulate and incorporate traditional cooperatives as licensed entities in the constitutional system.
Although the effects were significant, the laws were ambivalent and complex,
and most cooperatives continued to remain outside the juridical order.
I should note here that even though it was widespread as a social practice,
the kō is not considered an important component of Japan’s civilization or its
modernity, perhaps because it appears to be a burdensome “tradition,” a“feudal”, remnant that should have disappeared long ago in the processes ofmodernization. Except for a few scholars who understand the importance of
the “horizontal” and “egalitarian” dimension of modern political theory,
including E. H. Norman (1909 57) in the Western world, the kō is not valued
as being consistent with Japan’s projection of itself internationally as amodern society. Even though the kō’s history and presence are not selfconsciously concealed, they are rarely publicized. At many different levels,
Japan has always felt a sense of urgency to present itself as modern andinternational and to disregard much of the history of ordinary people.
The history of the kō nonetheless flows out of a broad human and intellectual experience grounded in time and space, in short, in history itself, in amateriality within which commoners produced an ideology about their selfworth in everyday work, without regard to the negative assessments of thosewith scholarly knowledge and formal aristocratic power. This history istherefore about commoners acting in spaces that belonged to them and inwhich they acted without apology on the basis of knowledge they believed to
be truthful (makoto). But these spaces were not timeless or static, for they“Other Visions of Virtue” in Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750 1950 153

gained prominence and adapted and changed over the course of early modern
and. modern history.
I am constantly reminded that discourses from the past do not simply
disappear under the impact of pivotal thresholds, even one as sweeping as the
Meiji ishin or, for that matter, the unconditional surrender that ended thePacific War. At the same time, it certainly is true that while these discourses
do not vanish, they also do not persist intact. Instead, they are scattered about
in bits and fragments, often not readily noticeable and sometimes hidden fromview, appearing only as traces, as unadvertised practices, de-emphasized by
the language of “true” modernity and of the attitudes spun out of the cosmopolitanism and internationalism that accompany that new language. The
relentless surge and resurgence in the urban and industrial reconstruction that
produces a vast and indiscriminate technological sprawl simply reinforce theprocess in which, in its constantly changing physicality, the present is thought
to be unthinkable as an extension of the distant past. In its urgency to present
itself as modern and international, Japan often has abandoned much of thehistory that ordinary people hustled through. Accordingly, the past is intermixed in this context in ways that, like those of a recessive gene, are subtle,
complex, and also embarrassing if too readily visible.
The markings, however, still are discernible and therefore challenging tointellectual historians and ethnographers who choose simply to explore on the
ground, here and there, the traces that are neither random and chaotic nor a
broad light on the road ahead. As one anonymous itinerant monk inscribed ona scroll (as payment for food and lodging) at a country home during theturmoil of the late Tokugawa and Meiji ishin: “Leaving behind me the way ofconfusion or enlightenment. I simply see the level ground and clear sky
before me” (Seigo nidō subete bōkyaku, tada miru heihō seiten jin).17

17 From a scroll at a country physician’s residence outside Niigata City. The wording
may be interpreted to derive from either Faith or Zen Buddhism.