Kumazawa Banzan's (1619-1691) Responding to the Great Learning (Daigaku wakumon) stands as the first major writing on political economy in early modern Japanese history. John A. Tucker's translation is the first English rendition of this controversial text to be published in eighty years. The introduction offers an accessible and incisive commentary, including detailed analyses of Banzan's text within the context of his life, as well as broader historical and intellectual developments in East Asian Confucian thought. Emphasizing parallels between Banzan's life events, such as his relief efforts in the Okayama domain following devastating flooding, and his later writings advocating compassionate government, environmental initiatives, and projects for growing wealth, Tucker sheds light on Banzan's main objective of 'governing the realm and bringing peace and prosperity to all below heaven'. In Responding to the Great Learning, Banzan was doing more than writing a philosophical commentary, he was advising the Tokugawa shogunate to undertake a major reorganization of the polity - or face the consequences.
Introduction; Part I: 1. The heaven-decreed duty of the people's ruler; 2. The heaven-decreed duty of the people's ministers; 3. Revering good counsel; 4. A grand project for growing wealth; 5. Eliminating anxieties over flooding and relieving droughts; 6. Preparing for northern barbarians, emergencies, and bad harvests; 7. Filling Shogunal coffers with gold, silver, rice, and grain; 8. Eliminating debt from the realm below heaven; 9. Helping Rōnin, vagrants, the unemployed, and the impoverished; 10. Making mountains luxuriant and rivers run deep; Part II: 11. The ebb and flow of the ruler's blessings; 12. Returning to the old farmer-Samurai society; 13. Eliminating landless income and increasing new fiefs; 14. Lowering the cost of foreign silk and textiles; 15. Eliminating Christianity; 16. Reviving Buddhism; 17. Reviving Shintō; 18. Worthy rulers reviving Japan; 19. Governing with education; 20. Those who should teach in our schools ; 21..A little kindness provides benefits; 22. Wasted rice and grain; Bibliography.
John A. Tucker is a professor of history at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He specializes in early modern Japanese Confucianism and its varied roles in the intellectual history of Japan. He is the author of The Forty-Seven Rōnin: The Vendetta in History (2018), as well as translation studies of Itō Jinsai's Gomō jigi (1998) and Ogyū Sorai's Bendō and Benmei (2006). He co-edited Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy (2014) with Chun-chieh Huang, and edited a four-volume series, Critical Readings on Japanese Confucianism (2013).
