Satō Nobuhiro and the Political Economy of Natural History in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Abstract

After the economic crises of the 1790s and 1830s, various domains of Tokugawa Japan initiated a series of reforms of their administrative and productive systems. Among these, the reform plan carried on by the Shimazu lords of the Satsuma domain, in the southern island of Kyushu, is particularly revealing. Under the lead of Zusho Hirosato and inspired by the writings of scholar Satō Nobuhiro, Satsuma became one of the wealthiest regions of nineteenth-century Japan. The plan consisted of assuring direct samurai control over productive and marketing activities, the development of monoculture in cash-crops like sugarcane in the southern islands of Amami and Okinawa (under the proto-colonial administration of Satsuma) and food self-sufficiency on the mainland. The philosophical foundations of this reform plan rested on a conceptualization of a systematic human domination over nature that coincided with similar notions developed in Europe and that unfolded in an analogous framework of exploitation of natural resources, labor reorganization, complete monetization of economic life, and market-oriented productive activities. Nobuhiro invented a Japanese form of ‘political economy’ (keizai) which exercised, directly and indirectly, a considerable influence among Meiji political oligarchs, economists, and intellectuals throughout the nation’s modernizing years. It also contributed to redefining both the human relationship with the material environment and knowledge as an instrument in economic growth.

Notes

¹ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 223.

² Sagers, Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power, 5.

³ In this essay, the main actors are identified by their personal rather than family name, in line with the historiographic tradition of pre-1868 studies.

⁴ Kanbashi, Shimazu Shigehide, 171–75.

⁵ Sagers, Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power, 6 and 53–72.

⁶ Ishii, Gakusetsu hihan.

⁷ Harold Bolitho, ‘The Tempō Crisis’.

⁸ As in the works of John Hall and Edwin O. Reischauer. On modernization theory, see Dower, ‘E.H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History’, and Garon, ‘Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese Studies’.

⁹ On the multiplicity of actors, motives, and goals in late Tokugawa political unrest, see Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers in Japan. I would like to thank Julia Adeney Thomas for her help in highlighting this important development in bakumatsu Japan.

¹⁰ Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 147.

¹¹ Ōguchi, ‘Tenpōki no seikaku’.

¹² Bolitho, ‘The Tempō Crisis’, 22.

¹³ On regional nationalism and the concept of kokueki, see Ochiai, “The Shift to Domestic Sugar and the Ideology of ‘National Interest’ and Wolff, ‘Notes from the Periphery’. On trade, see Hellyer, Defining Engagement.

¹⁴ Sagers, Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power, 6, 53–72.

¹⁵ On Shigehide, see Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 62–72, and Kanbashi, Shimazu Shigehide. Honzōgaku is the name of a field of pharmacological studies that expanded in the Tokugawa period to become an eclectic field of nature studies. See my forthcoming The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge.

¹⁶ Sagers, Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power, 5.

¹⁷ On Satsuma in late Tokugawa Japan see also Sakai, ‘Feudal Society and Modern Leadership in Satsuma-han’, Sakai, ‘The Satsuma–Ryukyu Trade and the Tokugawa Seclusion Policy’, and Hidemura, Satsuma han no kōzō to tenkai.

¹⁸ See Matsui, Satsuma hanshū Shimazu Shigehide, 127–31.

¹⁹ Sagers, Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power, 42.

²⁰ Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, 71.

²¹ Needham, Daniels, and Menzies, Science and Civilisation in China, 450.

²² Miyazaki, Nōgyō zensho, 391–92.

²³ Matsui, Satsuma hanshu Shimazu Shigehide, 134–36.

²⁴ Bolitho, ‘The Tempō Crisis’, 6.

²⁵ Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan. ‘The Rules for Military Houses’ (buke shohatto) were promulgated by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1615 and reissued with variations in 1629, 1635, 1663, 1683, and 1710. They purported to regulate the political duties, responsibilities, and behavior of samurai.

²⁶ Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain.

²⁷ Fujita, Kokueki shisō no keifu to tenkai.

²⁸ Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, 70.

²⁹ Satō Nobuhiro, Keizai yōryaku, 522. English translation from Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought, 35.

³⁰ Satō, Suitō hiroku, 412.

³¹ Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought, 36.

³² Satō, Suitō hiroku, 503. For further details, see Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought, 36.

³³ Satō, Satsuma keii ki, 671. For a different translation, see Sagers, Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power, 49.

³⁴ Kanbashi, Zusho Hirosato, 99–119.

³⁵ Ibid., 144–70.

³⁶ A lucrative trade that would, however, be fateful for Hirosato, when in 1848 Shimazu Nariakira denounced him to the bakufu senior counselor Abe Masahiro. See Kanbashi, Zusho Hirosato, 197–209. See also Kanbashi, Satsumajin to Yōroppa, 75–89.

³⁷ See Kanbashi, Shimazu Shigehide, 73–81.

³⁸ See the classic Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, and Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society. See also Schama, Citizens, esp. 19–199.

³⁹ This is a trope that can be traced as far back as the writings of seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Yamaga Sokō and that was repeatedly appropriated in the course of the Tokugawa period by scholars as diverse as Kaibara Ekiken, Motoori Norinaga, Hiraga Gennai, Andō Shōeki, and Aizawa Seishisai. In the twentieth century, it would become part of the nationalist rhetoric of Kokutai no hongi (The Essential Principles of the Nation), the ideological manifesto that sustained the imperialist expansion of Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. See Thomas, ‘The Cage of Nature’, 21–22.

⁴⁰ Satō, Kondō hisaku, 426. Translated by Tessa Morris-Suzuki in A History of Japanese Economic Thought, 37–38.

⁴¹ Satō Nobuhiro, Satsuma keii ki, 679.

⁴² In early modern Japan there was no single term equivalent to ‘nature’ – the modern shizen being established as translation of the German Natur only in the late 1880s. In its place, a constellation of different terms was utilized to express different aspects of the environment, material reality, natural objects, and the laws that regulated them. See my forthcoming The Knowledge of Nature, esp. chapter one, as well as Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, and Terao, ‘Shizen’ gainen no keisei shi.

⁴³ See Marcon, ‘Inventorying Nature’.

⁴⁴ See Kagaku Asahi, Tonosama seibutsugaku no keifu.

⁴⁵ Bref och skrifvelser (I:7, 27), quoted in Koerner, Linnaeus, 104.

⁴⁶ Quoted in Koerner, Linnaeus, 104.

⁴⁷ See Fara, Sex, Botany & Empire and Nishimura, Rinne to sono shitotachi.

⁴⁸ Kanbashi, Shimazu Shigehide, 98–101.

⁴⁹ Nanzan is one of the many noms de plume of Shimazu Shigehide.

⁵⁰ Siebold, Edo sanpu kikō, 186.

⁵¹ Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 69; see also Ueno, ‘Shiiboruto no Edo sanpu ryokō no dōbutsugakushiteki igi’.

⁵² Shimazu, Gyōbō setsuroku, 40.

⁵³ Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 68.

⁵⁴ Shin is a complex term, the meaning of which changed during the Tokugawa period. It appeared in early pharmacopoeia like Kaibara Ekiken’s Yamato honzō (1709) and Inō Jakusui’s Shobutsu ruisan (1738) and referred to the essential properties of natural species. According to Maki Fukuoka, its meaning changed in the works of Owari naturalists, members of the Shōhyaku-sha cultural circle, and expressed the actual physical existence of specific objects – the specific plant, herb, or shellfish, etc., they observed on particular occasions. See Fukuoka, The Premise of Fidelity . It appeared also in the compound term shashin, which in modern Japanese means ‘photography’, to refer to ‘true-to-nature’ illustrations of plants and animals. Fukuoka translates the term as ‘transpositions of the real’. See my review of Fukuoka’s text for a critical analysis, Marcon, ‘Review of The Premise of Fidelity’.

⁵⁵ Sō and Shirao, Seikei zusetsu, especially vols 1 to 12.

⁵⁶ Shimazu, Gyōbō setsuroku, 22.

⁵⁷ In the context of the burgeoning print culture of Tokugawa Japan, it was not uncommon for larger domains to have a state-run printing house, a practice that began in the late sixteenth century with Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had his own printing facility built in the Fushimi Castle; see Kornicki, The Book in Japan, 11–17. The history of Seikei zusetsu, now a prefectural ‘treasure’ of Kagoshima, is in itself quite interesting, as the original woodblocks were repeatedly destroyed by fire and had to be re-carved. See Kanbashi, Shimazu Shigehide, 121.

⁵⁸ Sō and Shirao, Seikei zusetsu, Vol. 1, ‘Outline’ (Teiyō) page 1-left and 2-right.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 2-left.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 3-right.

⁶¹ Ibid., Vol. 1, ‘Agricultural Matters’, p. 1-left.

⁶² Ibid., p. 3-right.

⁶³ Satō, Kondō hisaku, 426. Musubi no kami, sanrei in Nobuhiro’s text, refers to Kami-Musubi-no-kami and Takami-Musubi-no-kami, who are two of the first three gods in the mythological chapters of the Kojiki.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ ‘Natura jugum recipit ab imperium hominis.’ Aphorism 1 in Bacon, Parasceve ad historiam naturalem et experimentalem, 47. English translation at: http://www.constitution.org/bacon/preparative.htm.

⁶⁶ Senior Councilor Tadakuni’s attempt to stabilize the economy by appealing to frugality and moderation through new sumptuary laws was particularly unsuccessful. See Crawcour, ‘Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century’, 587–600.

⁶⁷ Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 522. A different translation can be found in Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought, 35. It is worth pointing out that many terms Nobuhiro used in this line, keizai, keiei, kaihatsu, etc., have since become part of the jargon of modern Japanese political economy.

⁶⁸ Satō, Keizai yōryaku.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ See Saigusa, ‘Nihon no chisei to gijutsu’, 371–74 and Morris-Suzuki, Reinventing Japan, 41.

⁷² Ekiken, however, never dissociated the ‘investigation of things’ from its application in agricultural production. See also Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan, 45–48.

⁷³ See Hijioka, ‘Minakawa Kien no kaibutsugaku’, Hamada, ‘Kaibutsugaku no hassō ni tsuite’, and Hamada, ‘Minakawa Kien no kaibutsugaku no hōhō ni tsuite’. Simply put, Kien’s argument was that in ancient China people were in a condition of instinctive attunement with the universal life force ki and were therefore able to express with their voices the essence of things they came into contact with and named them accordingly. For Kien names and things shared the same substance, being moved by the same spontaneous activity (shizen no gi). The development of the writing system had the pernicious effect of clouding this empathic understanding of things by separating things and their names through the meaning embedded in the written characters.

⁷⁴ Needham, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, 102.

⁷⁵ Song, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu, xiv. See also Schäfer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, and Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, 20–21.

⁷⁶ Kikuchi, Zufu Edo jidai no gijutsu, vol. 1, 85. See also Morris-Suzuki, Reimagining Japan, 43–44.

⁷⁷ The same pair of characters, read as keidai, refers to the enclosed precinct of a shrine or a temple: it is worth noting the sacred connotations given to the country enclosed by borders.

⁷⁸ Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 535.

⁷⁹ Despite the fact that some Physiocrats, especially François Quesnay, developed their theories inspired by ideas of Chinese Confucian agrarianism circulating in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, individual entrepreneurship and private property remained for them axiomatic assumptions. See Rowbotham, ‘The Impact of Confucianism on Seventeenth Century Europe’, and Maverick, China, a Model for Europe.

⁸⁰ Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 535.

⁸¹ Ibid., 536.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Karl Marx, Capital, 637–38. Although Marx did not develop a thorough conceptualization of ‘nature’ and the environment, his thought has nonetheless influenced a number of environmental thinkers. See Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, and Foster, Marx’s Ecology.

⁸⁴ Stolz, Bad Water. See also Walker, Toxic Archipelago.

⁸⁵ Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 133. On cornucopianism, see also Julia Adeney Thomas’ article in this issue.

⁸⁶ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3.

⁸⁷ Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 536.

⁸⁸ Keizai yōryaku and Sonka zateki ron are the two texts in which Nobuhiro developed the concept of fukoku. The third chapter of Keizai yōryaku is entitled precisely ‘Fukoku’ and it begins by stating: ‘Those who wants to make the country prosperous must first of all rectify the circulation of wealth [yūzū o yoroshiku shite] and make sure there is no disturbance in its working’ (Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 549). That is, the ruler must intervene by maintaining the flow of money and commodities in redistribution as well as in domestic and international trade.

⁸⁹ Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 537.

⁹⁰ These included season, position of the stars, temperature, etc.

⁹¹ Satō, Keizai yōryaku.

⁹² Insofar as the individual species are concerned, Nobuhiro explains that ‘the number of products that the various deities had created with great effort is enormous, but they can all be divided in three groups: minerals, plants, and animals’ (Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 536). For him, in order to achieve a thorough knowledge of nature, it did not suffice to accumulate encyclopedic information on each species, as was conventional in honzōgaku texts, but one should rather understand how each species interacted with the others and with the environment. Ecological knowledge, for Nobuhiro, was clearly the key to the dominion of nature.

⁹³ Satō, Keizai yōryaku, 547.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 548.

⁹⁵ Edo, Chiyō no sugata.

⁹⁶ Marcuse, Five Lectures, 1.

⁹⁷ Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 155.

⁹⁸ Two elements that Horkheimer and Adorno ascribed, following Weber and Marx, to the modernization process. See Stone, ‘Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature’.

⁹⁹ It should, however, be noted that in the Meiji period it coexisted with the opposite view whereby Japan was a country peculiarly poor in natural resources, an argument that would be mobilized to sustain Japan’s imperial expansion. See Satō, ‘Motazaru kuni’ no shigenron.

¹⁰⁰ Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity.