Self-writing in Tokugawa Japan

1The erasure of the Japanese individual by the implacable logic of the group is a hackneyed cliché on the society of the archipelago, as noted by Emmanuel Lozerand, professor at Inalco, in a recent article in the Ebisu journal. His amusing anthology of speeches about the “dilution of the Japanese subject” shows that this prejudice is often used as a convenient explanation of the virtues or defects ascribed to the Japanese nation. Yet for the historian, Japan is a mine of individual testimonies of exceptional richness. Since ancient times, the Japanese have indeed kept diaries (nikki), essays (zuihitsu), and some of the oldest and most famous works of the Japanese literature, such as the Diary of Murasaki Shikibu or the Pillow book of Sei Shônagon, show the subjectivity of the author, in which it is yet difficult to distinguish the part of the literary construction.

Sei Shônagon (c. 966-1017), Japanese poet and writer.

2The custom of keeping a diary spread in the population along with the knowledge of writing, and in the Edo period, between the 17th and 19th centuries, it was a common practice for men and women of all conditions. However, the place left for the expression of the redactors’ inner feelings in these daily notes is highly variable, because they often merely register singular or routine events without much comment.

Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725), advisor for shogun Tokugawa Ienobu.

3Another type of “private writings” may seem more likely to express a stronger presence of the author: the autobiography. Nevertheless, just as in Europe, this form of writing is rare in Japan before the contemporary period. From the Meiji era, many autobiographies were published, and Western influence in this editorial phenomenon is obvious. But autobiographies have been also written a long time before the opening of the ports, at least if we do not limit the definition of this genre to exhibitionism or a more or less complacent narcissism, as they are seen in our current era of “egolatry.” One can even find some rather old crude examples of autobiographies in Japan, but again, the Edo period is providing us with the more numerous examples.

4It must be said that, under the Tokugawa rule, feudal powers imposed to regularly justify individual positions and family merits by producing some kind of curriculum and genealogies recounting the biographies of the members of a household over many generations. And thus, anyone willing to maintain his own social position and that of his family, had an incentive to keep records about his family’s existence. Transmission between generations is a central element of autobiography in Japan, which often begins with a reminder of the family background. Furthermore the pretext of autobiographical writing commonly lies in the education of later generations. Whatever the real motive, this justification is also commonly alleged in pre-industrial Europe, for example by Blaise de Monluc or Agrippa d’Aubigné.

5Apart from the autobiography in the strict sense, this concern is more readily apparent in Japan in the testamentary documents and various instructions bequeathed by the family heads to their successors. Although generally very scant on details about their personal lives, the authors of these texts present the sum of their own experiences and provide advice for personal and professional success, heavily tinged with collective representations of social status. The wealthy merchant of Hakata named Shimai Sôshitsu wrote in the early seventeenth century a testament which is a remarkable testimony of the mentality of a rich trading house owner, a social class in full rising at the time. One of the first explicitly autobiographical works of the Edo period, written in 1675 by the Confucian and professor of military science Yamaga Sokô, also borrows the form of a spiritual testament addressed to his heirs, with the concise, but quite satisfied, records of a life dedicated to study, which summarizes the main points of his reflection on the samurai’s role in society.

Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759-1829), regent to shogun Tokugawa Ienari.

6The most famous autobiographies of the Edo period are from warrior writers, statesmen or intellectuals. Arai Hakuseki, author of the Oritaku shiba no ki, or Matsudaira Sadanobu, who wrote the Uge no hitokoto, were both head of the shogun government respectively at the beginning and the end of the eighteenth century. Their life records, as might be expected, are also political memoirs, written after they retired from public affairs, following a disgrace. Pleas pro domo mixed with settling political scores, these autobiographies make virtually no place for the private life of their authors once they reached political responsibilities. It is perhaps these limitations of the autobiographical frame for a statesman who incited Matsudaira Sadanobu to write a kind of essay, the Shugyôroku, more focused on the rules of life, and that draws an idealized self-portrait.

7The parts concerning youth in these writings may yield some discreet insights on the personality of writers at the time. This period is obviously related to the memory of parents, and therefore of the lineage; as the autobiographies that remain were mostly written by men, it is also the part where female entourage (mother, maids) is more present. But the dawn of personal existence is often a sort of stereotypical narrative scheme, more or less influenced by a Confucian conception of ages. Education, which is responsible for inculcating the child with the values of his social background, finally brings in the adolescent a moral awareness of the debt to his parents and of his own responsibilities, a decisive step for becoming a man ready to assume his role in society. So the authors of autobiographies often describe how their learning progressed, peppering their records with some youthful errors.

The first pages of Enomoto Yazaemon’s biography.

8The scarcity of autobiographies before the Meiji era demonstrates that, under Tokugawa’s rule, taking one’s own life as a writing subject was nothing obvious or banal. The desire of the statesman to testify for posterity, or that of the intellectual to illustrate the link between his life and his thoughts, are reasons easily understandable. But why Yazaemon Enomoto, a salt merchant of Kawagoe born in 1625, decided to tell his life, so similar to many others, from his third to his 56th year? This man was in fact fully aware of having experienced times of deep social and economic changes, and in this context, he considered that he had fulfilled the duties of filial piety by making prosperous his business: it was indeed with him that the family business was set on the actual of a wealthy merchant dynasty.

9His pride is all the greater since his relations with his family were not always easy, and, may be less embarrassed than a warrior on this, its text bears traces of his sufferings. These records are also those of a man aware of his decline, and anxious to leave in his descendants’ memories the image of a respected and hardworking merchant. Enomoto Yazaemon presents himself as an example of success and personal fulfillment while respecting the values of his community. These values, based on patriarchal and paternalistic conceptions of the family, are tinged in the middle of a seventeenth century by popular Confucianism. People often wanted to search in the Confucian ideology the causes of the so-called lack of individuality of Japanese or other “Asians.” But we cannot forget that, in Japan, Confucian teachings have often been interpreted as an incentive to develop its own personal ability to give the best of human potential to society.

10A limited number of biographies are listed in the Edo period, but perhaps are there still more to be discovered, especially in the mass of the nineteenth century archives. In fact, we know some very surprising autobiographies wrote in this period. For example, in Kanazawa, the one of Watazuya Masaemon, brothel keeper and entertainment producer, who, not ashamed at all by his underworld activities, emphasises his role in the city during the 1820–1830s. Or the long picaresque narrative of Katsu Kokichi, perfect embodiment of the aimless Shogun vassal, a brawler moving from a shady business to another to survive, unworthy son, rogue swordsman, and deplorable family head. None of these characters naturally claim to pose as paragons of domestic virtues or as examples to follow. Yet they thought their lives as nonconformists wereworthy of storytelling, a sign among others that the common values and collective identities of the Tokugawa society gave way to new representations and aspirations of individual destinies. It is quite possible that the countless private Japanese archives of the late shogunate still contain many such life records. Anyway the singularities of this kind of self-portraits suggests the autobiographical vogue of Meiji and Taisho eras was not only a symptom of “Westernization” and that the roots of new conceptions about “self-writing” are also to be found in Edo Japan.