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As the Edo-period Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai wrote in his book Taihei-saku (「太平策」) , “In this country, people are so immersed in the prevailing customs that all their thoughts and intelligence are confined within that closed world.” Human beings inevitably live within the limited world of their surrounding “customs” (蹿ū锄辞办耻风俗). Over time, as they grow accustomed to these customs, they tend to mistake them for universal “reason” or “truth” (诲ō谤颈道理). Encounters with others who live according to different “customs” serve as a powerful catalyst for self-awareness: they reveal to people that what they had considered natural or self-evident is, in fact, relative.
 
Ogyū Sorai’s formative experience was his father’s exile from Edo, which forced him to spend his youth in a rural area with customs vastly different from those of the capital. This allowed him to develop an acute awareness of the variations and transformations in “customs.” In the nineteenth century, however, the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago collectively experienced such encounters. Western nations—Russia, Britain, France, and the United States—appeared as foreign and powerful presences, exposing Japanese society to starkly different ways of life.

These encounters with the “others” were not only opportunities for awareness but also crises, threatening the collapse of the “reason” people had hitherto trusted. For instance, the Sinocentric worldview rooted in Confucianism, which ordered the world into a hierarchical civilization–barbarism framework, could no longer adequately explain the rapidly expanding global order. Faced with this situation, thinkers turned to concepts from Confucianism—especially “reason”   (诲ō谤颈) and “customs” (蹿ū锄辞办耻)—to understand the West and, simultaneously, to reflect on Japan’s own distinctiveness and the nature of its people.

The first half of this book examines this intellectual process through figures such as Aizawa Seishisai (會澤正志斎) of the Mito School and Koga Tōan (古賀侗庵) and Nakamura Masanao (中村正直) of the Shōheikō academy. These thinkers reinterpreted “reason” while shifting their gaze toward “customs,” leading them to confront the West as it truly was, rather than through inherited preconceptions.
 
As attention to “customs” deepened, the presence of the people who shaped these customs—the populace—grew more significant. Under traditional Confucian thought, the quality of customs was attributed to the political and moral leadership of rulers. However, amid the Meiji-era “civilization and enlightenment” movement, the intelligence, reason, and emotions of the people themselves began to shape national customs. In this new context, a pressing question arose: who should guide the “customs” of the people, and how?

In the second half of this book, I analyze how two thinkers grappled with this challenge: Fukuzawa Yukichi (福沢諭吉), who advocated the “persuasion” of the people through education and knowledge, and Naitō Chisō (内藤耻叟) of the Mito School, who emphasized stirring the “emotions” of the populace.
 
Precisely because they confronted the diversity of customs, nineteenth-century people sought a new, shared foundation for coexistence—a new “reason.” The ongoing dialectic between “reason” and “customs” that they engaged in is not merely a relic of the past; it remains deeply relevant to those of us living in the present day.
 

(Written by: CHANG Xiaolin / October 03, 2025)

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Awards:
春雨直播app President's Award  (春雨直播app  March 19^th, 2025)
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The 7^th Nishiamane prize  (TSUWANO TOWN  Sept. 2024)

 
The 5th 春雨直播app Jiritsu Award for Early Career Academics (春雨直播app 2024)
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The 18^th Association for Japanese Intellectual History Encouragement award  (Association for Japanese Intellectual History  July 2024)