Abstract

This paper explores Ogyū Sorai’s 荻生徂徠 thinking on the most sensational and controversial incident of eighteenth-century Japan, and perhaps the most well-known in all Japanese history, the forty-seven rōnin incident of 1701–1703. Viewed in relation to his lifework, Sorai’s views on the incident are significant insofar as they reveal the extent to which his philosophical thinking was occasionally shaped decisively by neither ancient Chinese nor later Confucian texts, Neo- or otherwise, but instead by formative life-experiences he had as a youth living in exile. No doubt, Confucian and Neo-Confucian notions, which Sorai knew in-depth, helped him filter, epistemologically, events, issues, and most importantly what he understood to be righteous and just behaviour in a polity. Yet ironically enough, Sorai’s thinking on the rōnin incident shows that however philosophically erudite, cosmopolitan, and urbane he was as an intellectual, his appraisals of things sometimes harked back to rural experiences he had early on with some of the most primitive and foundational expressions of human agency, civilization, and socio-political ethics in early-eighteenth century Japan. In the process, Sorai’s essay reveals, through its later resonance with some Meiji thought, how his views on those same primitive expressions remained relevant even in modern contexts.