Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai trans. by Mark Teeuwen, et al.
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The world is going to pot. Doctors, lawyers, bankers and priests are all greedy, corrupt and often incompetent. The government is not doing what it's supposed to be doing, and people are going about with no manners and very bad attitudes. Old values are being ignored and derided. The poor are suffering, powerless to do anything about it, and morals are becoming laxer than ever, with prostitution burgeoning. What we need is someone to come along and fix society, to lift it out of its materialism and restore old glories.Sounds familiar? Another rant about the moral decline of Europe or America in 2014? Certainly not—this is Japan in 1816, and an old-fashioned samurai, Buyo Inshi, doesn’t like what he sees at all. Based on his experiences in the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), Buyo delivers a scathing, entertaining and frank assault on the life-styles of everyone from the rich and famous to the utterly obscure.
We know very little about Buyo Inshi apart from a few clues in his book. He does not even use his real name, perhaps worried about reprisals or his reputation, and the nom de plume he uses translates as “a retired gentleman of Edo”. He belonged to the samurai class and may have worked as an official in the shogunal government; he seems to have had some other, perhaps shady occupation to, by which he made, he says, “a little money,” although by the time he came to write this book he tells readers that he has “stopped doing such improper things” and now lives in relative poverty.
His book, known in Japanese as Seiji kenbunroku or Matters of the World: What I Have Seen and Heard, became one of those classics which everyone quotes but nobody reads. This is the first English translation, one which will be definitive for a long time to come; anyone interested in the bygone eras of Japanese history just a few decades before Japan was “opened” to the West should read it. The translators and editors have done a wonderful job capturing Buyo’s language and tone, his indignation (almost comic at times) and his genuine desire for the reformation of society, the restoration of the old Way of Duty and the displacement of the new Way of Greed. Early nineteenth-century Edo is a thoroughly unfamiliar world to most of us, but in this translation, together with the lively and informative introduction, it springs to vivid life before our eyes. In the end it doesn’t matter that we never can know exactly who Buyo was as an historical entity, because he, too, emerges as a living person through this excellent translation of his book. We can feel his irritation (sometimes too much), his nostalgia and his compassion for the less-privileged, which is an unexpected quality that frequently emerges amongst the vignettes depicting greed, corruption and general nastiness.
Buyo presents himself as a person with little formal learning, but it is obvious that he has read most of the scholarly works on his subject, that he knows his history and is quite familiar with life at court, by which is meant here the Shogun’s court rather than that of the Emperor, who is hardly mentioned at all by Buyo. He does not, moreover, provide any solutions to particular problems, but that is because he considers the moral fabric of society to be more important; once that can be rectified in a more satisfactory manner, then everything else should fall into place.
Buyo’s model for the ideal state is the one established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (whom he extols as the “Divine Lord”) at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which Buyo says worked so well because Ieyasu followed the “Military Way”, based on two segments of society, the warriors and the farmers, who worked together in mutual respect and shared a lofty concept of duty to one another. After a time, as people grew more prosperous they became more materialistic, and the two groups, warriors and farmers, found themselves displaced by merchants and others, whom Buyo designated as “idlers”, a group which included popular entertainers, artists, some writers and a loose conglomeration of “townspeople”. The “Military” or “Righteous” Way was being superseded by the Way of Greed. Money did, indeed, become the root of all evil, and social relationships, which hitherto had involved mutual responsibility, deteriorated, and it was now each man for himself, as Buyo says “I have noticed that people’s dealings with one another are not straightforward. People’s desire to win and their competition for gain troubled me”. Buyo knew that it was impossible to roll back time, but he believed that reviving the Military Way might be the answer to reducing the number of idlers, thus restoring a sense of duty to society, minimising materialism, and generally achieving reformation. As Buyo states, “the Way of benevolence is to bring benefit to others without harming oneself. To benefit those below without diminishing those above can be called benevolent government,” and the method for doing this is the Military Way. He deplored Confucianism and its ethic, a system which he believed promoted circumspection rather than honest, direct and no-nonsense advice.
Buyo’s book begins with the warriors and farmers, who are the foundations of his society, and then, chapter by chapter, deals with priests, the medical profession, lawyers, townspeople, prostitutes and outcasts. He is particularly hard on blind moneylenders and surprisingly sympathetic to prostitutes, many of whom he believes have been forced into service by poverty or coercion, although he states that lust is “a threat to the state,” and that “rulers of high rank. . .have been led astray by lust and luxury,” but the blame is placed firmly on the shoulders of those in power. “Disorder,” Buyo says firmly, “arises from the bedchamber of the ruler.” He is skillful at illustrating his points by not simply describing them in abstract terms but by frequently using lively examples and anecdotes, which serve to make the presentation of his thesis both attractive and realistic. “I will simply let my brush run to my heart’s desire,” he tells us, “without embellishment or ornamentation.”
There are actual people involved in the problems he discusses, and Buyo’s emphasis on the human aspect makes the book much more readable and telling than any abstract philosophical treatise would have been. We do indeed get what Haruo Shirane, in a comment on the book’s back cover, called “the back-side of everyday lives” in nineteenth-century Edo, a place in some ways not so exotic, indeed perhaps more like our own backyards than we might be comfortable with. The author comes across as a cranky and no doubt frustrated man on the one hand, but also a man who displays compassion, humor and a feeling for giving readers a real picture of life.
The translation is an amazing piece of co-operative work, and how five scholars managed to produce such a seamless book is nothing short of a miracle, as there must have been many differences of style which had to be reconciled. They should all be congratulated on such a splendid result. Columbia University Press, too, should be singled out for producing such an attractive volume on good quality paper with clear print; it would have been good to have seen some more from the scroll which formed the cover illustration, but reproduction of illustrations is expensive, and the volume is none the worse for not being illustrated on the inside as well.
I cannot commend the book highly enough, and would add that the general interested reader will find it as much of a treat as the specialist; a scholarly but readable introduction goes a long way, too, in making this book a great pleasure to read.