of all knowledge into pre- and post-astronomy was not accepted by the
Kaitokudo, but his empiricist secularism found new bases. Yamagata became
head of a branch house of a big Osaka merchant, where mathematical and
financial specialists were becoming in-house intellectuals. One of these, Kaiho
Seiryo, built an empirical science upon the accounts of the great Osaka mer-
chant houses and his travels to witness their operations. Kaiho was a veritable
Adam Smith.^38 He equated li (principle) with the balance point of an exchange,
recognizing a natural law governing buying and selling which is accessible by
rational calculation. Everything is a commodity and has its exchange value. In
the style of the radicals of the European Enlightenment, Kaiho rejected meta-
physics in favor a materialist monism, critiquing as well Confucian tradition-
alism and the simplistic ethical maxims of the samurai class. Stratification is
the result of historical conditions, he said, as can be seen by the fact that there
are no classes among the Ainu of Hokkaido. Workers are best motivated by
incentives rather than punishment. With Kaiho, we have class-conscious advo-
cacy combined with analytical secularism.
By the generation of the early 1800s, the Kaitokudo had become upstaged
by even more militant offshoots. A former pupil, Oshio Heihachiro, led his
own small school of some 20 pupils in setting fire to Osaka in 1837 in an
effort to provoke a general uprising against the bakufu. Another descendant
of the Baien-Yamagata lineage, Ogata Koan, founded the Tekijuku in 1838
close by the Kaitokudo, as a school of Dutch Learning devoted to Western
medical science. From this school came many of the militants and intellectual
leaders of the Meiji restoration, including Fukazawa Yukichi, who introduced
Western liberalism and positivism in the 1860s.
Until the mid-1800s, these Osaka lineages were out of the mainstream of
attention, which remained focused at Kyoto and Edo. The more spectacular
success in the attention space broke off from the Ito Jinsai and Sorai networks.
In the familiar dialectic of creative innovation, this move now took a contrary
direction. The pseudo-conservatives of the Japanese Enlightenment were calling
forth an opposition of genuinely reactionary conservatism. To set the stage,
we must consider the fact that Sorai separated public and private spheres: that
is to say, public issues of law were to be treated by different standards than
private matters of ethical belief. Thus, in the famous law case of 1702, when
47 ronin (masterless samurai) avenged the death of their former lord by killing
one of the shogun’s officials, Sorai held that their adherence to the samurai
code of ethics was irrelevant, and they should be punished for breaking the
public law.^39 Sorai’s differentiation of intellectual realms went along with a
corresponding shift in the structure of education as well. The teaching of
non-orthodox religious doctrines was condoned, so long as it took place in
private schools. In his own school, specialization emerged between those
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 363