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A new translation of Kumazawa Banzan's (1619-1691) Responding to the Great Learning, the first major writing on political economy in early modern Japan.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I: 1. The heaven-decreed duty of the people's ruler; 2. The heaven-decreed duty of the people's ministers; 3. Revering good counsel; 4. A grand project for growing wealth; 5. Eliminating anxieties over flooding and relieving droughts; 6. Preparing for northern barbarians, emergencies, and bad harvests; 7. Filling Shogunal coffers with gold, silver, rice, and grain; 8. Eliminating debt from the realm below heaven; 9. Helping R¿nin, vagrants, the unemployed, and the impoverished; 10. Making mountains luxuriant and rivers run deep; Part II: 11. The ebb and flow of the ruler's blessings; 12. Returning to the old farmer-Samurai society; 13. Eliminating landless income and increasing new fiefs; 14. Lowering the cost of foreign silk and textiles; 15. Eliminating Christianity; 16. Reviving Buddhism; 17. Reviving Shint¿; 18. Worthy rulers reviving Japan; 19. Governing with education; 20. Those who should teach in our schools ; 21..A little kindness provides benefits; 22. Wasted rice and grain; Bibliography.
About the author
John A. Tucker is a professor of history at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He specializes in early modern Japanese Confucianism and its varied roles in the intellectual history of Japan. He is the author of The Forty-Seven Rōnin: The Vendetta in History (2018), as well as translation studies of Itō Jinsai's Gomō jigi (1998) and Ogyū Sorai's Bendō and Benmei (2006). He co-edited Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy (2014) with Chun-chieh Huang, and edited a four-volume series, Critical Readings on Japanese Confucianism (2013).
Summary
The first major work on political economy in early modern Japanese history, Kumazawa Banzan's (1619-1691) Responding to the Great Learning, translated unabridged, features incisive commentary on this pivotal work and its controversial author within the context of broader historical and intellectual developments in East Asian Confucian thought.
