Songs of the Righteous Spirit: “Men of High Purpose” and Their ...

Songs of the Righteous Spirit:“Men of High Purpose” and TheirChinese Poetry in Modern JapanMAT THEW FR ALEIGHBrandeis UniversityThe term “men of high purpose” (shishi 志 士 ) is most commonlyassociated with a diverse group of men active in a widerange of pro-imperial and nationalist causes in mid-nineteenth- centuryJapan.1 In a broader sense, the category of shishi embraces not onlymen of scholarly inclination, such as Fujita Tōko 藤 田 東 湖 , SakumaShōzan 佐 久 間 象 山 , and Yoshida Shōin 吉 田 松 陰 , but also the lesseru dite samurai militants who were involved in political assas sinations,attacks on foreigners, and full-fledged warfare from the 1850s throughthe 1870s. Before the Meiji Restoration, the targets of shishi activismincluded rival domains and the Tokugawa shogunate; after 1868, somedisaffected shishi identified a new enemy in the early Meiji oligarchy (agroup that was itself composed of many former shishi). Although theyI have presented portions of my work on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the Associationfor Asian Studies, Boston, March 27, 2007, as well as at colloquia at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, and Brandeis University. On each occasion, I have benefited fromthe comments and questions of audience members. I would also like to thank in particularthe two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose detailed comments have beenimmensely helpful.1I use Thomas Huber’s translation of the term shishi as “men of high purpose”; hisarticle provides an excellent introduction to several major shishi actions in the 1860s. SeeThomas Huber, “Men of High Purpose: and the Politics of Direct Action, 1862–1864,” inConflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, ed. Tetsuo Najita and VictorKoschmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 107–27.Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute hJAs 69.1 (2009): 109–71 109