Papers by David Mervart
The Historical Journal, 2020
The article offers a case study in the nature of uses of the European past in East Asia at a time... more The article offers a case study in the nature of uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool – alongside the long-established Sinological erudition – for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to the medical and astronomical manuals of the occidentals but also to their histories. The translation-cum-commentary Miscellanea from the western seas by Yamamura Saisuke (1801) is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as the European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent, while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan now exposed to the dynamics of the global European presence.
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2018
Global Intellectual History, 2018
The essay is framed by the story of an early translation of the metaphorical expression “republic... more The essay is framed by the story of an early translation of the metaphorical expression “republic of letters” into an East Asian language. The story itself—reconstructed from primary archival materials—is then used as an illustration of the processes of transmission, translation, and communication that brought into existence something like a republic of letters on a Eurasia-wide scale.
Although scholarly consensus is no longer marked by the uncritical acceptance of the description of Tokugawa Japan as a “closed country,” the trope of isolationism continues not just to shape the popular awareness of the period, but to determine disciplinary agendas. This is particularly true of the disciplinary culture of intellectual history, which has mostly taken “Japanese thought” for its self-evident object.
Yet, in the face of considerable geopolitical and logistical odds, by the eighteenth century there was a quite densely interconnected sphere of textual culture that can be seen as Eurasian in its scope. Japan was part of this network to such an extent that the trope of a “closed country” is unfitting to characterize the intellectual activity of the early modern period.
This micro-historical study of a particular translation’s conditions of possibility is an attempt to demonstrate how we could do intellectual history differently, in this case by recasting Japan as a nodal point within a Eurasian network of the transmission of texts, metaphors, and imaginaries that partook in the generation of knowledge.
With the rise and rise of mainland China over the recent decades, both economic and geopolitical,... more With the rise and rise of mainland China over the recent decades, both economic and geopolitical, pundits have increasingly come to remind us that once upon a time what we now call China was the centre of a world. The implication invariably is that just like the historical China was once a centre of global gravity, its current trajectory may be expected to bring today’s China inexorably back into the centre of the global order from which it only briefly abstained itself for a few recent centuries.
When making such conjectures, we assume we safely know what China is and where. But what is this “China”, Zhongguo or Zhonghua, the “Land of the Middle” or “Central Civilisation”, as it is famously called in its native version? It certainly has the claim to centrality in its very name. Yet the name was emphatically not established as a geographic or ethnic label for a territorial state or a nation. Rather, it represented a bold normative claim, a universalist assertion of value. It resembles such lofty epithets as “the Land of the Free”, “the new Rome”, or “Zion” in that it is above all an aspirational title. Historically, the gravitational pull that has constituted what some have called “the Sinosphere” was due to this aspirational universal moral claim more than it was the result of an actual geopolitical hegemony over the neighbouring region.
Thus, until the twentieth century and the arrival on the stage of that brave new invention, the nation, neither territory nor ethnicity really defined “China”. But if it was the aspirational moral universalism that did, then the “Land of the Middle” could in principle occur anywhere. Just like a “new Rome” may not be found anywhere near the Tiber, a “Zion” may not lie in Jerusalem, and “the Land of the Free” may cease to be the synonym of the US and shift to some other polity that comes to more convincingly embody that treasured moral value.
A situated view from the neighbourhood may help to clarify this confusing situation. Well embedded in the broader Sinosphere through a complex history of negotiating its relations to the succession of dynastic empires that came and went on the mainland, the Japanese archipelago has long been the locus of discussions about the meaning and purpose of their claim to represent the “Middle Kingdom”. Indeed, in terms of statehood and asserted or wished cultural identity, “Japan” has defined itself for most of its history by acknowledging, denying, emulating or arrogating that claim to centrality. We can understand something about what “China” has meant by mapping Japanese aspirations to be China.
The underlying concern of this article is with the function and purpose of the normative imaginar... more The underlying concern of this article is with the function and purpose of the normative imaginary of ‘China’, Chugoku (Zhongguo) or Chuka (Zhonghua) in the Japanese discourse up to and around the mid-nineteenth century; namely, how it was deployed to make sense of the historical situation facing the contemporaries amid the combined internal and external crises and how it structured the range of options available to them. To exemplify this, I first turn to the debate of the shape of the polity that straddled the critical decades of 1850s 1860s. The self-conscious restoration of a past political ideal was the ostensible justification of the revolutionary overhaul, but in terms of the models of polity, there existed very different versions and understandings of what past could or should be restored. In the classical conceptual language of politics, the choice was between the hōken and gunken model. While the year 1871 saw a closure that cast Meiji as a gunken revolution, the debate continued beyond and the shift of preferences from hōken to gunken needs to be explained. In arguing for Meiji as a ‘Chinese revolution’, we can further point to the surprising degree of overlap between the concerns of earlier Edo-period commentators and the actual factors of the revolution when it finally arrived. Lastly, the normative imaginary of China is shown to have served as the key mediating filter for processing and appropriating the West both before and after the Meiji revolution.
Journal of History of European Ideas, 2009
By offering an apology of Japan's closed country policy, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) was contr... more By offering an apology of Japan's closed country policy, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) was contributing not so much to the literature of exotic journey record, but rather to the field of European political and moral theory, and importantly to the debate over the relative merits of ancient and modern societies and effects of international commerce. There is a marked lack of scholarly attention given to Kaempfer as a modestly interesting political theorist, compared to a substantial body of research praising his record as a scientifically minded observer of remote cultures. As a deceptively straightforward specimen of the genre of travelogue, and also because it has tended to be treated mostly as a pioneering attempt in western Japanese studies, Kaempfer's work has not generally been considered in its relation to the debate on Europe’s own moral and political predicament. When it has, the emphasis tended to be on the influence his work exercised on the enlightened European mind and its awareness of alien cultures, rather than on the extent to which the moral and political questions he sought to answer regarding Japan’s situation were in fact standard questions formulated within the wider European debate on commerce and government. This paper hopes to correct the imbalance by placing Kaempfer's argument into the context of such contrasting contemporaneous positions as those represented, respectively, by Joseph Addison's view of global commerce in The Spectator and by François Fénelon's vision of the ideal commonwealth of Salente in his Aventures de Télemaque.
Chapters by David Mervart
Since notions like ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, or ‘public’ emerged from European history as linchpins ... more Since notions like ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, or ‘public’ emerged from European history as linchpins of normative theories of politics that claim universal validity, other complex moral and political discourses, like those of pre-modern China or Japan, which historically held equally universal normative appeal, have been scanned for the seeds of concepts for which they lacked even a vocabulary, like ‘civil society’, ‘public sphere’, or ‘free market.’ In order to address this bias inherent in the very tools of our analysis, we might—as a counterfactual exercise—choose to bracket off the contingent fact of the geopolitical imbalance of power that historically caused the process of conceptual translation to go predominantly one way rather than the other, and attempt to deploy the normative vocabularies originating in East Asia to see how that could affect the description and valuation of forms of government.
In this effort, we can draw not least on some nineteenth-century Japanese and Chinese authors who enlisted preexisting ‘indigenous’ concepts to account for the new realities generated by an intensified engagement with the West. This allows us to catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar political landscape structured by different conceptual optics. On a particular example of the actual historical deployments of the conceptual pair fengjian/junxian (J: hōken/gunken) this case study supports the general argument by proposing one such alternative snapshot. The purpose of such an exercise is not to offer a challenge to liberal democracy in the name of ‘Asian values,’ but to challenge insufficient methodologies and lack of conceptual imagination in intellectual history of politics and possibly in political science in general.
Digital platforms by David Mervart
15past15, 2019
David Mervart traces the entanglements of foreign trade and book collecting in so-called “closed ... more David Mervart traces the entanglements of foreign trade and book collecting in so-called “closed Japan”, and the ways that Japanese translators came to conceive of—and embody—the republic of letters. Interviewed by Martin Dusinberre and Birgit Tremml Werner at Universität Zürich.
The podcast series is part of the outreach accompanying the collaborative research project “East Asian Uses of the European Past” funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) framework of the European Commission.
Reviews by David Mervart
International Journal of Asian Studies, 2019
What is the relationship between the trend towards global history and the language-specific, loca... more What is the relationship between the trend towards global history and the language-specific, localized historical expertise of so-called “area studies”? How do historians of non-European societies face the challenge of global history? What kind of research agenda does the desideratum of a “global” history translate into, especially beyond the staple tale of European expansion? These types of questions brought together renowned East Asia historians from Fudan University in Shanghai, the University of Tokyo, and Princeton University in a series of conferences that have culminated in the reviewed publication. The outcome of these three-way engagements, the edited volume is one of the – in total three – sister publications ambitiously produced in a parallel manner in Japanese, Chinese and English.
Social Science Japan Journal, 2010
Paramore's book is a new take on the role of the anti-Christian discourse in early modern Japan b... more Paramore's book is a new take on the role of the anti-Christian discourse in early modern Japan but also a stimulating case study of the more general issues of the complex interplay between religious discourses and the construction of the modern categories of political legitimacy and national identity. Along the way, it questions to what extent any historical process identifiable as 'modernity' is correctly described as pointing towards or inherently connected with a movement towards the 'secular'. In contrast to the standard format of an intellectual biography or a commented translation of a single author's text, common among studies of Japanese intellectual history, Paramore opts for an ambitious sweep, covering in effect three centuries. He starts before the beginning of the Tokugawa era at the end of the 16th century and traces his theme well into the Meiji period at the end of the 19th century.
Talks by David Mervart
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, 2021
This talk proposes to take stock of the conceptual vocabulary which early Japanese observers and ... more This talk proposes to take stock of the conceptual vocabulary which early Japanese observers and commentators resorted to when trying to describe and understand the historical trajectory of what we now so self-evidently perceive as an ‘imperial’ expansion of the western powers’ dominion around the world.
By the late eighteenth century, there existed a well-established convention to translate western modes of universal sovereignty (Kayzer, Caesar, Tsar, Imperator) into the equally universalist nomenclature of the post-classical Chinese political theology. By extension, it had become perfectly possible to speak of an ‘emperor-land’ (Ch: diguo; J: teikoku) as a general type of polity. Yet, despite these conditions of translatability by means of such comparative political vocabulary, curiously, the expansion of European powers over the globe was not described in the language of Sino-Japanese equivalent of ‘empire’.
Given that Japanese commentators did not see the conquest and settlement of the non-European world as an instance of empire, what conceptual vocabulary did they use? Which is really to ask: What class of known historical events serving as a general precedent did they suggest the exploits of the Occidentals to be an intuitive instance of? Querying a range of primary sources from the 1790s–1840s, this talk will try to offer some answers while sketching an alternative, historically documented way of articulating the ‘age of empire’.
By inertia, we continue studying and referring to European and East Asian historiographical “trad... more By inertia, we continue studying and referring to European and East Asian historiographical “traditions” as if they were separate worlds sealed off from one another. Yet, even prior to 1800s, there had long existed a dense network of textual connections that crisscrossed the urban centers of the old world and new and drew them together in a sort of Eurasian Republic of Letters. On three short case studies this talk documents how this traffic in texts affected historiographical production and horizons of historical awareness on both ends of Eurasia in complex ways that are not helpfully described in the language of “impact” or “influence”. These cases, far from unique of isolated, include: a Madrid-based Augustinian friar whose footnotes lead to a Persian history of China; a khan of Khiva whose genealogical history of the “Tartars” becomes a favourite reference of Edward Gibbon or Adam Ferguson; or a young samurai retainer in Tokugawa Japan whose philological expertise in both Dutch and classical Chinese led him to the discovery of how queen Dido taught the Occidentals the trick of establishing colonies.
The early preoccupation with the shapes and partitioning of European history in Japan was driven ... more The early preoccupation with the shapes and partitioning of European history in Japan was driven by a mixture of pedantic antiquarianism, amused ethnographic curiosity and a modicum of demand for geopolitical intelligence rather than by the considerably later arrival of the diplomatic gunboats of the western powers in mid-nineteenth century. As in the course of the eighteenth century the Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool—alongside the long-established Sinological erudition—for accessing information and generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the archipelago began to read and use not only medical or astronomical manuals of the Occidentals but also their histories.
Japanese intellectuals harnessed Sinitic writing for a wide range of work. Questioning the artifi... more Japanese intellectuals harnessed Sinitic writing for a wide range of work. Questioning the artificial modern/premodern divide, the panel showcases influential texts from various genres – poetry, stylistic primer, political treatise –, their intertextual webs, and their cultural and political impact.
In Europe, a relatively new type of concern entered the field of vision of political theory from ... more In Europe, a relatively new type of concern entered the field of vision of political theory from the end of 17th century on. When John Locke or Dudley North argued in England’s parliament that no deployment of legislative and executive power could or should try to bring down the natural rate of interest on loans, they preceded more systematic formulations of the observation in the works of Montesquieu or James Steuart. The economic system had now reached such level of complexity, these authors were able to claim, that it de facto precluded excesses of arbitrary tampering by however capricious a ruler, by imposing natural constraints on what was possible to achieve politically in face of the interconnected markets.
In Japan, within the established genre of writings of advice on government of which Sorai’s Seidan was an early representative example, a very similar argument came to be made. Although the default framework was a moral critique of commerce and the luxurious dissipation it brought, part of the analysis of the state of the polity indeed was a practical observation, formulated into a theoretical proposition, that the complex and interconnected workings of the commercial economy rendered some ordinances unenforceable and some types of action from the position of political power self-defeating. Even though the power of the rulers ostensibly remained unchallenged, it was being redescribed as limited by the exigencies of the commercial complex which could not be ignored. I explore this line of argument from Ogyū Sorai to Kaiho Seiryō.
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Papers by David Mervart
Although scholarly consensus is no longer marked by the uncritical acceptance of the description of Tokugawa Japan as a “closed country,” the trope of isolationism continues not just to shape the popular awareness of the period, but to determine disciplinary agendas. This is particularly true of the disciplinary culture of intellectual history, which has mostly taken “Japanese thought” for its self-evident object.
Yet, in the face of considerable geopolitical and logistical odds, by the eighteenth century there was a quite densely interconnected sphere of textual culture that can be seen as Eurasian in its scope. Japan was part of this network to such an extent that the trope of a “closed country” is unfitting to characterize the intellectual activity of the early modern period.
This micro-historical study of a particular translation’s conditions of possibility is an attempt to demonstrate how we could do intellectual history differently, in this case by recasting Japan as a nodal point within a Eurasian network of the transmission of texts, metaphors, and imaginaries that partook in the generation of knowledge.
When making such conjectures, we assume we safely know what China is and where. But what is this “China”, Zhongguo or Zhonghua, the “Land of the Middle” or “Central Civilisation”, as it is famously called in its native version? It certainly has the claim to centrality in its very name. Yet the name was emphatically not established as a geographic or ethnic label for a territorial state or a nation. Rather, it represented a bold normative claim, a universalist assertion of value. It resembles such lofty epithets as “the Land of the Free”, “the new Rome”, or “Zion” in that it is above all an aspirational title. Historically, the gravitational pull that has constituted what some have called “the Sinosphere” was due to this aspirational universal moral claim more than it was the result of an actual geopolitical hegemony over the neighbouring region.
Thus, until the twentieth century and the arrival on the stage of that brave new invention, the nation, neither territory nor ethnicity really defined “China”. But if it was the aspirational moral universalism that did, then the “Land of the Middle” could in principle occur anywhere. Just like a “new Rome” may not be found anywhere near the Tiber, a “Zion” may not lie in Jerusalem, and “the Land of the Free” may cease to be the synonym of the US and shift to some other polity that comes to more convincingly embody that treasured moral value.
A situated view from the neighbourhood may help to clarify this confusing situation. Well embedded in the broader Sinosphere through a complex history of negotiating its relations to the succession of dynastic empires that came and went on the mainland, the Japanese archipelago has long been the locus of discussions about the meaning and purpose of their claim to represent the “Middle Kingdom”. Indeed, in terms of statehood and asserted or wished cultural identity, “Japan” has defined itself for most of its history by acknowledging, denying, emulating or arrogating that claim to centrality. We can understand something about what “China” has meant by mapping Japanese aspirations to be China.
Chapters by David Mervart
In this effort, we can draw not least on some nineteenth-century Japanese and Chinese authors who enlisted preexisting ‘indigenous’ concepts to account for the new realities generated by an intensified engagement with the West. This allows us to catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar political landscape structured by different conceptual optics. On a particular example of the actual historical deployments of the conceptual pair fengjian/junxian (J: hōken/gunken) this case study supports the general argument by proposing one such alternative snapshot. The purpose of such an exercise is not to offer a challenge to liberal democracy in the name of ‘Asian values,’ but to challenge insufficient methodologies and lack of conceptual imagination in intellectual history of politics and possibly in political science in general.
Digital platforms by David Mervart
The podcast series is part of the outreach accompanying the collaborative research project “East Asian Uses of the European Past” funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) framework of the European Commission.
Reviews by David Mervart
Talks by David Mervart
By the late eighteenth century, there existed a well-established convention to translate western modes of universal sovereignty (Kayzer, Caesar, Tsar, Imperator) into the equally universalist nomenclature of the post-classical Chinese political theology. By extension, it had become perfectly possible to speak of an ‘emperor-land’ (Ch: diguo; J: teikoku) as a general type of polity. Yet, despite these conditions of translatability by means of such comparative political vocabulary, curiously, the expansion of European powers over the globe was not described in the language of Sino-Japanese equivalent of ‘empire’.
Given that Japanese commentators did not see the conquest and settlement of the non-European world as an instance of empire, what conceptual vocabulary did they use? Which is really to ask: What class of known historical events serving as a general precedent did they suggest the exploits of the Occidentals to be an intuitive instance of? Querying a range of primary sources from the 1790s–1840s, this talk will try to offer some answers while sketching an alternative, historically documented way of articulating the ‘age of empire’.
In Japan, within the established genre of writings of advice on government of which Sorai’s Seidan was an early representative example, a very similar argument came to be made. Although the default framework was a moral critique of commerce and the luxurious dissipation it brought, part of the analysis of the state of the polity indeed was a practical observation, formulated into a theoretical proposition, that the complex and interconnected workings of the commercial economy rendered some ordinances unenforceable and some types of action from the position of political power self-defeating. Even though the power of the rulers ostensibly remained unchallenged, it was being redescribed as limited by the exigencies of the commercial complex which could not be ignored. I explore this line of argument from Ogyū Sorai to Kaiho Seiryō.
Although scholarly consensus is no longer marked by the uncritical acceptance of the description of Tokugawa Japan as a “closed country,” the trope of isolationism continues not just to shape the popular awareness of the period, but to determine disciplinary agendas. This is particularly true of the disciplinary culture of intellectual history, which has mostly taken “Japanese thought” for its self-evident object.
Yet, in the face of considerable geopolitical and logistical odds, by the eighteenth century there was a quite densely interconnected sphere of textual culture that can be seen as Eurasian in its scope. Japan was part of this network to such an extent that the trope of a “closed country” is unfitting to characterize the intellectual activity of the early modern period.
This micro-historical study of a particular translation’s conditions of possibility is an attempt to demonstrate how we could do intellectual history differently, in this case by recasting Japan as a nodal point within a Eurasian network of the transmission of texts, metaphors, and imaginaries that partook in the generation of knowledge.
When making such conjectures, we assume we safely know what China is and where. But what is this “China”, Zhongguo or Zhonghua, the “Land of the Middle” or “Central Civilisation”, as it is famously called in its native version? It certainly has the claim to centrality in its very name. Yet the name was emphatically not established as a geographic or ethnic label for a territorial state or a nation. Rather, it represented a bold normative claim, a universalist assertion of value. It resembles such lofty epithets as “the Land of the Free”, “the new Rome”, or “Zion” in that it is above all an aspirational title. Historically, the gravitational pull that has constituted what some have called “the Sinosphere” was due to this aspirational universal moral claim more than it was the result of an actual geopolitical hegemony over the neighbouring region.
Thus, until the twentieth century and the arrival on the stage of that brave new invention, the nation, neither territory nor ethnicity really defined “China”. But if it was the aspirational moral universalism that did, then the “Land of the Middle” could in principle occur anywhere. Just like a “new Rome” may not be found anywhere near the Tiber, a “Zion” may not lie in Jerusalem, and “the Land of the Free” may cease to be the synonym of the US and shift to some other polity that comes to more convincingly embody that treasured moral value.
A situated view from the neighbourhood may help to clarify this confusing situation. Well embedded in the broader Sinosphere through a complex history of negotiating its relations to the succession of dynastic empires that came and went on the mainland, the Japanese archipelago has long been the locus of discussions about the meaning and purpose of their claim to represent the “Middle Kingdom”. Indeed, in terms of statehood and asserted or wished cultural identity, “Japan” has defined itself for most of its history by acknowledging, denying, emulating or arrogating that claim to centrality. We can understand something about what “China” has meant by mapping Japanese aspirations to be China.
In this effort, we can draw not least on some nineteenth-century Japanese and Chinese authors who enlisted preexisting ‘indigenous’ concepts to account for the new realities generated by an intensified engagement with the West. This allows us to catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar political landscape structured by different conceptual optics. On a particular example of the actual historical deployments of the conceptual pair fengjian/junxian (J: hōken/gunken) this case study supports the general argument by proposing one such alternative snapshot. The purpose of such an exercise is not to offer a challenge to liberal democracy in the name of ‘Asian values,’ but to challenge insufficient methodologies and lack of conceptual imagination in intellectual history of politics and possibly in political science in general.
The podcast series is part of the outreach accompanying the collaborative research project “East Asian Uses of the European Past” funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) framework of the European Commission.
By the late eighteenth century, there existed a well-established convention to translate western modes of universal sovereignty (Kayzer, Caesar, Tsar, Imperator) into the equally universalist nomenclature of the post-classical Chinese political theology. By extension, it had become perfectly possible to speak of an ‘emperor-land’ (Ch: diguo; J: teikoku) as a general type of polity. Yet, despite these conditions of translatability by means of such comparative political vocabulary, curiously, the expansion of European powers over the globe was not described in the language of Sino-Japanese equivalent of ‘empire’.
Given that Japanese commentators did not see the conquest and settlement of the non-European world as an instance of empire, what conceptual vocabulary did they use? Which is really to ask: What class of known historical events serving as a general precedent did they suggest the exploits of the Occidentals to be an intuitive instance of? Querying a range of primary sources from the 1790s–1840s, this talk will try to offer some answers while sketching an alternative, historically documented way of articulating the ‘age of empire’.
In Japan, within the established genre of writings of advice on government of which Sorai’s Seidan was an early representative example, a very similar argument came to be made. Although the default framework was a moral critique of commerce and the luxurious dissipation it brought, part of the analysis of the state of the polity indeed was a practical observation, formulated into a theoretical proposition, that the complex and interconnected workings of the commercial economy rendered some ordinances unenforceable and some types of action from the position of political power self-defeating. Even though the power of the rulers ostensibly remained unchallenged, it was being redescribed as limited by the exigencies of the commercial complex which could not be ignored. I explore this line of argument from Ogyū Sorai to Kaiho Seiryō.
Le genre et la forme typique des écrits ‘confucianistes’ Japonais traitant d'une manière pratique de l’économie politique et du gouvernement, c’est un projet de reformes, addressé à un haut responsable de kôgi, des autorités à Edo, comme c’est le cas dans les trois textes choisis pour l’illustration de l’argument, Seidan de Sorai (1726), Sôbô kigen de Nakai Chikuzan (1789), et d’un example beaucoup moins connu, Kyûjisaku de Ôtsuka Takatake (1787). Il y a une tendence commune à tous ces textes, malgré les différences entre leurs auteurs sur les questions de l’interprétation des classiques. Ils prennent leur point de départ dans la prémisse ostensible que le gouvernement du jour s’est justement voué aux principes du règne virtueux pour la bienfaisance de toute la tenka, tout le royaume sous les cieux. Mais dans la mesure où la réalité politique du monde Tokugawa soit bien loin des concepts confucianistes, de parler comme si ce n’était pas le cas, c’est déja un acte politique en soi. En fait, c’est imposer la confiance, ostensiblement, aux dirigeants qui n’ont plus de contrôle des termes normatives dans lesquels on la leur a imposée. C’est fixer, d’une manière, les limites du possible quant aux buts et moyens de l’éxercice de pouvoir politique.