Ryohei Noguchi 'Biographies of Bakumatsu Figures: Exclusion and Opening of the Country' Episode 2: Hikokuro Takayama (3)

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3

The thought and culture of the Japanese archipelago are characterized by a weakness in the power to conceive of a utopia. Even when feeling contradictions in the real world, people's attention is captured by various constraints of reality, and there is a lack of tradition in imagining an ideal world and creating and nurturing a yardstick by which the structure of the real world can be fundamentally criticized.

However, in the archipelago from the 18th to the 19th century, the seeds of utopian imaginative power were nurtured in a way that had not existed in past history.

One of the sources for this was the experience of castaways, starting with Kodayu Daikokuya. In order to survive together in unfamiliar lands, they realized that status-based customs were useless, and they devised new ways of associating with others, learning humbly from anyone who possessed the skills to live there. When they entered into relationships with foreigners locally, they also cultivated the ability to discern that there were customs and systems different from those of the archipelago.

Another source is the imperial loyalist thought supported by the imagination of beliefs and myths passed down from ancient times in various regions of the archipelago.
A society connected to the conditions of each region of the archipelago, different from the Tokugawa-led status-based society, once existed and can be created again.
Ancestor worship is positioned as a fiction that supports this belief, and the concept of imperial loyalty is positioned as another fiction that supports that.
The Takayama family, and Hikokuro, were connected to this context.

In March of the first year of Meiwa (1764), 18-year-old Hikokuro left a note for his grandfather, ran away from his hometown, and went to Kyoto for study. This was the beginning of a long history of travel.

At this time, many scholars headed to Edo, a place of fame and profit close to power, so Hikokuro, who aimed straight for Kyoto, was unique. The interest that gripped him was not 'fame and profit' to succeed in current society, but 'meibun' (moral duty/status), in other words, the basis for the legitimacy of power and rule.

There are correct and incorrect forms of power and rule. Correct politics is not military rule that threatens and controls the people with force, but civil rule where people cooperate across status lines and govern the world with the power of learning.
The place to resist the system and learn the fundamentals of civil rule must be Kyoto, where the Imperial Palace, the original center of civil rule, is located. That is what Hikokuro thought.

Sanjō Bridge The anecdote that Hikokuro, upon arriving at , sat on the ground and knelt in worship toward the Imperial Palace is recorded by Rai Sanyo (1780-1832) ('Biography of Hikokuro Takayama', a short biography in classical Chinese based on stories heard from his father Shunsui, who was an acquaintance of Hikokuro).

It is said that even when passersby gathered and laughed in suspicion, Hikokuro did not look back at all.

The 'Dogeza' statue currently standing at the east end of Sanjo Ohashi Bridge was built with this anecdote as its image source, but the gesture of throwing one's whole body onto the ground in front of another person was likely not eccentric to him, but a very natural expression of respect, regardless of who the other person was.

*Header: Current Kyoto Sanjo Ohashi Bridge*

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