Aizawa Seishisai Portrait Ibaraki Prefectural Museum of History

, born , was a Japanese samurai (retainer of the Mito Domain) and a nationalist thinker of the Mito school during the

late shogunate period was the final years of the Edo period when the Tokugawa shogunate ended. Between 1853 and 1867, Japan ended its isolationist foreign policy known as and changed from a feudal Tokugawa shogunate to the modern empire of the Meiji government. ...

. In 1799 he became involved in the compilation of the ''

Dai Nihon-shi The ''Dai Nihonshi'' (大日本史), literally ''History of Great Japan'', is a book on the history of Japan. It was begun in the 17th century, during the Edo period, by Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the head of the Mito branch of the Tokugawa family. Aft ...

'' (Great History of Japan) being undertaken by the Mito school. In 1825 he wrote his ''Shinron'' ("New Theses"), a collection of essays that dealt with issues such as Tokugawa defence policy and how the ships were a threat to Japan. Aizawa also tried to describe conditions in the West and theorize why those states had gained so much control; in his opinion Westerners used religion to inculcate conformity in the masses. He also claimed that

Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...

was used by the colonial powers to subvert native cultures and governments by creating a fifth column that would collaborate with and facilitate military conquest by Europeans. He discussed the religious policies established by the Toyotomi government and continued by their successors, the

Tokugawa shogunate The Tokugawa shogunate (, Japanese 徳川幕府 ''Tokugawa bakufu''), also known as the , was the military government of Japan during the Edo period from 1603 to 1868. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)"''Tokugawa-jidai''"in ''Japan Encyclopedia ...

, in this context. Furthermore, he believed that if Japan's way of life was to survive, it would need to take up its own state religion in order to prevent

cultural assimilation Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assume the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially. The different types of cultural ass ...

via Christianization and discussed the concept of ''

kokutai is a concept in the Japanese language translatable as " system of government", "sovereignty", "national identity, essence and character", "national polity; body politic; national entity; basis for the Emperor's sovereignty; Japanese constitu ...

'' ("national polity") in this context. The ''Shinron'' would become an important work for the '' sonnō jōi'' movement and his theory of the Kokutai would be developed by future thinkers.Wakabayashi In 1840 Aizawa became the first head of professors of the Mito school's ''Kōdōkan'' but was forced to resign in 1844 when

Tokugawa Nariaki Tokugawa Nariaki (徳川斉昭, April 4, 1800 – September 29, 1860) was a prominent Japanese ''daimyō'' who ruled the Mito Domain (now Ibaraki Prefecture) and contributed to the rise of nationalism and the Meiji Restoration. Biography C ...

resigned as domain leader. He later returned to the ''Kōdōkan''.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Seishisai, Aizawa 1781 births 1863 deaths Samurai Japanese nationalists Anti-Christian sentiment Japanese educators 19th-century Japanese philosophers Writers from Ibaraki Prefecture Japanese Confucianists

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