Japan's Ignored Anarchist: Andō Shōeki

When we think of Japan’s history, a rigid social hierarchy often comes to mind — samurai ruling over peasants, emperors commanding divine reverence, and an intricate web of duty and loyalty binding each person to their place. Though Japan has changed dramatically in the modern era, its reputation as a staunchly hierarchical and duty-​bound society remains. It is hardly a nation known for anarchism, which is mainly linked to Western thinkers. 

Most political ideologies focus on how to best govern a state, but anarchism questions whether states should exist. Anarchism describes a wide array of political theories advocating for the abolition of a hierarchical government and the spontaneous organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion.

There have been Japanese anarchists since the 20th century. Recently I have stumbled upon an even earlier example of Japanese anarchism in the writings of the 18th century radical philosopher: Andō Shōeki. 

Biography 

Little biographical information remains of Andō Shōeki. He was born in 1703, in modern-​day Akita, located along the northern coast of Japan. As a young man, he had intentions of becoming a monk, but abandoned them to practice medicine instead. Shōeki most likely studied in Kyoto, the country’s cultural capital. Eventually, he returned to Northern Japan with a wife and child to serve as a doctor in the Aomori Prefecture. While training as a physician, he developed a keen interest in Dutch culture, not only in the medical field, but in the norms of their society. This is about as much as we can learn about Shoeki from scholarship. To understand Shōeki, we must know the world in which he lived. 

Tokugawa, Japan

Shōeki lived during what is known as the Tokugawa era of Japanese history, characterized by prolonged peace, stability, and strict social order. On the one hand, Japanese culture and arts flourished, but, on the other, the government adhered to strict isolationist policies. Access to European cultural ideas was restricted, especially any materials directly related to Christianity. Though Japan developed a sizeable literate population, what they could read was tightly regulated.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Japanese warlords fought continuous civil wars until Tokugawa Ieyasu prevailed at the Battle of Sekigahara. Ieyasu established hegemony over most of Japan and was given the title shogun by the Emperor in 1603. Peace lasted, making the large numbers of formerly warlike samurai redundant. 400,000 or so samurai of various ranks became civil servants paid by local lords. 

They comprised about 5% of the Japanese population, while 80% were rice farmers, and the remainder were artisans and merchants. Subsequent Tokugawa shoguns formalized Japanese social classes in a strict hierarchy.

Book

One of Shōeki’s works that survives and has been translated to English by E.H Norman is entitled The Animal Court. Here, Shōeki criticizes every philosophy and religion that was culturally dominant in his era; for example, he condemned Confucianism and Buddhism as false doctrines which upheld aristocratic hierarchies. Shōeki believes none of these systems described the world as it actually is. Even more importantly, these ideas spread false doctrines that supported a small number of ruling elites at the expense of the majority of people.

Shōeki argued in favor of a new kind of society rooted in his concept of “Shizen,” which means naturalness. For Shōeki, a natural society is free from arbitrary authority and populated by equal individuals. 

Anti-​feudalism

Shōeki was also critical of the Tokugawa government because it maintained the culturally constructed hierarchy of feudalism. Sounding extremely postmodern for an isolated thinker in the 18th century, he believed the peasantry had been forced into an unnatural state of oppression upheld through the language and ideologies that supported the samurai warrior class.

Shōeki believed agricultural production was a legitimate and necessary use of human effort. But also that, rightly so, the samurai class did not partake in farming; instead, they reaped the benefits from the work of others. 

He thought that, before the advent of states and hierarchies, humans had no need for warfare, and the impulse to destroy others was absent. Ideas of political states and class were introduced by the samurai class, marking the beginning of what Shōeki dubbed “the world of law.”

The world of law, which Shōeki believed he was living under, was marked by war, disease, and widespread banditry. It is characterized by distinctions codified by law between the ruler and the ruled, creating an elaborate hierarchy that masks an economic system in which 95% of the population serves the needs of the 5% at the top. 

Though vaguely described, Shōeki believes humans can return to a natural order without oppression or exploitation. The primary method of doing so is acknowledging the fundamental equality of all humans and living without social distinctions.

Language 

Despite being from a culturally isolated archipelago two hundred years ago, Shōeki’s philosophy is, in some ways, comparable to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America as a land of equal yeomen farmers. In addition, despite their age, his writings are strikingly modern sounding. Particularly, on how language is manipulated to uphold power.

The categories of heaven and earth are fundamental to much of East Asian moral philosophy. Heaven and earth discriminate between high and low, something Shōeki could not abide. But Shōeki entirely rejected these two categories, not even deeming them acceptable as metaphoric references. For Shōeki, the idea of heaven often served as a false source of political authority for kings. Emperors’ imagined mandates from heaven do not give them the right to rule the earth, no matter how many Confucian scholars say so. 

It is difficult to read and appreciate Shōeki in English because he was so restless about language and rhetoric. Echoing Nietzsche’s concerns in the Genealogy of Morals, Shōeki argued that language acts as an ideological instrument for power, so the first step to attacking an existing political order would be through language. Borrowing in part from Daoism, Shōeki believed it was an artificial construction, one that served a functional necessity but, all too often became a vehicle for greed. 

Freedom 

Until the Meiji Restoration of the mid-​19th century, Japanese people did not have a word for freedom. As Japan underwent rapid modernization and encountered Western Ideas, the term jiyu was adopted from classical Chinese texts, which meant “acting according to one’s own will.” In Japan, this term was reinterpreted to align with Western concepts of political freedom and individual liberty.

Western ideas of political freedom often originated from doctrines of natural law. In Japan, a nation intellectually dominated by Confucianism and Buddhism, hierarchies were justified by nature, and individual rights were substituted for collective duties.

Shōeki was skeptical about narratives about nature and political power. He argued the only faculty nature gave humans was the ability for each individual to realize their ‘‘natural mean.’’ Shōeki’s idea is that naturalness is synonymous with an absence of artificial constructs, such as the feudal hierarchy. Though not an exact match with the commonly held Western idea of freedom as non-​interference Shōeki’s concept of naturalness is a precursor to the future Japanese political developments toward liberal ideas. 

Shōeki was also somewhat of a monist. This is the belief that all things are one and that no dualities exist. For example, there is no light or darkness, both coexist manifesting in different ways. Shōeki believed nature was one unified whole, and humanity was similar. He wrote, “You should not look for friends. That is because there is no human being who is not your friend.” He believed the strife and misery of humanity was a result of discrimination built into states.

This might sound a bit far out, saying we are all one. However, it is not too far from Western home truths such as the Biblical example of humanist Monism is Galatians, which reads, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Legacy 

Records report that Shōeki had a small local following for whom he wrote voluminous books and gave lectures. In the 1920s, the Japanese philosopher Kanō Kōkichi rediscovered Andō Shōeki’s works in an antiquarian bookstore. Kanō donated Shōeki’s work to the University of Tokyo, but disaster struck in 1923, when an earthquake destroyed the majority of Shōeki’s writings . 

Though surviving manuscripts were discovered, Japan’s political climate of ultra-​nationalism from the 1930s until 1945 meant few would indulge a subversive philosopher who preached human equality. Only after the conclusion of the Second World War did Canadian diplomat and historian E.H Norman rediscover Shōeki, and write about his ideas primarily in “Andō Shōeki and the Anatomy of Japanese Feudalism,” published in 1949.

But, in the 1950s, Norman was accused of being a Communist, mainly because of his involvement with certain societies during his university years. After moving stations and countries in numerous occasions in his quest to avoid further tensions, he ended up taking his own life. He left behind three written testimonies of innocence. With Norman’s name being tied to such a tragic event, his works went understudied in the U.S, however he continued to be cited as a respected scholar in Japan. In recent decades, both Norman and, as a consequence, Shōeki’s works have seen a new wave of scholarship in English. 

I am no expert and am merely reading the currently available scholarship. But no libertarian I am aware of has ever heard of Andō Shōeki, so I might be the first to voice an opinion. It is impossible to give any modern political label to a historical figure retroactively, but at the minimum, Shōeki’s works reflect a deep skepticism of the state’s legitimacy. Shōeki’s goal is to abolish warrior classes in favor of a society of equals productively working alongside one another.

His vision is very similar to that of the 20th-​century German Franz Oppenheimer, the subject of a previous episode. An anthropologist, Oppenheimer, believed states were not a result of consent or convenience. They were the fruits of conquest. Early statehood came with the power to tax subjects, solidifying a relationship of economic exploitation. Oppenheimer and Shōeki believed the birth of statehood was the birth of exploitation. Shōeki argued much the same; with the separation of classes came forced obligations and double standards. For example, the Tokugawa era nobles looked down on the merchant and peasant class’s work as menial, despite relying on their labor to subsist for their samurai and rule their territory. 

Franz Oppenheimer’s theory of the “political means” versus the “economic means” is similar to Shōeki’s view of the ruling class as exploiters who produced nothing of value but lived parasitically on the labor of others.

His work proves that Japan is no collectivist monolith. However, obscure Japan, like every nation, has had a select few who completely deny the state any authority to regulate and impose a system on unwilling humans. Shōeki’s work proves that skepticism of the state and advocacy for voluntary cooperation are universal—emerging even in isolated, rigidly hierarchical societies.

Unlike liberals of the Meiji period such as Yukicchi Fukuzawa and Itagaki Taisuke, who imported and adapted the theories of John Stuart Mill and Hebert Spencer to a Japanese context, Shōeki had little foreign influence.

There are aspects of Shōeki’s work that oppose classical liberalism. Norman was not wrong to note Shōeki’s disdain of money and condemnations of greed. Regardless, I believe as research continues, scholars will note that few labels fit a thinker as unique and esoteric as Andō Shōeki. 

Andō Shōeki was a radical critic of state power who saw the existing social order as an unnatural imposition on humanity. His work challenges us to reconsider the narratives that justify the state, reminding us that state sanctioned oppression is not an inevitability, but something that can be dismantled.

His vision of a stateless, cooperative society anticipates many themes in later libertarian and anarchist thought. While he did not advocate for free markets or individual property rights like Western classical liberals did, his rejection of imposed authority and his emphasis on natural, voluntary association resonate with libertarianism’s fundamental principles.

Shōeki’s work also forces us to ask how many other forgotten thinkers worldwide have challenged the state, only to be buried by the very systems they criticized?

Though, as of yet, Shōeki’s work has had little breathing room to flourish outside of academic circles , I am excited for the future of his work. I am early to the party, and maybe in years to come, we will learn more about anti-​state ideas not only in Japan, but throughout the world. Shōeki’s work proves that skepticism of the state and advocacy for voluntary cooperation are not just Western ideas—they emerge even in the most unlikely places.