Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū

This article contributes to the growing literature on the nexus of religion and emotion, thinking through the ways in which historians of Japan can make interventions in the field, and exploring research methodologies that speak to a pre‐modern and non‐Christian milieu. In looking to the moral and p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of religious history Vol. 45; no. 1; pp. 50 - 67
Main Author Takao, Makoto Harris
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Melbourne John Wiley and Sons Australia, Ltd 01.03.2021
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects
Christianity
Emotions
Morality
Pedagogy
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Summary:This article contributes to the growing literature on the nexus of religion and emotion, thinking through the ways in which historians of Japan can make interventions in the field, and exploring research methodologies that speak to a pre‐modern and non‐Christian milieu. In looking to the moral and pedagogical philosophy of Hosoi Heishū (1728–1801), a Tokugawa Confucian teacher and itinerant preacher, this article places an emphasis on the use of contextualised and historically‐specific emic categories of belief and feeling. To do so, it explores the popularising movement of Japanese Confucianism in the late eighteenth century, tracing Hosoi's development of vernacular sermonising and his identification of emotion as both a subject and object of instruction. His rhetorical style and pedagogy is unpacked, followed by an analysis of his popular reception, before turning to a sermon case study to observe these ideas in action. This article offers new insights into the viewing habits and emotional expectations of Tokugawa audiences, underscoring the ways in which emotion terms and concepts can change meaning in how they are defined, embodied, expressed, and valued as part of a broader habitus.
Bibliography:The research for this article was funded by the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Stephen Cummins, Margrit Pernau, and Max Stille for their close reading of early drafts and invaluable feedback which, in no small way, has shaped my thinking. Many thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers for their commentaries and for challenging me to push the envelope. Lastly, I am deeply indebted to Nishimura Takahashi and Takao Yasuo for their review of the translations of Hosoi Heishū's texts that appear in this article.
Makoto Harris Takao is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Affiliated Faculty with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies and the Center for Global Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign.
ISSN:0022-4227
1467-9809
DOI:10.1111/1467-9809.12729