Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/158

 as to relegate self-cultivation to a secondary place, declaring that the only things of real importance were social etiquette, music, and administration. But the results of such teaching, as exemplified in the lives of Ogyū's disciples, were most unattractive, and moreover he gave umbrage in patriotic quarters by applying to his countrymen the epithet Tō-i no  (Oriental aliens) in an essay eulogising Confucius. Hayashi Razan, the great exponent of Chu's philosophy, had roused the ire of imperialists by identifying Jimmu, the first mortal sovereign of Japan, with a prince of ancient China who shaved his head, caused himself to be tattooed and fled from his father's court. That sacrilegious doctrine contributed largely to the genesis of the Mito school of historians, described in a former chapter, and now Ogyu Sōrai, enemy of the Chu philosophy and friend of the Confucian, applied an insulting epithet to the whole Japanese nation. Thus each school provoked critics who set out by differing from its doctrines and ended by differing from each other, so that the closing years of the eighteenth century saw the representatives of the schools fighting with zeal scarcely cooler than that of religious controversialists in medival Europe. Iyenari, one of the four great Tokugawa Shōguns, came to power under such circumstances, and by the advice of his sagacious minister, Matsudaira Sadanobu, he issued a decree declaring the doctrines of Chu to be the only orthodox system