Hayashi Clan (Confucian Scholars) - Critical Analysis

Critical Analysis

The Hayashi family's special position as personal advisors to the shoguns gave their school an imprimatur of legitimacy that no other contemporary Confucian academy possessed. This meant that Hayashi views or interpretation were construed as dogma. Anyone challenging the Hayashi status quo was perceived as trying to challenge Tokugawa hegemony; and any disagreements with the Hayashi were construed as threatening the larger structure of complex power relations within which the Confucian field was embedded. Any disputes in the Confucian field in the 1650s and 1660s may have originated in personal rivalries or authentic philosophical disagreements, but any issues became inextricably intertwined with the dominating political presence of the shogun and those who ruled in his name.

In this period, the Tokugawas and the fudai daimyō were only the most powerful of the nearly 250 domain-holding lords in the country. By filling the high offices of the shogunate with his trusted, loyal daimyō, the shoguns paradoxically increased the power of these office holders and diminished the powers which were once held by Ieyasu alone., which caused each to more zealously guard against anything which might be seen to minimize intertwined power and prestige; and the varying characters of the shoguns further exacerbated this development. The Edo period power structure itself discouraged of dissent from what became the accepted Hayashi othodoxy.

In the spectrum of the Tokugawa retainer band, the Hayashi family head himself was a high-ranking hatamoto (thus coming under the jurisdiction of the wakadoshiyori), and possessed an income of 3,500 koku.