Toju Nakae

Who was Toju Nakae?

Toju Nakae was a Japanese Confucian philosopher known as "the sage of Ōmi".

Nakae was a feudal retainer who lived during the Tokugawa shogunate. He taught that the highest virtue was filial piety, and acted upon this, giving up his official post in 1634 in order to return to his home in Takashima, Ōmi to care for his mother. He distinguished, however, between sho-kō and dai-kō: lesser and greater filial piety. Sho-kō involves the normal care owed by children to their parents; dai-kō involves the notion that our human parents are themselves the children of the divine parents — thus, if one's parents are wrong, then one should encourage them to return to virtue.

He was unusual in believing that his teaching would be useful to women as well as men. While accepting the then standard view of women as usually lacking such virtues as compassion and honesty, he argued: "if a wife's disposition is healthy and pious, obedient, sympathetic and honest, then ... every member of her family will be at peace and the entire household in perfect order."

Nakae originally followed the teachings of the Chinese neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi, but eventually became more influenced by Wang Yangming, who argued for the primacy of human intuition or conscience over intellect: moral improvement arises out of conscience-based action. Nakae added a more religious aspect to Wang's "School of Intuition of Mind", calling the human conscience the "divine light of heaven". Nakae's works also supplied his followers with "the moral foundation for political action".