was a Japanese neo-Confucian scholar of the Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

. He was an hereditary rector

Rector

The word rector has a number of different meanings; it is widely used to refer to an academic, religious or political administrator...

 of Edo’s Confucian Academy, the Shōhei-kō, also known at the Yushima Seidō

Yushima Seido

, located in the Yushima neighbourhood of Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan, was constructed as a Confucian temple in the Genroku era of the Edo period .-Tokugawa bureaucrat training center:...

, which was built on land provided by the shogun. The Yushima-Seidō, which stood at the apex of the Tokugawa shogunate

Tokugawa shogunate

The Tokugawa shogunate, also known as the and the , was a feudal regime of Japan established by Tokugawa Ieyasu and ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family. This period is known as the Edo period and gets its name from the capital city, Edo, which is now called Tokyo, after the name was...

's educational system; and Jussai was styled with the hereditary title .

Academician

Hayashi Daigaku-no-kami Jussai was a member of the Hayashi clan

Hayashi clan (Confucian scholars)

The ' was a Japanese samurai clan which served as important advisors to the Tokugawa shoguns. Among members of the clan to enjoy powerful positions in the shogunate was its founder Hayashi Razan, who passed on his post as hereditary rector of the neo-Confucianist Shōhei-kō school to his son,...

 of Confucian scholars, each of whom were ad hoc personal advisers to the shoguns prominent figures in the educational training system for the bakufu bureaucrats. The progenitor of this lineage of scholars was Hayashi Razan

Hayashi Razan

, also known as Hayashi Dōshun, was a Japanese Neo-Confucian philosopher, serving as a tutor and an advisor to the first four shoguns of the Tokugawa bakufu. He is also attributed with first listing the Three Views of Japan. Razan was the founder of the Hayashi clan of Confucian scholars.Razan was...

, who lived to witness his philosophical and pragmatic reasoning become a foundation for the dominant ideology of the bakufu until the end of the 19th century.

This evolution developed in part from the official Hayashi schema equating samurai with the cultured governing class (although the samurai were largely illiterate at the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Hayashi helped to legitimize the role of the militaristic bakufu at the beginning of its existence. His philosophy is also important in that it encouraged the samurai class to cultivate themselves, a trend which would become increasingly widespread over the course of his lifetime and beyond. One of Hayashi Daigaku-no-kami Razan's aphorism encapsulates this view:

"No true learning without arms and no true arms without learning."

The Hayashi played a prominent role is helping to maintain the theoretical underpinnings of the Tokugawa regime; and Hayashi Daigaku-no-kami Jussai was the 8th hereditary rector of Yushima Seidō.

Jussai was the son of Matsudaira Norimori of the Iwamura Domain. He was appointed by Matsudaira Sadanobu

Matsudaira Sadanobu

Japanese daimyo of the mid-Edo period, famous for his financial reforms which saved the Shirakawa Domain, and the similar reforms he undertook during his tenure as chief senior councilor of the Tokugawa Shogunate, from 1787 to 1793....

 to be heir to the previous Hayashi family head, Kimpō.