Ōshio Heihachirō
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- In this Japanese name, the family name is Ōshio.
Ōshio Heihachirō (大塩平八郎? 1793-1837) was a lower class samurai and the chief representative of the Ōyōmei school of Neo-Confucianism. He is best remembered for his fierce opposition to the Tokugawa shogunate. He served as a shogunal policeman for much of his life. During times of famine in 1836 he petitioned the city magistrate of Osaka to help the starving citizens. After this was refused, Ōshio sold his own books to buy food for the suffering. As a student of Wang Yangming, who taught that in times of crisis men must follow their intuition rather than their institution, Ōshio released a manifesto charging the shogun's officials with moral corruption. He then led an army of peasants into Osaka in 1837. They managed to burn about a quarter of the city before government troops put down the rebellion, after which Ōshio committed suicide.[1] The novelist Mori Ōgai, active during after the Meiji Restoration, wrote an eponymous novella on Ōshio Heihachirō, which was published in January 1914.
[edit] References
- ^ Ebrey, Patricia Buckley; Walthall, Anne; Palais, James B. (2006), East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 400, ISBN 0 618 13384 4
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