history of japan - Library

Now, to have made any such notification would have put
Kira so thoroughly upon his guard that he could never have
been touched; so much is recognized in the fifth and sixth
paragraphs of the Hyōjōsho report on the episode quoted a
few pages back. In the peculiar circumstances, it was
generally considered that the rōnin were punished for a
mere technicality. Even Hayashi, the official Chinese
scholar, wrote Chinese stanzas lauding them as heroes,
and although the Bakufu spoke to him about the matter
privately,
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no public censure was passed upon him. Ogyū Sorai, who
had been Kira's lecturer or reader and who was a protégé
of Kira's son, Uyesugi, issued a pamphlet in which he
assailed the rōnin for failing to commit suicide at the
Sengakuji, without sending any notice to the censor at all.
This gave rise to a great commotion among the Chinese
scholars of the time, and an embittered controversy over
this point went on for years. Modern authors have divided
these writers into pro-Bakufu and anti-Bakufu according to
the view they supported. This betrays a serious
misconception of the actual circumstances of the time --- it
was only in the nineteenth century that perfervid loyalists
began to exploit the episode of the Forty-seven Rōnin for
their own special purposes. The Shogun was inclined to
save the rōnin, from their doom, and the Great Councillors,