Ninomiya Sontoku

Statue of Ninomiya Sontoku in Odawara

Ninomiya Sontoku ( jap. 二宮尊徳 , born Ninomiya Kinjiro ( 二宮金次郎 or 金治郎 ); * 4. September 1787 in Kayama, district Ashigarakami , Sagami Province (now Kayama, Odawara , Kanagawa Prefecture ); † 17th September 1856 in Imaichi, district Tsuga , shimotsuke province (now Imaichi, Nikko , Tochigi Prefecture )) was a Japanese agrarian reformers.

biography

Ninomiya was born into a farming family who lost their property to a flood during childhood. At the age of sixteen he became an orphan and had to support himself and his siblings. Through clever management and constant self-taught training, he brought his property back to prosperity. He was then commissioned with the reform of the estates of various impoverished daimyōs and in 1822 Ōkubo Tadazane used him as a liege lord over Odawara. Since 1843 he was in the service of the Shogun dynasty Tokugawa .

Ninomya's agrarian reforms were based on the Shinto-Buddhist principle of hōtoku-kyō ( 報 徳 教 ), which meant that farmers should strive to repay the benefits they received from heaven, earth and people. He demanded the traditional virtues of honesty, diligence and thrift and gave the farmers the opportunity to implement technical innovations in agriculture through the formation of mutual credit unions ( hōtukusha ).

Ninomiya is widely worshiped in Japan. In the Meiji period it was Shinto shrines ( Hōtoku-Ninomiya shrines ) dedicated, first in 1894 in Odawara and 1897 in Imaichi, and later included more than ten more. In the 1930s he became a model for virtuous living in school books, and statues of him were set up in front of numerous elementary schools - as a school child, carrying firewood on his back, reading a book. Ninomiya's collective writings ( Ninomiya Sontoku zenshū ) have been published in thirty-six volumes. A portrait of Ninomiyas was printed on the 1-yen note from 1946.

Web links

Commons : Ninomiya Sontoku  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

• Brigitte Steger: (No) time to sleep ?: cultural-historical and social-anthropological exploration of Japanese sleeping habits . Verlag Münster Press, 2004, ISBN 3-8258-6993-8 , pp. 685 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• William Theodore De Bary: Sources of East Asian Tradition: The modern period . Columbia University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-231-14323-3 , pp. 318-21 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Bruno Lewin (Ed.): Kleines Lexikon der Japanologie: zur Kulturgeschichte Japans ". Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-447-03668-0 , p. 318-19 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• Encyclopedia Britannica - Ninomiya Sontoku
• Encyclopedia of Shinto - Ninomiya Sontoku
• Japanese Currency Yen
• Japan Photo Archive - Ninomiya Sontoku / Kinjirō 二 宮 尊 徳
• Tomita Kōkei (1814-1890); Yoshimoto Tadasu (1878–1973; ex.): A Peasant Sage of Japan: The Life and Work of Sontoku Ninomiya (PDF; 11.6 MB); London 1912 (Longmans, Green)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Ninomiya is the family name, Sontoku the first name.