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This paper suggests that the Tokugawa Confucian debate over the Akō revenge vendetta was, in part, a religious debate over the posthumous status of the forty-six ronin who murdered Lord Kira Yoshinaka as an act of revenge for the sake of their deceased master, Asano Naganori. At issue in the debate was whether the forty-six ronin were chushin gishi, a notion typically translated as loyal and righteous samurai. The paper shows, however, that in Tokugawa discourse the term chūshin gishi had significant religious nuances. The latter nuances are traceable to a Song dynasty text, the Xingli ziyi, by Chen Beixi, which explains that zhongchen yishi (Jpn. chūshin gishi) could be legitimately worshiped at shrines devoted to them. The paper shows that Beixi's text was known by those involved in the Akō debate, and that the religious nuances, as well as their sociopolitical implications, were the crucial, albeit largely unspoken, issues in the debate. The paper also notes that the ronin were eventually worshiped, by none other than the Meiji emperor, and enshrined in the early-twentieth century. Also, in prewar Japan, they were extolled as exemplars of the kind of self-sacrificing loyalism that would be rewarded, spiritually, via enshrinement at Yasukuni Shrine.

Rethinking the Ako Ronin Debate: The Religious Significance of Chushin gishi