Background
Banzan Kumazawa was born in 1619 into a Kyoto family named Nojiri but was adopted by his mother’s father, Kumazawa Morihisa.
熊沢 蕃山
Banzan Kumazawa was born in 1619 into a Kyoto family named Nojiri but was adopted by his mother’s father, Kumazawa Morihisa.
In 1634 he took service under Ikeda Mitsumasa, the lord of Bizen (present- day Okayama Prefecture), but in 1639 left his position because of poor health and went to live with his grandfather at Kirihara in the province of Omi (Shiga Prefecture). There he devoted himself to study and in 1642 became a disciple of Nakae Toju, an exponent of Yomeigaku, the doctrines of the Ming Confucian scholar Wang Yang-ming, who emphasized the importance of practice over theory. In 1645 he returned to the service of Ikeda Mitsumasa, this time at a very substantial stipend, and applied himself to problems of land and water utilization and the prevention of famine in the fief of Bizen. But the success that he achieved in these undertakings aroused the criticism of rivals within the domain, and in 1658 he asked permission to retire and moved to Kyoto, where he devoted his time to writing and teaching.
As his fame increased, a number of persons associated with the court came to study with him, and this aroused the suspicions of the shoshidai, the official appointed by the Edo shogunate to superintend the court. As a consequence he left Kyoto in 1667 and lived on Mt. Yoshino and in other mouniainous regions in the capital area, but because of criticisms of the shogunate that he expressed in his writings, he was arrested in 1669. He was first turned over to the fief of Akashi in present-day Hyogo Prefecture for surveillance but was later moved to Kdriyama in Yamato and then to Furukawa in Shimosa (Ibaraki Prefecture), where he died in confinement.