Ando Shoeki: He who dared anger the gods
The Ando Shoeki Museum in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture | ANDO SHOEKI MUSEUM, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CC BY-SA 3.0
BY MICHAEL HOFFMAN
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Apr 14, 2018
Human beings are thinkers by nature. We think, therefore we are not mere beasts. Unusually intense thinkers among us are known as philosophers. A very few among them outlive themselves, shaping minds and institutions beyond, sometimes far beyond, their own time.
Most do not, and are soon forgotten. Who today remembers the name Ando Shoeki?
Historian Hiroshi Watanabe does, which is fortunate for us, because, relevant or not, influential or not, a mind like Ando’s — bold, mischievous, unconventional, borderline crackpot, one might almost say — is worth probing, if only for those qualities, let alone for his ideas, which leave the mainstream so far behind that the word “evil” has been attached to him. “There was a doctor named Shoeki hanging about this village in recent years,” commented a government official shortly after his death, “assiduously practicing evil teachings and deluding the villagers.”
