[A study of Hashida Kunihiko's thought: the life history and thought of an "outcast thinker"].

Abstract

Hashida Kunihiko, described and known as "an Outcast Thinker", was born in Tottori, in 1882. From his young age, he was taught oriental thought by his father Fujita Kenzo, a practitioner of Kampo medicine. While Hashida taught physiology as a faculty member at the Imperial University of Tokyo, he studied Dogen's Zen philosophy and developed his original philosophy of science to answer the question: "What is Life/Living?". After taking the oath of office as the 56th education minister of Japan from 1940 to 1943, he committed suicide in 1945, taking the responsibility for his policy-making of nationalistic education at time of the Second World War. Some previous studies on Hashida have focused on various aspects such as his work as a physiologist, a scientist, a scholar of Zen philosophy, and an educrat. He may be well known in each of these different disciplines, whereas how these different aspects are integrated in Hashida's thought as a whole has not been clarified yet. Taking the propositions in those previous studies on him into account to totally understand Hashida as a thinker, this note will focus on the potential perspective for his undiscovered aspect: "Hashida as Medical Philosopher". Hashida has perused and loved two classical texts on oriental thought and oriental medicine, which are "Chuan Xi Lu" and "Shang Han Lun", during his lifetime and learned many things about "Medicine". He has tried to implement his philosophy of medicine to set up and maturate "Japanese medicine". Hence, to dissert "Hashida as Medical Philosopher" may become a ground for argument to understand his thought as a whole from the genetic perspective on the process of thought formation of Hashida. Therefore this note can be characterized as a preliminary survey to develop the further studies on Hashida's thought.