Yoshikawa (Kikkawa), Koretari

(1616-1694)

   A yui-itsu (Yoshida) Shinto leader of the early Edo period. Born a samurai and adopted into a merchant family, he showed no interest in business and retired to Kamakura at the age of thirty-five to write poetry and study. Two years later he moved to Kyoto, became a disciple of Hagiwara, Kaneyori, at that time head of the Yoshida family, from whom he received a secret initiation transmission called 'himorogi iwasaka den' and was recognised as the successor in the line of Yoshida Shinto. He subsequently returned to Edo to revitalise Shinto there, instructing Yamazaki, Ansai amongst others and exerting considerable influence among the higher nobility, the shogun and the daimyo. Like Yoshida, Kanetomo he saw Shinto as a tradition superior to and subsuming Confucianism and Buddhism and asserted the primacy of the kami Kuni-toko-tachi-no-mikoto. His thought inevitably incorporated Chinese ideas of the creative power of yin and yang and the five elements and it reinforced Tokugawa feudal ideology centreing on the ruler-subject relationship. Yoshikawa emphasised tsutsushimi (seriousness of mind) and purification rites (harae). He initiated at least two daimyo into Yoshida Shinto and raised the status of Shinto in the eyes of at least some of the nobility to the same status as Buddhism and Confucianism. In 1682 he was appointed Shinto-kata, official 'Shinto representative' or 'director of Shinto affairs' by the shogun Tokugawa, Tsunayoshi, a position which effectively became hereditary in his family.