Aristocratic and Bourgeois Values
As I have suggested, Chinese classics were then the basis of all learning. Naturally, my brother was a thorough scholar in Chinese, but he was peculiar in one respect—he studied mathematics according to the teaching of Hoashi Banri, a scholar of Bungo province.
This teacher, though he was a noted scholar in Chinese, had a new theory that the gun and the abacus were to be considered important instruments for the samurai, and that it was wrong to leave the abacus, or rather finances, to lower officials, and the gun to the common soldiers. This theory had spread to Nakatsu and my brother was one of the several younger men who had studied mathematics and attained some ability in it. In this he differed from the usual scholars; otherwise, he was a strict follower of the Chinese, believing to the core in their moral teachings. One day I had an amusing conversation with him.
"Yukichi, what do you intend to be in the future?” he asked me.
“Well, Sir, I would like to be the richest man in Japan,” I answered, “and spend all the money I want to.”
He made a wry face and gave me a piece of his mind. So I asked him in return: "What do you want to be?"
He answered gravely in stilted Chinese phrasing: ”I will be dutiful to my parents, faithful to my brethren, and loyal to my master until death.”
“H'm!” I exclaimed. And there the conversation ended. That was my brother.
He sometimes had queer ideas. ‘‘I was born the eldest son," he once said to me, “and I am now the head of the family. But I should like, if it were possible, to become an adopted son of some very difficult family with the most headstrong parents. I would prove that an adopted son can live with any parents and be good and obedient.”
His opinion was that all troubles arising between parents and an adopted son came from the wilfulness of the son.
But I had an entirely opposite opinion. “I should hate to be an adopted son,” I said. “Why should I serve people as parents who are in truth not parents at all?”
So our ideas differed.
