Description A BRONZE FIGURE OF NINOMIYA SONTOKU, MEIJIJapan, Meiji period (1868-1912)The famous agricultural leader depicted as a boy, standing on a naturalistically cast base, reading a book, the Great Learning (Daigaku), while carrying bundles of brushwood cast in openwork secured by robes on his back together with his axe, separetely cast. With a seal mark on the back of the base.HEIGHT 18.7 cm WEIGHT 1,278 gCondition: Good condition with restorations to the feet of the figure, surface wear, few nicks, and shallow surface scratches.Provenance: German private collection.Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856), bown Ninomiya Kinjiro, was a prominent 19th-century Japanese agricultural leader, philosopher, moralist, and economist. It is not uncommon to see statues of Ninomiya in or in front of Japanese schools, especially elementary schools. Typically, they show him as a boy reading a book while walking and carrying firewood on his back. These statues depict popular stories that said Ninomiya was reading and studying every moment he could.The book held in the boy's hand is incised with a passage from the Great Learning. one of the 'Four Books' in Confucianism attributed to one of Confucius' disciples, Zengzi. The passage reads, "When one family becomes humane, the whole country will be stimulated to be humane. When one family becomes easy to get along with, all the people in the country are stimulated to become easy to get along with. If one man greedily upsets things, the whole country can be plunged into chaos. Its function is really like this. Hence there is the saying "one word can win the whole affair, one man can settle the whole kingdom."