Hayashi Gakusai

, formerly Hayashi Noboru, was a neo-Confucian scholar and a bakufu official in the late Tokugawa shogunate.
Academician.
Hayashi "Daigaku-no-kami" Gakusai was a member of the Hayashi clan of Confucian scholars, each of whom were "ad hoc" personal advisers to the shōguns prominent figures in the educational training system for the "bakufu" bureaucrats. The progenitor of this lineage of scholars was Hayashi Razan, who lived to witness his philosophical and pragmatic reasoning become a foundation for the dominant ideology of the "bakufu" until the end of the 19th century.
This evolution developed in part from the official Hayashi "schema" equating samurai with the cultured governing class (although the samurai were largely illiterate at the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate). The Hayashi helped to legitimize the role of the militaristic "bakufu" at the beginning of its existence. His philosophy is also important in that it encouraged the samurai class to cultivate themselves, a trend which would become increasingly widespread over the course of his lifetime and beyond. One of Hayashi "Daigaku-no-kami" Razan's aphorism encapsulates this view:
The Hayashi played a prominent role is helping to maintain the theoretical underpinnings of the Tokugawa regime; and Hayashi "Daigaku-no-kami" Gakusai was the 12th hereditary rector of "Yushima Seidō".
The privileges and honors he and his family and his clan had enjoyed up through 1867 were stripped from them during the turmoil which accompanied the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
Kanagawa convention of 1853.
Hayashi Noboru's signature can be found on the Japanese translation of the Dutch text of the agreement negotiated between Commodore Perry and Daigaku-no-kami Hayashi, implying some degree of participation in this historic negotiation.