Introduction

Abstract

This volume, part of the Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy Series edited by Huang Yong 黃勇, seeks to advance the study of Japanese Confucian philosophy for English language readers. It also advances a tradition in scholarship traceable through at least three previous anthologies: (i) Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period 1600–1868: Methods and Metaphors, edited by Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Najita and Scheiner 1978); (ii) Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (de Bary and Bloom 1979), and (iii) Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture, edited by Peter Nosco (Nosco 1984). These previous volumes are not exclusively devoted to Confucianism in Japan, although most of their essays deal largely with it in one way or another. The present work boasts essays that invariably focus on Japanese Confucianism, while including themes and topics related to Buddhism, Shintō, Nativism, and even Andō Shōeki 安藤昌益 (1703–1762), one of the most vehement critics of Confucianism in all of East Asia. The earlier anthologies do not describe their contents as philosophy, nor do they necessarily pertain to philosophical thought in every case, but arguably each of them furthers our understandings of Japanese Confucianism and its relevance to philosophy where the latter is understood broadly as an ongoing search for critical insight and self-reflective knowledge, even wisdom (sophia), about the nature of the self, society, culture, the polity, spiritual matters, and the cosmos. Methodologically, the earlier anthologies are hybrids combining studies in intellectual history informed by Western theoretical literature along with other studies analyzing philosophically significant writings by Japanese Confucian scholars and their critics. The present volume is also eclectic in methodology.

1.1 About the Anthology

This volume, part of the Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy Series edited by Huang Yong 黃勇, seeks to advance the study of Japanese Confucian philosophy for English language readers. It also advances a tradition in scholarship traceable through at least three previous anthologies: (i) Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period 1600–1868: Methods and Metaphors, edited by Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Najita and Scheiner 1978), (ii) Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (de Bary and Bloom 1979), and (iii) Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture, edited by Peter Nosco (Nosco 1984). These previous volumes are not exclusively devoted to Confucianism in Japan, although most of their essays deal largely with it in one way or another. The present work boasts essays that invariably focus on Japanese Confucianism, while including themes and topics related to Buddhism, Shintō, Nativism, and even Andō Shōeki 安藤昌益 (1703–1762), one of the most vehement critics of Confucianism in all of East Asia. The earlier anthologies do not describe their contents as philosophy, nor do they necessarily pertain to philosophical thought in every case, but arguably each of them furthers our understandings of Japanese Confucianism and its relevance to philosophy where the latter is understood broadly as an ongoing search for critical insight and self-reflective knowledge, even wisdom (sophia), about the nature of the self, society, culture, the polity, spiritual matters, and the cosmos. Methodologically, the earlier anthologies are hybrids combining studies in intellectual history informed by Western theoretical literature along with other studies analyzing philosophically significant writings by Japanese Confucian scholars and their critics. The present volume is also eclectic in methodology.

This anthology differs significantly, however, with an interpretive parameter set in Japanese Thought with its assertion, “… we should not seek pure philosophical statements, exemplifications of syllogistic reasoning, for this leads one to ask whether there was systematic philosophy in traditional Japan – let us say in the manner of Hume or Kant – a question destined to receive an uncomplicated negative answer” (Najita and Scheiner 1978: 5–6). Few today, other than Kantians, would suggest that philosophy need be “pure,” or necessarily systematic or syllogistic in reasoning, if in fact there need be a resort to reasoning at all. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the most important philosophical texts of the twentieth century, was neither consistently syllogistic nor systematic. Rather the Tractatus, not unlike the Analects of Confucius, includes a series of occasionally brilliant but often-random observations typically declared rather than argued logically. Thus its opening declarative, “The world is all that is the case,” is followed, on the final page, by a concluding confessional, “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it). He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.” (Wittgenstein 1961: 5, 89). Even with its declarative and self-deconstructive propositions, the Tractatus remains one of the great works of philosophy.

Wittgenstein aside, or perhaps because of him, understandings of philosophy and philosophical discourse have gone beyond the Western-centered paradigm that once declared the world other than Europe and areas of European descent to be barren of philosophy. Increasingly students of philosophy are recognizing what Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel noted centuries ago – that philosophy is a far grander endeavor than Western philosophy and that one dimension of its grandeur is surely Confucianism (Hegel 1892: 120–121; Tu and Ikeda 2011: 55; Mungello 1977). Whether acknowledged minimally as a moral teaching rising to the threshold of ethics, or more fully as comprising metaphysical and ontological speculations, Confucianism rated as philosophy well before the present. However, for reasons to be discussed shortly, during the twentieth century a reaction set in against recognizing Confucianism, including Japanese Confucianism, as philosophy. In China, this became conspicuous in the early twentieth century with the May Fourth Movement; in Japan, it did not occur until the post-World War II period. Yet in the same postwar period, the notion that the world harbors more philosophical wisdom than just that of the West made a comeback, and ironically this was most true in Western thinking about Asian thought, now often considered as philosophical in nature. Since the early 1960s, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa has led this process of rethinking the provenance and scope of philosophy with scholarship published in UH journals such as Philosophy East and West and the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, academic gatherings such as the East–West Philosophers’ Conferences, plus numerous UH Press publications – monographs and translation-studies – exploring Asian and East Asian philosophical thinking. Among Western scholars, Wm. Theodore de Bary at Columbia University has made enormous contributions to the study of Confucianism generally and Japanese Confucianism in particular, as thought, as intellectual history, and in distinctly philosophical terms as well. Since its publication in 1979, Principle and Practicality, a massive volume co-edited by de Bary and Irene Bloom, has incomparably advanced erudite thinking about Japanese Confucianism and its multifaceted expressions of philosophically informed practicality. Essays in Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture edited by Columbia-trained Peter Nosco have expanded understandings of Japanese Confucianism in its ideological, historiographical, and ontological dimensions, as well as in relation to Shintō, Buddhism, and some nineteenth-century Meiji thought.

Many other important scholars and their works contributing to the interpretive revolution in understanding philosophy as a global, and certainly Japanese Confucian, activity might be cited here as well. One is David A. Dilworth’s Philosophy in World Perspective: A Comparative Hermeneutic of the Major Theories published by Yale (Dilworth 1989). Another, Mary Evelyn Tucker’s The Philosophy of Qi: The Record of Great Doubts, a study of Kaibara Ekken 貝原益軒 (1630–1714), published by Columbia University Press, reveals the growing interpretive shift specifically in relation to research on Japanese Confucianism (Tucker 2007). At the University of Chicago, Tetsuo Najita now, in Tokugawa Political Writings at least, refers to his subject as “Ogyū Sorai’s political philosophy” (Najita 1998: xiv-xv), moving his hermeneutics into a philosophical dimension. Trained at the University of Hawai’i and Columbia, John A. Tucker, in translation-studies of the philosophical masterworks of Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁齋 (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728), published by E. J. Brill and the University of Hawai’i Press respectively, has made accessible two major Japanese Confucian texts revealing the extent to which, necessary or sufficient or not, Jinsai and Sorai were systematic and methodologically modern philosophers in their concern for language and meaning (Tucker 1998, 2006). At National Taiwan University, Chun-chieh Huang, dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences has furthered the study of Confucianism as a multifaceted intellectual force in decidedly East Asian contexts, with Japanese developments, philosophical and intellectual, well represented. Within Japan, the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP), founded in 2002, includes researchers studying Japanese culture and intellectual history, as well as traditional East Asian thought, hopefully in an effort, as one of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Centers of Excellence, to foster new understandings of Japanese Confucianism and its philosophical dimensions. Endorsing a broad and inclusive approach to its understanding of philosophy, UTCP similarly emphasizes the importance of understanding Japanese developments within an East Asian and ultimately global context, one aiming at providing for humanity a future conducive to “living together” (kyōsei 共生).

1.2 Defining Philosophy and Understanding Tetsugaku

Before proceeding, a detailed exposition of what this volume understands by philosophy is in order. Needless to say, it does not subscribe to narrow conceptions that apply to nothing outside of the Western fold. Nor does it recognize philosophy as a discipline that was originally or inherently Western, yet into which non-Western writings are charitably included to build bridges and promote cultural understanding. With Confucianism, there is abundant and compelling evidence that the practice of discussing ethics, politics, the mind, epistemology, the cosmos, and spiritual topics in sustained, self-reflexive, critical dialogues with a conscientious concern for precision in meaning, conceptual use, and logical development occurred with Kongfuzi 孔夫子 (551–479 BCE) and Mengzi 孟子 (372–289 BCE), about the same time that it did in the West with Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), Plato (424–348 BCE), and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Presumably that was why Kant himself called Confucius “the Chinese Socrates” (Tu and Ikeda 2011: 55). The practice of philosophizing was not, then, something introduced to East Asia; it existed there early on, resulting in, after Catholic missionaries encountered East Asia, the invention, in the Western mind, of “Confucius,” “Mencius,” and “Confucianism.” That invention did not begin or even significantly alter the processes of philosophical development in East Asia; there, what Westerners began calling “Confucianism” in the West, had long existed, under various names but with a fairly clear and unified identity, as a multifaceted form of learning including discussions of and debates over a range of topics and themes. What this anthology understands by philosophy consists precisely in this sort of ongoing engagement in critical, self-reflective discussions of and speculative theorizing about ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, political theory, and spiritual problems, as well as aesthetics, cosmology, and ontology, with the goal being attainment of a more profound understanding of ourselves, others, the world, and the universe at large. Confucians in East Asia have been doing this for over two millennia, since the time of Confucius.

When the Greco-Western term “philosophy” was introduced to East Asia, Japanese scholars led the way in translating it, first with various neologisms, virtually all of which were formed by combining ancient notions from the Confucian lexicon. The neologism that prevailed, advanced by Nishi Amane 西周 (1829–1897), was tetsugaku 哲學 (C: zhixue), a compound including the word gaku 學, meaning “study” and “learning,” with tetsu 哲, meaning “wise” (Piovesana 1963: 11–12; Takayanagi 2011: 81–84; Lam 2011: 72–73, also see Fujita 2009: 261–266). The first word, tetsu 哲, appears in the ancient Five Classics and later works of Confucianism literally dozens of times, invariably with the meaning of “wise” or “wisdom.” While the Five Classics were not exclusively Confucian, many scholars claimed that Confucius edited them, making the Five Classics, for those who accepted that perhaps questionable claim, profoundly if not exclusively Confucian. The second word in the neologism, gaku 學, was used in various discourses related to study and learning, but has ancient roots in Confucianism beginning with the opening passage of the Analects (C: Lunyu 論語 J: Rongo) where Confucius is recorded as asking, “Is it not a pleasure to study (C: xue 學 J: gaku) and in time learn?” Nowhere was the notion gaku more extolled and promoted than by ancient Confucians and their later followers and interpreters throughout East Asia. From the beginning, then, Confucian notions were intrinsically related to the modern Japanese translation for the Western term “philosophy.”

It must be admitted, however, that Nishi made no overall attempt to interpret earlier Japanese Confucian thought as tetsugaku. If anything Nishi, like many Meiji intellectuals who stood in awe of Western intellectual developments, was somewhat contemptuous of ideas tracing to China and so differentiated Confucianism from tetsugaku. Nakae Chōmin 中江兆民 (1847–1901), another Meiji intellectual of similar mind in regard to Western ideas as opposed to those of pre-Meiji Japan and East Asia, even declared, rather polemically, that,

In Japan, there was never philosophy (Nihon ni tetsugaku naishi 日本に哲學ないし). While there were philologists such as Motoori [Norinaga] 本居宣長 (1730–1801) and [Hirata] Atsutane 平田篤胤 (1776–1843) who dug up the graves of antiquity to study ancient texts, they did not provide clear answers about the meaning of life or the world around us. Followers of [Itō] Jinsai and [Ogyū] Sorai offered new interpretations of Confucian texts, but they were nonetheless Confucian thinkers. Although some people among the Buddhist monks proposed some new ideas and created a new school, all of them remained confined to the realm of religion and so their work was not pure philosophy. Recently [there] appeared people like Katō [Hiroyuki] 加藤弘之 (1836–1916) and Inoue [Tetsujirō] 井上哲次郎 (1855–1944) who call themselves philosophers. And they are recognized as such. However they are just introducing in Japan theories from the West without taking time to digest them. That attitude is not worthy of philosophers. (Nakae 1983: 155; translation adapted from Dufourmont 2010: 72)

When Nakae wrote, China was moving toward a revolution that would bring the Qing 清 (1644–1911) dynasty down. Confucianism, the official curriculum for the civil service exam system since the Yuan dynasty 元 (1279–1368), appeared to many inside and outside of China as an old-fashioned if not obsolete and badly discredited teaching. Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927), a late-Qing thinker, attempted to reinterpret Confucius as a revolutionary reformer whose ideas could help mediate the transformation of China into a modern nation, but his ideas did not find a significant following in either China, where they were included in his lectures from the mid-1880s, or in Japan, where his writings on Confucius were first published, during Kang’s exile from China, in the early 1900s. For an ascendant Meiji Japan increasingly ready, in some corners, to “quit Asia” (脫亞) as its leading public intellectual, Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901), advocated, it appeared senseless to equate a Western intellectual discipline, philosophy, a source of Western cultural pride and presumably strength, with a seemingly impotent way of thinking that originated in ancient China. Better to redefine Confucian terms quickly and abandon the rest rather than attempt to retain all and find them a hindrance to modernity. Confucianism did remain a part of Meiji intellectual culture, but neither Nishi nor Nakae, nor most late-Meiji intellectuals sought to elevate it as an authentic counterpart to Western philosophy. Apart from Kang Youwei, however, there was one very important exception: Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 (1855–1944).

1.3 Inoue Tetsujirō and the Study of Japanese Confucian Philosophy

Not long after Nishi Amane coined the term, tetsugaku, the first Japanese professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, Inoue Tetsujirō, defined for the discipline a distinctively Japanese dimension by authoring a monumental trilogy on the first schools of what he called “Japanese philosophy” (Nihon no tetsugaku 日本之哲學). Admittedly, Inoue distinguished between “Western philosophy” (Seiyō tetsugaku 西洋哲學) and “Asian philosophy” (Tōyō tetsugaku 東洋哲學), situating Japanese philosophy in the latter division. The tripartite analyses evident in Inoue’s trilogy echoed Hegel, whom he had studied while in Germany in the mid-1880s as a graduate student, but they also reflected Inoue’s national pride over Meiji Japan’s modern development and its impressive victory over Qing China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895).

Each of the schools of Japanese philosophy that Inoue identified was Confucian. His trilogy, consisting of (i) The Philosophy of the Japanese School of Zhu Xi (Nihon Shushigakuha no tetsugaku 日本朱子學派之哲學) (Inoue 1905), (ii) The Philosophy of the Japanese School of Wang Yangming (Nihon Yōmeigakuha no tetsugaku 日本陽明學派之哲學) (Inoue 1900), and (iii) The Philosophy of the Japanese School of Ancient Learning (Nihon kogakuha no tetsugaku 日本古學派之哲學) (Inoue 1902), defined the major schools, their philosophers, their key ideas, and selections from major texts, plus commentary and critical reflections. Significantly the overall “three school” architectonic of Inoue’s descriptions of Japanese Confucianism has informed virtually all discussions of the subject since. While extolling a foreign way of thinking, Confucianism, as the foundation of Japanese philosophy, Inoue saw, along distinctly nationalistic lines, the most creative and profound expression of Confucianism in the Japanese School of Ancient Learning (Nihon kogakuha 日本古學派), composed of three major figures, Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–1685), Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁齋 (1627–1705), and Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728). Ancient Learning stood as the new synthesis produced, as Hegelian dialectics would have it, by the opposition of the Zhu Xi School (thesis) and the Wang Yangming School (antithesis). In that Hegelian manner, Inoue saw something distinctively Japanese, “Ancient Learning,” drawing on, emerging from, and ultimately prevailing over its Chinese foundations, philosophically, much as Imperial Japan had prevailed over Qing China in warfare and modern development.

However, once that inflated sense of national and philosophical grandeur came crashing down in 1945, Inoue’s name was quickly forgotten. The reasons for this Inoue amnesia are found in postwar loathing for what were soon recognized as Inoue’s highly nationalistic and propagandistic interpretations of Japanese Confucianism, advanced with hyperbole and distortion to serve the political interests of the imperial throne, promote ultra-nationalism, and affirm an aggressive militaristic ethos for the Japanese people under the guise of such quasi-philosophical notions as “imperialism” (teikoku shugi 帝国主義), “nationalism” (kokka shugi 國家主), and “the way of the warrior” (bushidō 武士道). Inoue’s mixture of Confucian philosophy and what would later be recognized as prewar and wartime ideologies was profoundly tragic. After his death in 1944 and the war in 1945, few mentioned Inoue, even fewer called Confucianism a philosophy, and those who did study philosophy saw it entirely in Western, and most typically German terms. Nevertheless if his nationalistic, imperialistic, and militaristic interpretations can be bracketed (and that is asking a great deal), it remains significant that it was Inoue who recognized in Japanese Confucianism the most compelling and systematic statements of what could be called Japanese philosophy. Inoue’s views of Confucianism as philosophy also contributed to the rise of Chinese philosophy and its recognition of Confucianism as an important branch of philosophical study. In Korea, much the same is true where Confucianism continues to be studied widely as a philosophical system. While the particulars of his interpretations were rarely endorsed outside Japan, and even rarely in Japan in the postwar period, Inoue’s overall thesis, that Confucianism was an expression of East Asian philosophy (Tōyō tetsugaku 東洋哲學), continues to reverberate widely. Still, few credit Inoue for pioneering this development, whether in Japan or not.

In addition to his trilogy on the Japanese schools of Confucian philosophy, Inoue co-edited, with Kanie Yoshimaru 蟹江義丸 (1872–1904), a 10-volume series (with each including 500–600 pages), Japanese Writings on Ethics (Nihon rinri ihen 日本倫理彙編). The volumes are thematically grounded according to the schools that Inoue identified in his trilogy. Major works by the Japanese Wang Yangming School are presented first, in volumes 1 through 3; School of Ancient Learning texts, in volumes 4 through 6; Japanese Zhu Xi School writings, volumes 7 and 8; Japanese Eclectic School writings are in volume 9; volume 10 includes texts by so-called independent thinkers (Inoue and Kanie 1901–1903). In addition to providing libraries and universities with nicely bound modern editions of works that otherwise remained in woodblock editions, the Nihon rinri ihen series went a long way toward defining (or inventing) the collection of basic texts comprising what Inoue and his followers referred to as Japan’s philosophical tradition. The gist of it, Inoue and Kanie could claim, was there for the reading, in over 5,000 pages of systematically grouped texts.

The textual work evident in Nihon rinri ihen reverberates in postwar Confucian publications found in series such as the 50-volume Japanese Masterworks (Nihon no meicho 日本の名著), published by Chūō kōronsha (1969–1978), the 20-volume Japanese Thought series (Nihon no shisō 日本の思想), published by Chikuma shobō (1969–1972); and the 67 volume Grand Compilation of Japanese Thought (Nihon shisō taikei 日本思想大系), published by Iwanami shoten (1970–1982). In these postwar series, many of the same Confucian texts presented in Inoue’s and Kanie’s Nihon rinri ihen reappear time and again. Whatever else might be said about them, the works Inoue and Kanie highlighted constitute a considerable portion (excluding Buddhist and Shintō works) of the great works of Japan’s philosophical tradition.

That Inoue had served Tokyo Imperial University as the first native Japanese to hold a chair in philosophy added considerably to the prestige and credibility of his interpretations. Inoue’s work can be viewed as an important academic dimension of ongoing Meiji 明治 (1868–1912) efforts to establish that Japan was a civilized nation of the first order, one comparable, in its substantial collection of philosophical literature, to the leading Western imperialist nations bearing down on East Asia. That Inoue found philosophy in Confucianism was not necessarily mistaken, regardless of his egregiously nationalistic interpretations. What is undeniable is that with Inoue’s writings, published early in the twentieth century, Japanese Confucian philosophy emerged as a modern field of study. The substance of the field had existed in East Asia since the time of Confucius, and in Japan at least since the rise of a succession of distinctively Japanese statements of Confucianism in the early seventeenth century. Significantly, when Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese intellectuals considered the question, how to render the Western notion of philosophy into their vernaculars, they accepted the Japanese neologism tetsugaku 哲學, recognizing the appropriateness of the Meiji gloss as well as its unmistakable allusions to Confucian terms from the most ancient texts of the tradition, suggesting the antiquity of the speculative enterprise in East Asian learning (Kōsaka 2007: 12).

Had Inoue and those who echoed his appraisals not been determined to make their philosophical studies of Confucianism serve the interests of the imperial state in pre-1945 Japan, the field of Japanese Confucian philosophy might be healthier today. Rather than elevate the Confucian tendency to stand with integrity and remonstrate against wrongheaded rule and misguided government policies, Inoue refashioned traditional Japanese Confucian ethics into a “national ethic” (kokumin dōtoku 國民道徳) consisting of filial piety and patriotism, self-denial and self-sacrifice, and service unto death for the cause of imperial glory. A prolific author-editor, Inoue produced a succession of increasingly ideological, but nominally philosophical works such as his 1905 publication, compiled with Arima Sukemasa 有馬祐政 (1873–1931), The Bushidō Library (Bushidō sōsho 武士道叢書), in three volumes (Inoue and Arima 1905). In 1912, he published An Outline of National Morality (Kokumin dōtoku gairon 國民道徳概論), a text extolling the virtues of Japanese in relation to their imperial throne, military spirit, and the virtues of their national ethics (Inoue 1912). Anticipating the propaganda treatise, Fundamentals of Our National Essence (Kokutai no hongi 國體の本義) compiled by the Ministry of Education nearly a decade later, Inoue published his Our National Essence and National Morality (Waga kokutai to kokumin dōtoku 我が國體と國民道徳) in 1925 (Inoue 1925). During the same years that Kokutai no hongi was in circulation as a text for public school instruction, Inoue authored yet another work, The Essence of the Japanese Spirit (Nihon seishin no honshitsu 日本精神の本質), published in 1934 (Inoue 1934a). The same year, he returned to bushidō, publishing volume one of his compilation, The Collected Works of Bushidō (Bushidō shū 武士道集), the second volume of which he published in 1940 (Inoue 1940). Reportedly Inoue was working on the third and final volume when he passed away in 1944. In 1939, two years after Japan’s invasion of China, Inoue authored a work addressing Japan’s mission there entitled, East Asian Culture and the Future of China (Tōyō bunka to Shina no shōrai 東洋文化と支那の将来) (Inoue 1939).

In 1941, Inoue coedited, with Nakayama Kyūshirō 中山久四郎 (1874–1961), a work for the imperial military forces entitled, Fundamental Meanings of Battlefield Precepts (Senjin kun hongi 戦陣訓本義) (Inoue and Nakayama 1941). Following Japan’s successful initiation of a series of military initiatives in the Pacific, Inoue published another volume on bushidō, The Essence of Bushidō (Bushidō no honshitsu 武士道の本質) (Inoue 1942). As a scholar, Inoue had moved from defining Japanese philosophy in terms of Confucianism to defining a national ethic (kokumin dōtoku 國民道徳) with substantial portions coming from Confucianism, thus mixing ideas about thinkers earlier identified as philosophers with the creation of what later scholars would agree was little more than imperialistic and militaristic propaganda masked as an ethics for the nation. With this, however, Inoue had arguably poisoned the well of Japanese Confucian philosophy that his early work, even with its ardent nationalism, had done so much to provide. His death in 1944 shielded him from seeing the fate of his lifework, but surely he must have had some inkling how badly things would turn out.

Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the notion of Japanese Confucian philosophy was virtually discredited. Inoue’s voluminous writings were largely ignored no doubt because they consisted of so many tragically irresponsible interpretive fabrications (Nakamura 2007: 33–35). Philosophy as a discipline was redefined, away from Inoue’s understanding of Japanese Confucianism and toward another dimension of its expression by one of Inoue’s early students, Kyoto Imperial University professor of philosophy Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945). Rather than emphasize the importance of tracing the beginnings of Japanese philosophy within Japanese intellectual history, Nishida drew creatively on notions from German, Japanese, and Zen Buddhist thought to formulate a new synthesis that was highly original and systematic. Although some of Nishida’s thinking has been interpreted as advancing pro-imperial ideologies (Heisig and Maraldo 1995), it never went to nearly the lengths that Inoue’s did and so has fared better in postwar Japan as the widely recognized beginning point of Japanese philosophy. Along the way, Inoue and his claims about Japanese Confucian philosophy have been all but omitted from contemporary Japanese discussions of the nature of Japanese philosophy and its history as an area of study within Japanese history. It should be added, however, that even Nishida had to affirm the philosophical world that Inoue fashioned. Consequently, he too recognized that Confucianism had been considered as philosophy, mentioning as much in his New Year’s address to the emperor in 1941 (Nishida 1950: 267–268; Cheung 2011: 58–59). That aspect of Nishida’s thought, surely deriving from Inoue, has been nearly forgotten as well, along with Inoue.

The ethics, metaphysics, political thought, epistemological theories, and spiritual speculations of Japanese Confucianism continued to be studied in postwar Japan, but most Japanese scholars doing so have refrained from calling them “philosophy” and instead cast the subject matter of their research as “thought” (shisō 思想), “intellectual history” (shisōshi 思想史), or “ideology” (ideorogii イデオロギー), distancing their work nominally from the disciplinary area Inoue advanced. Yet arguably in these studies of thought and intellectual history, the substance of Japanese Confucian philosophy remains evident even though it is rarely spoken of as philosophy. Recent Western scholarship on Japanese philosophy generally and Japanese Confucian philosophy within it has contributed substantially to reviving the credibility of the study of Japanese Confucianism as philosophy. One work exemplifying this is the massive reader, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Heisig et al. 2011). An earlier and briefer survey, Japanese Philosophy, also interprets Japanese Confucian thinking as philosophy (Blocker and Starling 2001). The diversity so characterizing the field of Confucian philosophy generally and Japanese Confucian philosophy in particular has prompted Chun-chieh Huang 黃俊傑 at National Taiwan University to suggest that far from a single intellectual force, Confucianism should be understood as a plurality of multifaceted teachings and so referred to as “Confucianisms” (Huang 2010). Readers of this volume will presumably come to appreciate Huang’s enlightened suggestion because if anything the studies presented here well illustrate the fact that there was never a single, monolithic Japanese expression of Confucianism, philosophical or otherwise.

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s establishment of the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP) also offers great hope for the revival of studies of Japanese Confucianism as philosophy. UTCP understands philosophy in the widest possible sense, as including philosophical thought, intellectual history, cultural studies, religious studies, cultural studies, and reflections on science and technology, all as geared toward the fundamental idea of “living together” (kyōsei 共生). The essays in this volume similarly reflect a wide range of approaches to philosophical wisdom about Japanese Confucianism, including ones drawing on intellectual history, thought, and cultural studies. Hopefully they too will contribute to, through understanding, a better and more cooperative future for humanity.

1.4 Beginnings: Defining Terms and Defining Politics

Readers familiar with previous accounts of Japanese Confucianism – especially those following Inoue’s interpretations – might expect this volume to open with an essay on the Confucian thought of Fujiwara Seika 藤原惺窩 (1561–1619) or Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657), two figures at the headwaters of early-modern developments in Confucian philosophizing in Japan. Previous studies in earlier anthologies and publications on Japanese Confucianism have by no means exhaustively explored every dimension of Seika and Razan, but those thinkers have received considerable attention (de Bary 1979: 127–188; Boot 1982; Ooms 1984: 27–61; Tucker 1992: 41–60; Paramore 2006: 185–206). This volume opens with a different approach to the study of the beginnings of early-modern Japanese Confucianism: an examination of the thought of Matsunaga Sekigo 松永尺五 (1592–1657) as developed in his Ethics (Irinshō 彙倫抄). Sekigo, a disciple of Seika and contemporary of Razan, articulated a system of Confucian philosophizing that can be described as distinctively Japanese insofar as it encompasses, through systematically syncretic interpretations, Shintō, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings into its accounts of Confucian philosophical terms. This kind of all-embracing philosophical statement, while not unheard of in medieval Japan, had earlier been more typically formulated by Zen monks giving the syncretic philosophy advanced a decidedly Buddhist core around which Confucian teachings were added. Sekigo’s text is at its core Confucian, but where possible incorporates examples from the life of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563–483 BCE), as well as Buddhist teachings in an effort to establish the pervasive validity of Confucian teachings. Along the way, Sekigo establishes a kind of philosophical united front, merging potentially opposing forces from East Asian religio-philosophical traditions to check the appeal of the dangerous foreign heterodoxy that Sekigo could not tolerate, Christianity. Writing in 1640, two years after the Christian-inspired Shimabara Uprising (Shimabara no ran 島原の乱) had been brutally quashed by Tokugawa forces, Sekigo authored the postscript to his Confucian syncretism, explaining it not as an abstract system having little relationship to realities of the day, but as a statement meant to instill in its readers ethical sensibilities that would render them immune to dangerous Christian teachings. In articulating his system by way of philosophical lexicography, or the semantic analysis of philosophical terms, Sekigo was equally engaging in an exploration of philosophical language and meaning of a kind that Confucius spoke of in the Analects as “the rectification of terms” (C: zhengming 正名 J: seimei). There Confucius explained the rectification of terms as a fundamentally necessary step toward achieving right political order in governing a realm. In this respect Sekigo’s philosophical system, developed by defining philosophical terms, represents one statement of Confucian political philosophy in early-modern Japan. As the first English language study of Sekigo’s Confucianism, the opening essay reveals a new dimension of Japanese Confucian philosophy in the early seventeenth century.

1.5 Discussions of the Spiritual

In the Analects, Confucius remarks that wisdom (C: zhi 知 J: chi) consists partly in “revering ghosts and spirits, but distancing oneself from them” (敬鬼神而遠之) (Analects 6/22). In another passage, Confucius is said to have “offered sacrifices to the spirits as if they were actually present” (祭神如神在) (Analects 3/12). When asked about the way of spirits, Confucius responded with a question, “Why need you be able to serve spirits when you have not been able to bring yourself to serve other people? (未能事人,焉能事鬼)” (Analects 11/12). In another passage Confucius is described as “not talking about … spiritual matters” (子不語 … 神) (Analects 7/21). One of the distinctive features of Neo-Confucianism, however, was that it devoted considerable energy to discussing spiritual matters. Chen Beixi 陳北溪 (1159–1223), a late-Song follower of Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200) Neo-Confucian teachings, wrote more in his accounts of spiritual matters (C: guishen 鬼神 J: kishin), than he did on any other notion in his lexicography of Neo-Confucian philosophical concepts. Other major compilations of Zhu Xi’s philosophical discussions such as the Classified Conversations of Master Zhu (C: Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 J: Shushi gorui) and the Grand Compendium of Neo-Confucian Notions (C: Xingli daquan 性理大全 J: Seiri dazen) equally featured Zhu’s comments on spiritual topics. In part, Neo-Confucians felt compelled to address these as a way of responding to Buddhist claims about heavenly paradises, myriad realms of hell, ceaseless reincarnation, and other spiritual notions. Among early-modern Japanese Confucian scholars influenced by these texts as well as other standard works of Neo-Confucian literature such as Zhu Xi’s Commentaries on the Four Books (C: Sishu jizhu 四書集注 J: Shisho shitchū), discussions of ghosts and spirits proliferated. Perhaps more so than in China and Korea, Japanese Confucians felt it necessary to address these topics due to the continued vitality of Buddhism as well as the widespread nativist beliefs of Shintō regarding the nature of kami 神. The prevalence of such discussions has not been lost on Japanese scholars studying Japanese Confucianism. Koyasu Nobukuni’s 子安宣邦 On Spirits: The Discourse of Confucian Intellectuals (Kishinron: Juka chishikijin no disukūru 鬼神論: 儒家知識人のディスクール), plus Asano Sanpei’s 浅野三平 modern edition and translation of Arai Hakuseki’s 新井白石 (1657–1725) and Hirata Atsutane’s 平田篤胤 (1776–1843) essays on kishin, make evident the enduring importance of this topic to understandings of Japanese Confucian philosophizing (Koyasu 1992; Asano 2012).

In his essay “Spirits, Gods, and Heaven in Confucian Thought,” W. J. Boot explores this discourse in considerable detail, showing that it was no random miscellany of writings lacking in theoretical cohesion and rigor. Instead Boot reveals the discourse as one far more unified in terminology and content than might have been imagined. In exploring this discourse, Boot examines the ideas of a wide variety of thinkers including Hayashi Razan, Minagawa Kien 皆川淇園 (1734–1807), Ogyū Sorai, Arai Hakuseki, and Aizawa Seishisai 会沢正志斎 (1782–1863). In these thinkers Boot finds considerable shared ground such as the tendency to avoid appeal to what Westerners so like to conceive the spiritual in terms of, things immaterial and supernatural. Rather Confucian theology, as Boot refers to it (it could also be called philosophical theology), is largely at one in its agreement that kishin are not immaterial but instead are manifestations of material force (C: qi 氣 J: ki, translated elsewhere in this volume as “generative force”), and that they are not “supernatural” but rather firmly grounded in the natural world of human existence and daily activity. For those thinkers who did not, like Yamagata Bantō 山片蟠桃 (1748–1821), flatly deny their existence, Confucian theorists were in part motivated by their understanding that defining a spiritual theology was immediately relevant to the practice of ancestor worship, one of the forms of religiosity comprehended and acted upon on the grounds of a detailed philosophical analysis of what exactly the nature of family ghosts and spirits consisted in. Given the importance of having people focus on this form of religiosity rather than any number of other activities that might undermine the socio-political order, a philosophical anthropology of matters spiritual was imperative. Also important for many Confucians, especially those like Hakuseki, was the sectarian need to define well-thought out Confucian accounts of kishin so as to preempt Buddhist theories and practices regarding the spiritual. What is perhaps most valuable about Boot’s essay is that in exploring kishin, he offers simultaneously a study of Confucian thinking and thinkers throughout the Tokugawa period. One of the more interesting sections is Boot’s examination of Razan’s writings on kishin which pertain as much to Shintō deities as to Neo-Confucian metaphysical and ontological notions. While some students of Chinese philosophy might be tempted to view Japanese Confucian philosophy as little more than a recapitulation of Chinese positions (and this was a claim Inoue made about the Japanese Zhu Xi School), Razan’s analysis of the spiritual in terms of the self-division of Kuninotokotachi no mikoto 国常立尊, the first deity of the Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki 日本書記) shows that there is considerable innovation in Japanese philosophical attempts at coming to terms with the divine.

1.6 Exploring the Borders

Japanese Confucianism is often addressed in relation to thinkers who lived on Honshū, Shikoku, or Kyūshū, i.e., the major islands of the Japanese archipelago. There have been exceptions: Julia Ching called attention to the life and thought of Zhu Shunshui 朱舜水 (1600–1682), the Ming 明 loyalist who fled China following the Manchu conquest, ending up in Japan serving the Lord of Mito domain, Tokugawa Mitsukuni 徳川光圀 (1628–1700), as a Confucian scholar-advisor (Ching 1979: 189–229). Abe Yoshio 阿部吉雄 (1978) revealed the influence of Korean prisoners-of-war such as Kang Hang 姜沆 (1567–1618) on Fujiwara Seika and others. Abe also called attention to the impact of Korean editions of Chinese texts such as the 1553 Jinju 晉州 edition of Beixi’s The Meanings of Human Nature and Principle (C: Xingli ziyi 性理字義 J: Seiri jigi) on Japanese Confucian writings. Abe further revealed the significant sway that Korean Neo-Confucian philosophers such as Yi T’oegye 李退溪 (1501–1570) and alternatively, Yi Yulgok 李栗谷 (1536–1584), had on Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎 (1619–1682), his Kimon 崎門 school, and a number of other Tokugawa Confucians. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom have shown that appreciating the complexity, depth, and philosophically nuanced nature of Japanese Confucianism involves more than knowing the Analects and Mencius. The substantial Chinese literature of Song Confucian philosophy including the writings of Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073), Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077), Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011–1077), Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085), Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), plus important texts from Yuan thinkers such as Xu Heng 許衡 (1209–1281), Ming Confucians Luo Qinshun 羅欽順 (1465–1547) and Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529), and Qing Confucians such as Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724–1777), cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant other if one hopes to achieve an authentic, well-informed understanding of Japanese Confucianism (de Bary and Bloom 1979; Bloom 1987).

Gregory Smits’s study of Sai On’s 蔡 温 (1682–1761) Confucian thinking makes a pioneering contribution to understandings of Japanese Confucian philosophy by casting it in the light of an important Confucian philosopher-statesman from the islands of the Ryūkyū 琉球 kingdom, now modern Okinawa 沖縄. Building on his important monograph on Ryūkyū thought and politics (Smits 1999), Smits offers a portrait of Sai On as a pragmatic Confucian philosopher in action, one intent on useful reforms of the Ryūkyū kingdom that would help make it more materially prosperous and culturally enlightened. Of particular interest in Smits’s study is his focus on Sai On’s thinking on social engineering; his philosophically-informed understanding of destiny or fate 命, one emphasizing aggressive initiative and hard work, while leaving the fruits of one’s labor to heaven 天; and Sai On’s efforts to battle superstition and ignorance that led many in Ryūkyū to rely on shamans and divination as indicators for their lives. Smits’s work on the latter two dimensions of Sai On’s thought in many respects continues themes also explored in Boot’s examination of Japanese Confucian thought on kishin. In combatting those forces while seeking to encourage those in authority and in positions that would give them leverage in effecting positive change, Sai On served as a Confucian philosopher-official of the first order. With his work on Sai On, Smits contributes most significantly toward establishing a fuller and more accurate understanding of the very multifaceted nature of Japanese Confucianism during the early-modern period.

1.7 The Body

Tsujimoto Masashi’s 辻本雅史 study of Kaibara Ekken’s 貝原益軒 (1630–1714) Confucian thought emphasizes a recent trend in philosophical studies of the body, especially within the context of Asian philosophy generally. An anthology edited by Thomas P. Kasulis, Roger T. Ames, and Wimal Dissanayake, Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, explained the centrality of the body in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophical systems (Kasulis et al. 1993). Within the context of Japanese philosophy and cultural practice, Thomas Kasulis has pioneered discussions of the importance of the body in the thinking of a range of scholars and cultural practices, not just Confucian, making clear the pervasive importance of the body in daily life, dramatic performances, ceremonial events, Buddhist and Shintō thought, and even phone conversations. In many respects Kasulis’ discussions go a considerable way towards showing that the mind-body problem so familiar to students of Western philosophy is simply not recognized in Asian philosophical discussions even when those discussions address problems related to the mind and the body (Kasulis 1993: 229–320). In modern Japanese philosophy, Shigenori Nagatomi has explored the pioneering philosophies of the body by Ichikawa Hiroshi 市川浩 (1931-) and Yuasa Yasuo 湯浅泰雄 (1925–2005) (Nagatomi 1993: 322–346). Beginning with Ichikawa’s The Body as Spiritual (Seishin to shite no shintai 精神としての身体, 1975) and Yuasa’s The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body (Shintai: Tōyōteki shinshinron no kokoromi 身体: 東洋的身心論の試み, 1977), these two thinkers have published many studies examining the religious, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of the body, often drawing on the insights of Western philosophers such as Husserl, Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty (Midgelow 2007: 180). Yet existing studies of Japanese philosophical understandings of the body have yet to focus specifically on the Confucian dimensions of the problem, highlighting the extent to which views of the self as the body and body as the self are grounded in Japanese Confucian philosophizing.

Tsujimoto Masashi’s “Spiritualizing the Physical in Edo Period Confucianism: The Somatization of Learning in the Thought of Kaibara Ekken” innovates by taking the body (shintai 身体) as the focus of its interpretations of Ekken’s thinking, especially as Ekken’s thought is developed in his Precepts for Children (Wazoku dōjikun 和俗童子訓) and his Precepts on Nourishing Life (Yōjōkun 養生訓), two works that reflect in many important respects conceptualizations of study, learning, and living prevalent during Ekken’s day. In his analyses of Ekken’s thought, Tsujimoto emphasizes how the Zhu Xi philosophical system that Ekken took as one of his starting points gave primacy, within its metaphysics, to principle (C: li 理 J: ri) over material force (C: qi 氣 J: ki), and to the “unmanifest” (C: wei fa 未發 J: mihatsu) over the “manifest (C: yifa 已發 J: ihatsu). Ekken’s approach, however, was to emphasize the material side of the metaphysical equation, noting how in learning to write characters, to read texts, and to master manners and etiquette, learning is of a physical sort, bringing into play at every turn the material force of the body. In Ekken’s view, according to Tsujimoto, the emphasis on the body and material force was informed by Ekken’s recognition that the human mind was a volatile and potentially precarious faculty, ever capable of changing erratically. The result, in Tsujimoto’s view, is that a rise in corporeality occurred in conjunction with the move by many Japanese philosophers such as Ekken away from Zhu Xi’s system of thought. Tsujimoto emphasizes that while this move is conspicuous in Ekken’s thinking, it is hardly unique to him. Similar body-centered philosophical positions are evident in the thought of Nakae Tōju 中江藤樹 (1608–1648), Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎 (1619–1682), and Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728). Tsujimoto adds to his findings on the body by noting that, especially in Ekken’s thought, the emphasis on the physical body as the self was something associated with children’s education where learning how to do something, often through guided development or training of physical habits, was more emphasized than discursive learning regarding why something is or should be done. In exploring the prominence of the physical, somatic nature of the self and learning in Ekken’s Confucian philosophy, Tsujimoto contributes significantly to understandings of the Confucian sources of modern and contemporary developments in Japanese discourse on the self.

1.8 Ogyū Sorai

It would be virtually impossible for any volume on Japanese Confucian philosophy to overlook Ogyū Sorai. Although by no means the most beloved or accessible of Japan’s Confucian thinkers, there can be little doubt about the erudition evident in Sorai’s philosophical writings and the extent to which he mastered much of the Confucian canon, in the Chinese original as well as its earlier Japanese expressions. Olof G. Lidin, the premier Western authority on Sorai’s life and thought, provides an interesting interpretive angle on Sorai’s overall philosophical perspective as evidenced in what appears to be Sorai’s first major text, Report of the Elegant Emissaries (Fūryūshishaki 風流使者記, ca. 1710) (Lidin 1983), a work commissioned by Sorai’s patron, Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu 柳沢吉保 (1658–1714), chamberlain to the shogun Tsunayoshi 綱吉 (1646–1709), and in one of Sorai’s last works, Discourse on Government (Seidan 政談, 1728), a set of practical political proposals submitted at the request of then shogun Yoshimune 徳川吉宗 (1684–1751). Although Lidin was one of the first Western postwar scholars to translate Sorai’s philosophical writings and the first and only Western scholar to author a biography of Sorai, one describing Sorai in its pioneering title as a “Confucian philosopher” (Lidin 1970, 1973), his purpose here is not to analyze Sorai’s philosophical writings philosophically, but rather to offer a philosophical characterization of Sorai’s first and last writings, the former a travelogue that Lidin was the first to translate into English (Lidin 1983) and the latter, a political text suggesting administrative reforms, which Lidin has also translated into English in its entirety for the first time (Lidin 1999). By no means a typical philosophical analysis, Lidin suggests that Sorai’s leitmotif in these very different works is his evident sense of “compassion” (C: ren 仁 J: jin) for humanity.

1.9 Whence Modernity?

Sorai is in part at the center of an essay by Olivier Ansart, author of L’empire du rite: La pensée politique d’Ogyû Sorai (Ansart 1998). Ansart’s essay explores what he calls the “philosophical moment” between Sorai and Kaihō Seiryō 海保青陵 (1755–1817), one that brought to the fore assumptions necessary to justify basic structures of modern society, establishing that in the non-Western, non-modern context of Tokugawa Japan, a moment existed during which imaginative thinkers moved toward a modern standpoint. In making this case, Ansart marshals philosophical theory for the sake of an argument that is as proximate to intellectual history as philosophical analysis. But the division between the two, intellectual history and philosophical understanding, and certainly as it pertains to understandings of Ogyū Sorai, has been all but irrevocably blurred in postwar Japan by the important studies of Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男 (1914–1996). Doing justice to the complexity of Maruyama’s analysis of Sorai’s thought requires going well beyond the limits of this introduction, but suffice it to say that Maruyama saw in Sorai, and especially Sorai’s emphasis on the ancient sage kings as creators of institutions, something he referred to as “the logic of invention,” a distinctively modern element in Sorai’s thought that heralded the beginnings of a modern political consciousness in Japan (Maruyama 1952). Maruyama’s discussions have fascinated students of Japanese thought, especially in the West, and most especially in the wake of Mikiso Hane’s translation of Maruyama’s work under the title, Studies in the Institutional History of Tokugawa Japan (Maruyama 1974). Many have contested Maruyama’s views, first published as journal articles in the mid-1940s, but not a few continue to hold that his writings remain the starting points for any future study of modern Japanese thinking. When one considers that Sorai’s ideas, like those of most Confucians, had been characterized in a major way by Tokyo Imperial University professor of philosophy Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 (1855–1944) as expressions of “Japanese philosophy” (Nihon no tetsugaku 日本之哲学), there are good reasons for seeing Maruyama’s writings, and those who have since addressed them, either positively or negatively, as having a philosophical dimension. Ansart’s essay must be situated, then, as with so many contemporary studies of Japanese Confucian thinking, somewhere between intellectual history and philosophical history.

Ansart does not agree with Maruyama’s characterization of modernity, but he does believe that Maruyama was onto something of considerable importance. Ansart sees the question of the locus of “modern political theory” as one that is alive and open, and suggests that the distinctive elements to look for are: a metaphysics disenchanted with appeals to nature and affirming instead a form of positivism; a theory of rational instrumentality in epistemology; the doctrine of freewill and personal responsibility in moral psychology; and an understanding of society as contractual in its relationships. In Sorai, Ansart sees the first element of modern political theory realized to a large degree in Sorai’s emphasis on the sage kings as creators/inventors who transform reality rather than claim that all is an expression of nature. However, Sorai’s move toward modern political theory stops there; the remaining three elements of modern political theory, in Ansart’s view, are developed in the thought of Seiryō. With copious citations and a masterful command of Seiryō’s works, Ansart presents a strong argument for the appearance of modern political theory in the philosophical transition from Sorai’s thought to Seiryō writings, a claim that will surely challenge all who might have imagined that the question was settled and the case closed.

1.10 The Nature

The importance of Sorai to Japanese Confucian philosophy is evident in the number of very significant thinkers that he either taught or influenced in one manner or another. Peter Flueckiger expands his expertise on Sorai (Flueckiger 2011) with a new study of Dazai Shundai 太宰春台 (1680–1747) that effectively suggests this point via its examination of Shundai’s thought on the inborn nature (C: xing 性 J: sei), especially as Shundai’s thinking on that seminal Confucian topic was developed in relation to Sorai’s. One aspect of Flueckiger’s study is his argument that Shundai’s position on the nature is more pessimistic than Sorai’s in that Shundai considers the nature something that might have to be overcome with rigorous practice and effort in order to bring it into harmony with the Confucian Way, if that is possible at all. In part, Shundai’s somewhat pessimistic appraisal of the inborn nature is more so than Sorai’s because Shundai posits a state of nature far removed from Sorai’s vision of an originally cooperative and mutually supporting and sustaining society. Shundai instead sees the natural condition as one in which human beings may take human form, but have hearts and minds that are no different than those of the wildest of animals. As a result, the state of nature is one wherein the strong have their way with the weak, overwhelming them as they see fit for whatever reason, if any at all. But most importantly, Shundai follows the Tang Confucian scholar Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) in identifying different grades of nature in humanity, with the idea being that different people have different expressions of inborn nature so that rather than a unified and consistently “good” or “evil” nature, people have as many different types of nature as there are people. Simply put, contrary to Mencian and Xunzian efforts to characterize human nature in a priori terms, Shundai holds that inborn natures are simply not the same. Flueckiger also calls attention to how Shundai viewed coming into conformity with the Way as a process or external control of one’s behavior so that regardless of what is thought or felt, one actually does the right thing in action. Thus it is conceivable for a person to be doing the right thing, but thinking all the wrong thoughts in the process. For Shundai, such a situation is not necessarily a bad thing, and might well be an acceptable step along the way toward a fuller internalization, as opposed to mere external manifestation of, the Way. One of the most interesting portions of Flueckiger’s essay discusses the political thinking of Shundai and Sorai and how Shundai, unlike Sorai, allowed for borrowings from Daoist, Mohist, and Legalist thought. Indeed, in his A Record of Political Economy (Keizairoku 経済録) Shundai endorses as appropriate for a degenerate age such as his own a quasi-Daoistic approach to government with the ruler engaging in “non-action” (C: wuwei 無爲 J: mu’i). In this regard, Flueckiger suggests, Shundai formulates a more adaptable, even if not necessarily philosophically consistent, expression of Confucian thinking than had Sorai.

1.11 Doubters, Critics, and Common Ground

Studies of Confucian philosophy often explore debates among Confucian thinkers, but do not typically examine criticisms of Confucian philosophizing from outside the fold. But to overlook such critiques is to disregard a deeply rooted aspect of Confucian philosophical learning, one that links the Confucian approach to knowledge, reason, and thought to – if a return to the question of modernity is allowed – the Western philosopher with whom so much of the paradigm shift resulting in the rise modern philosophy is associated, René Descartes (1596–1650). In his Discourse on the Method (Discours de la méthode) and Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae), Descartes sought both to combat skepticism and simultaneously define a methodology for arriving at certain knowledge. Ironically the method he proposed was systematic doubt: by embracing skepticism, so to speak, he sought a way of overcoming it. While reportedly engaged in doubt, Descartes realized that thought and therefore the thinker, exist, formulating this realization in his famous conclusion, “I think, therefore I am” (Je pense, donc je suis, or as cast in Latin, Cogito ergo sum). Certainty about existence then was a clear and distinct byproduct, in Descartes’ mind, arising from his confrontation with doubts about his own existence. Because of his well-recorded readiness to entertain doubt and then overcome it, Descartes – although he was hardly alone in this – has come to stand, even in revisionist studies, as the revolutionary early-modern thinker who articulated a dramatic break with ancient and medieval forms of inquiry (Cottingham 1993: 145–166; Rutherford 2006: 26–31).

In twelfth century China, Zhu Xi, somewhat similarly, affirmed the value of doubt not for the sake of establishing his own existence so much as arriving at, as with Descartes later, certainty about knowledge and learning. Zhu recognized that students ought to doubt, question, and scrutinize everything they might deem dubious. Without entertaining doubt, Zhu reasoned, there is no progress in learning. With some doubts, students will make some progress. However Zhu emphasized that it is only when students dare to doubt things in a major way that they make major progress in learning (Li 1984: 4414). Daniel Gardner notes that Zhu Xi encouraged students to read and study books with an open mind and that “only a genuinely inquiring mind would have the tenacity to pursue the truth fully, casting aside all preconceived and misguided ideas in the process.” Gardner further suggests that Zhu wanted students “to learn to treat … received opinions critically.” Having observed how fallible the classics and their commentaries were, Zhu emphasized that students should never accept them without questions or critique (Gardner 1990: 45–47). Nor was Zhu Xi alone in this: his thoughts on doubt and learning expanded Cheng Yi’s often repeated maxim: “Students must first of all know how to doubt” (Er Cheng quanshū 二程全集 1979: 1143). According to Wm. Theodore de Bary, Zhu found this to be a “wonderful method” (de Bary 1983: 62). In his own teachings, Zhu developed Cheng Yi’s maxim at length. He explains,

In reading books, if you have no doubts whatsoever, then you should be taught to entertain them. Conversely, if you harbor doubts about matters, you should try to resolve them completely. Only when students have reached this point will they have made progress. (Li 1984: 296)

Zhu Xi’s position was that if students were not skeptical about the material that they were studying, they should be. However, once skeptical, students must continue to deliberate and inquire until they have resolved all their doubts. Once they emerge from this dialectic of doubt and resolution, they begin to make progress in learning. Implied, however, is that without doubt, learning stagnates. If the goal is to advance toward wisdom, doubt is indispensable. In characterizing one of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian predecessors who earlier emphasized the importance of doubt, Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077), Siu-chi Huang adds that Zhang was a “methodological skeptic,” not unlike Descartes, who “would question the reliability of any proposition until it could be proven.” Huang further explains that Zhang “condemned conformity as the main obstacle to intellectual progress” and “emphasized independent thinking and a critical, reflective, and skeptical attitude as essential for philosophical inquiry” (Huang 1999: 66, 78).

Early-modern Japanese Confucian philosophers well understood Zhu Xi’s thinking and that of Neo-Confucians generally regarding doubt. In the opening section of his brief primer, On the Three Virtues (Santokushō 三徳抄), Hayashi Razan paraphrased Zhu Xi’s very remarks on the importance of doubt. Razan then explained his thinking about the role of doubt in learning by stating,

If we have any uncertainties about external things, we should clarify them so that we understand them. Unless we aspire to learning, we will not have the strength [to question and doubt things] as we should. Even as we think about exhausting principles completely, that we have doubts is proof that we are making progress in learning (gi no aru wa gakumon no susumu shirushi nari 疑のあるは學問の進むしるし也). When doubts and misgivings are resolved, our minds naturally become clear and principles of the way are no longer obscured. If we do not resolve these doubts but instead allow them to remain, throughout our lives we will never be able to differentiate what is true from what is false. Leaving doubts unresolved is like putting a living creature in a bag, or shutting up an active animal in a sealed box. Things will not be able to flow freely from our minds [if we do not address our doubts]. (Razan 1975: 153)

Later Kaibara Ekken authored one of the most systematic expressions of doubt ever directed at Neo-Confucian metaphysics, Record of Great Doubts (Taigiroku 大疑録). Interestingly enough, Ekken’s text paraphrased Zhu Xi’s thinking on the value of doubt as a sort of Neo-Confucian justification for doubting Neo-Confucianism. One of the legacies of Japanese Confucian philosophy was this acknowledgement of doubting and questioning received wisdom, even regarding its own teachings, as a means to certainty in knowledge. Much as Descartes’ method both captured and informed much of the inquisitive nature of his seventeenth century Europe, so did the Japanese Confucian advocacy of doubt, beginning with Razan and continuing through Ekken and beyond, encourage thinkers to reject blind acceptance of ideas and instead scrutinize them carefully.

Peter Nosco’s study, “Kokugaku Critiques of Confucianism and Chinese Culture,” and Jacque Joly’s “Saints as Sinners: Andō Shōeki’s Back-to-Nature Critiques of the Saints, Confucian and Otherwise,” are not presented by the authors as outgrowths of the Confucian call for doubt in learning, but are included in this volume as illustrations, arguably, of the consequences of this rather modern philosophical methodology advocated by Confucianism generally and Japanese Confucian philosophers such as Razan and Ekken in particular. Nosco’s essay acknowledges, for example, that the relationship between Kokugaku and Confu-cianism is often thought of in terms of critiques of the latter issuing from the former, with these critiques often expressing xenophobic attacks directed toward Chinese culture and Confucianism in particular. Kokugaku advocates of such criticisms included Keichū 契沖 (1640–1701), Kada no Azumamaro 荷田春満 (1669–1736), Kamo no Mabuchi 賀茂真淵 (1697–1769), Motoori Norinaga 本居宣長 (1730–1801), and Hirata Atsutane 平田篤胤 (1776–1843), just to mention some the major figures. Without denying the substantial dimensions of Kokugaku critiques of Confucianism, Nosco calls attention to the extent that nativist and Confucian goals were largely congruent resulting in the Kokugaku domestication of Confucian virtues such as filial piety, harmony, humaneness, and studiousness. Nosco does not elevate winners in these processes of critique and coming together, but does suggest that ultimately both intellectual forces, Confucianism and Kokugaku, emerged better due to the interaction. As evidence of this new relationship of convergence rather than criticism, Nosco cites the presence of the above-mentioned fundamental Confucian virtues in the Meiji emperor’s 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education wherein the imperial call was for practice of these virtues in service to the Japanese state. Another example cited is that of the late-Tokugawa Mito 水戸 text, Aizawa Seishisai’s 会沢正志斎 (1762–1863) New Theses (Shinron 新論), which acknowledged a “congruence” (angō 暗合) of sorts between the Confucian Way and the ancient Japanese Way of heaven and earth, allowing for the merging of virtues such as filial piety and loyalty to one’s sovereign, in this case the Japanese emperor.

Expanding on his book on Shōeki as well as his French translation of Maruyama Masao’s Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū 日本政治思想史研究 (Joly 1996a, b), Jacques Joly contributes an essay on Andō Shōeki’s critique of Confucianism. Joly explores the still little-known world of Shōeki’s thought, suggesting that Shōeki was ultimately a conservative thinker who shared much with the Kokugaku critics of Confucian philosophy. Joly also interprets Shōeki’s criticisms of the “saints” (seijin 聖人) – often translated as “sages” – as not necessarily directed at Confucianism as such, but instead applying to a range of philosophical positions and perspectives. Joly even calls into question the extent to which “Confucianism” can be spoken of meaningfully, emphasizing that one of the Japanese terms so frequently translated as “Confucianism,” Jusho 儒書, actually refers to, in his view, the entire tradition of the Chinese Classics including their Japanese commentators. This would include virtually every philosophical text of any note, Daoism and Kokugaku included, but not those of Buddhism. While it might well be that Shōeki’s critical wrath was not exclusively devoted to Confucianism, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was largely directed at the writings and philosophical thought of scholars associated with what is commonly referred to by Westerners as Confucianism. It is perhaps true that Jusho has a wider meaning than many Westerners imagine, but Matsunaga Sekigo’s Irinshō opens with a reference to the “three major ways” (大道三つあり): one Confucian (Ju 儒), expressing “the way of Confucius” (Kōshi no michi 孔子の道); one Buddhist (Shaku 釋), conveying “the way of the Buddha” (Shaka no michi 釋迦の道); and one Daoist (Dō 道), explaining “the way of Laozi” (Rōshi no michi 老子の道). Conceivably, not every instance of Ju 儒 refers to Confucianism, but neither was the word necessarily misinterpreted by Westerners in reference to the teachings of Confucius. There are, it seems, good reasons for holding that Confucianism actually existed in something akin to the manner in which scholars of Japanese history have imagined that it existed. That aside, Joly’s paper does reveal one clear example of systematic doubt and harsh criticism as leveled at Japanese Confucianism in early-modern times. Quite usefully for those familiar with Daoism, Joly notes in some detail how Shōeki’s criticisms also echoed the kinds of attacks on ancient Confucianism found in the Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi 荘子, especially as formulated in chapters such as “Robber Zhi” (Dao zhi 盜跖) and “The Old Fisherman” (Yu fu 漁父). Highlighting this connection makes clear the extent to which Shōeki’s ideas were original or lacking, somewhat, in the same. Regardless of their origins, the critiques of Confucian philosophy, and most especially its Saints/Sages, as offered by Shōeki are some of the most amusing and possibly insightful, at a certain level, ever formulated. The world of Japanese Confucianism remains a theoretically richer one for their existence.

1.12 Wang Yangming

Surveys of Japanese Confucianism dating back to Inoue Tetsujirō’s previously mentioned trilogy devoted to the three major schools of Japanese Confucian philosophy – the Zhu Xi, the Wang Yangming, and the Ancient Learning – have invariably devoted substantial coverage to figures from the Wang Yangming school of Confucian philosophy. Figures like Nakae Tōju 中江藤樹 (1608–1648) and Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢蕃山 (1619–1691) appear prominently in de Bary and Bloom’s anthology, Principle and Practicality (Yamashita 1979: 307–336; McMullen 1979: 337–374); Banzan’s thought has also been the subject of two monographs (McMullen 1991, 1999). In this volume, the Japanese school of Wang Yangming is discussed in relation to one of its leading figures at the end of the early-modern period, Ōshio Chūsai 大塩中斎 (1793–1837). Barry Steben’s essay offers a detailed philosophical-biographical study of this tragic scholar showing how Chūsai’s attempts to put the Wang Yangming principle of “the inseparability of knowledge and action” (C: zhixing heyi 知行合一 J: chikō gōitsu) into meaningful practice led him into a career as a police official, but then, ironically enough, ultimately toward a fateful end as the leader of a rebellion against the Osaka governing authorities. In particular, Steben explores the central principles of Chūsai’s teachings – that “the mind itself is principle” (C: xin ji li 心即理 J: shin soku ri) and that the body at death returns to the great vacuity (C: gui taixu 帰太虚 J: ki taikyo), the ultimate eternal source of all being – as an expression of an idealistic form of Japanese Confucianism. He also contextualizes this early-modern idealism within a contemporary framework by briefly examining the influence of Chūsai’s thought on the life and death of one of modern Japan’s great literary figures, MishimaYukio 三島由紀夫 (1925–1970).

1.13 Meiji Divination

Japanese Confucianism in the Meiji period has been one of the more neglected areas of research. Inoue Tetsujirō, who defined so many aspects of the study of Japanese Confucianism, whether as philosophy or thought, lived in the Meiji but looked back to and no further than the Tokugawa in identifying the thinkers dominating Japan’s own philosophical schools. Almost certainly, Inoue himself was one of the premier Confucians of the Meiji, Taishō, and early-Shōwa Japan, but perhaps enough has been said about Inoue for now. Studies of figures such as Motooda Eifu 元田永孚 (1818–1891), Confucian tutor to the Meiji emperor (Shively 1959: 302–333), and Nishimura Shigeki 西村茂樹 (1828–1902), one of the leading Confucian scholar-educators of the Meiji period (Shively 1965: 193–241), have offered fascinating insights into the extent to which Confucian philosophy continued well into modern Japan even after the collapse of the old regime with which it had been so strongly associated historically. If anything, the continued vitality of Confucian philosophy during the Meiji even when faced with competition from every major philosophical system the West had to offer – including Utilitarianism and Hegelianism – points to the extent to which Japanese Confucianism was more than simply an ideological buttress for a supposedly feudalistic military regime. Building on his groundbreaking research on the importance of the Book of Changes in Tokugawa Confucianism (Ng 2000), Wai-ming Ng presents a fascinating study of an important but relatively little known figure, Takashima Kaemon 高島嘉右衛門 (1832–1914) and his influential text, Takashima’s Judgments on the Yijing (Takashima Ekidan 高島易斷), an important work in Meiji Confucianism in regard to both philosophy and practice. Ng shows that a number of the most powerful leaders of the so-called enlightened Meiji government consulted Takashima, a semi-official diviner, frequently for divinations and judgments related to some of the most important decisions that they would make, including ones related to Meiji policies relevant to national education, the People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū minken undō 自由民権運動), military decisions pertaining to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), policy toward Taiwan, and imperial military decisions related to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). By bringing this aspect of Confucian theory and practice to light, Ng reveals how Meiji Japan emerged as an often-curious philosophical mixture of tradition and modernity.

1.14 Maruyama Masao on Yamazaki Ansai

Maruyama Masao’s “Orthodoxy and Legitimacy in the Yamazaki Ansai School” is a most valuable contribution, one that offers insights into Maruyama, one of the most important Japanese thinkers of the twentieth-century, and his understandings of the nature and legacy of Japanese Confucianism as expressed by the Yamazaki Ansai school of Zhu Xi philosophy. Maruyama was not, admittedly, a professor of philosophy and so his inclusion here might seem somewhat questionable. However he was a professor at Tokyo University, a status that gave his thinking clout, and most especially, a status that encourages his juxtaposition with Inoue, an earlier Tōdai don with whom he, Maruyama, had very fundamental disagreements regarding Confucianism. Maruyama’s studies of Japanese Confucianism, some of his earliest and final work, involved him in analyses of philosophical subject matter; although he typically described his studies as ones related to “thought,” “ideology,” or “intellectual history,” they always had a clear philosophical dimension. Thus in the opening paragraph of his Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū 日本政治思想史研究, translated by Mikiso Hane as Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Maruyama began his discussion of Zhu Xi’s thinking and Chinese culture by referring to Hegel’s characterizations of China and Confucianism (Maruyama 1952: 3–7, 1974: 3–6). Maruyama’s choice of Hegel as an interpreter of China and Confucianism was perhaps the worst possible that could have been made, but nevertheless it reflected his involvement in philosophical traditions and his rather naïve respect for Western philosophical interpretations of East Asia, regardless of how mistaken they were. Also, Maruyama often referred to Zhu Xi’s thought as philosophy (tetsugaku 哲学) in its Chinese context, even though he shifted the categorization to “ideology” or simply “thought” when speaking of it in relation to Japan. Characterized as an “intellectual historian” by Hane, Maruyama spoke of his own work, at least his first major study of Confucian thought, as shisōshi 思想史, a compound which could be translated either as “history of thought” or “intellectual history.” When later reflecting on errors, misinterpretations, and mischaracterizations in his Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū, Maruyama explained, however, that his overall intent in authoring the various studies constituting that text was to oppose the then dominant kokumin dōtoku 国民道徳, “national ethics,” thought formulated by men such as former Tokyo Imperial University professor of philosophy Inoue Tetsujirō. Although most intellectual historians today would call Inoue an ideologue or perhaps even a propagandist rather than a philosopher, during the first several decades of the twentieth century Inoue was among the most revered professors of philosophy in Japan, and certainly the first Japanese to hold a chair in philosophy at Tokyo University. While Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) has come to be recognized as modern Japan’s first philosopher, Inoue preceded him by decades and was far more prominent in public life than Nishida. Nishida’s elevation has occurred as memories of Inoue’s work are forgotten, often with contempt and dismay. If Inoue’s standing as a philosopher is taken seriously, then the fact that Maruyama’s first major studies on Confucianism were meant to oppose Inoue’s views, would give them a philosophical dimension by implication.

If allowed an allegorical interpretation as a work opposing kokumin dōtoku rather than simply trying to formulate an objective intellectual history of political thought, Maruyama’s Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū can be read as extolling Ogyū Sorai’s contributions to the achievement of modernity in political consciousness in part because it was Sorai who, among the Tokugawa Confucians, was so problematic for both Inoue and the Japanese imperial state. Maruyama noted in another essay addressing the fact that Sorai never received posthumous imperial rank as did so many Confucian scholars including Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–1685), Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 (1627–1705), Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎 (1619–1682) and others. In part Maruyama explained Sorai’s exclusion from posthumous honors by noting that Sorai had referred to himself and his country disrespectfully, at least from the pro-imperialist’s perspective, in calling himself and the people of Japan “eastern barbarians” (Tō’i 東夷). This, plus his evident interest in things Chinese, including all aspects of the Chinese language, and his minimalist interest in things distinctively Japanese, made Sorai a sort of philosophical and cultural pariah in prewar Japan, one whose foreign interests and disuse for Imperial Japan would never be rewarded with posthumous rank or even much in the way of positive scholarly recognition (Maruyama 1979). Indeed, before 1945, there was precious little scholarship on Sorai, even as the academic fortunes of Hayashi Razan, Yamaga Sokō, Itō Jinsai, Yamazaki Ansai, and others soared by comparison. Maruyama’s praise for Sorai and his contributions to Japan’s political development distanced him, Maruyama, from ideological orthodoxy prevalent during the 1930s and early 1940s, influenced as it was by Inoue and others like him.

Yet the Tokugawa Confucian about whom Maruyama said surprisingly little in Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū was none other than Yamazaki Ansai. In fact, Maruyama dispensed with Ansai in a mere three pages. Maruyama confesses in his essay on Ansai, published in the Nihon shisō taikei 日本思想大系 volume devoted to Ansai and the Ansai school, being hardly able to bring himself to look at much of the ideologically-laden literature which was so often associated with Ansai’s thought and that of his school (Maruyama 1980). In a subtle and yet penetrating way, one of the most interesting dimensions of Maruyama’s essay on Ansai and his school, translated here by Barry Steben, is the extent to which it can be interpreted, between the lines, as a commentary on why Japanese Confucianism did not continue to be viewed, as Inoue sought to establish, as philosophy in postwar Japan. In the essay, Maruyama repeatedly returns to the theme of the pre-1945 applications of Ansai’s philosophy and tendencies inherent within it as a teaching and in relations between Ansai’s followers. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying Maruyama’s essay, its suggests that many of the obsessively rigid, self-righteous, and Japan-centered themes so evident in Ansai as a teacher and in his students as disciples were ones that echoed in the pre-1945 intellectual dynamic of modern Japan. Here, Maruyama thus sees in the thinker who received ample posthumous imperial ranks tendencies that ultimately brought about imperial disaster for Japan.

1.15 Back to the Tokugawa

Responding to Maruyama’s essay and so revealing the dialectical vigor of Confucian philosophical thinking even in contemporary times, Koyasu Nobukuni’s 子安宣邦 “Zhu Xi and Zhuxi-ism: Toward a Critical Perspective on the Ansai School,” perhaps also brings readers full circle, back to the Tokugawa and a more traditional grounding in the study of Japanese Confucianism. Koyasu’s essay (Koyasu 2005), which originally appeared in his book, Edo as Method: Japanese Intellectual History and Critical Perspectives (Hōhō to shite no Edo: Nihon shisōshi to hihanteki shiza 方法としての江戸: 日本思想史と批判的視座), responds critically to Maruyama by suggesting that in his efforts to reveal the foundations of Japan’s pre-1945 “national essence” (kokutai 國體) ideology, especially as evident in Ansai’s thought, Maruyama overlooked the emphases that Ansai and his school placed, following in part the views of Zhu Xi as well as the Korean Zhu Xi scholar, Yi T’oegye 李退溪 (1501–1570), on the practices of “faithful exposition” (sojutsu 祖述) and “personal realization” (tainin 体認) of Confucian teachings in a “self-authenticated” (shutaiteki 主体的), essentially inward manner. Koyasu emphasizes that much that Ansai taught was conveyed orally, in his lectures, as a means of instructing his disciples in ways of self-mastery through mastering their minds. Ansai’s ideas, Koyasu suggests, need to be understood on their own terms rather than in relation to what later became of them. In making this point, he also calls attention to other aspects of Maruyama’s interpretive schema that he finds of questionable appropriateness to Ansai if the latter is to be interpreted in light of his own time and circumstances.

Koyasu’s critique of Maruyama reflects in part a living dimension of the philosophical tradition of Japanese Confucianism and the dialectic it has produced, even if one operative more in the history of ideas and among intellectual historians than in philosophical discussions of Japanese Confucians. While the tendency to interpret Tokugawa Confucianism as ideology shows few signs of diminishing, it seems internally at odds with itself unless those formulating such appraisals stand prepared, in a self-reflexive way, to see their perspectives in the same light, as themselves amounting to so many ideological statements reflecting their own involvement in power relations and a host of socio-political, colonial and post-colonial, modern and post-modern nuances that perhaps are in the end inescapable. Whatever interpretive register Japanese Confucianism might be viewed through – philosophical, ideological, intellectual historical, or otherwise – it has an enduring relevance to modern Japanese culture. The virtue of the philosophical lens, hopefully advanced somewhat in this volume, is that when brought to bear at its best as part of a search and passion for wisdom, it has tended to be consistently critical and self-critical but not condescending, in evaluating the integrity of ideas, past and present. As the field of Japanese studies moves further into the twenty-first century, it is imperative that those interpreting Japanese intellectual culture and its future prospects draw on every resource available, including the philosophical, for reexamining Japan’s past and living expressions – among them Confucianism – in the hope that they provide some insight, even wisdom, into how we can live together, as the UTCP puts it, and not simply side-by-side.