The Japanization of Confucianism

Abstract

Confucianism from China has penetrated into Japan since the fifth century. But it was overshadowed by Buddhism for thousand years. It was then made use of when Ieyasu established the Tokugawa regime. In the Tokugawa period, it is an undisputed fact that Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism was put to use by Tokugawa Ieyasy as a bakufu ideology, though informally. At the same time, we can not deny that Japan’s supreme rulers, from Oda Nobunaga through Tokugawa Iemitsu consciously deployed strategies by mythologizing their personal and their position. Moreover, the Tokugawa ideology was more or less a mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto. Neo-Confucians in Tokugawa period sought to provide the warriors with a clearer class identity than before. Tokugawa learned to organize and manage great masses of people. They were able to transfer skills from the military to the social and political realm. Such enabled the Tokugawa government to Japanize Confucianism and accordingly the Japanese Confucianism was different from the mainland’s original confucianism. In the nineteenth-century, late Edo, the threat came both from within and from without, beyond Japan’s borders. Thus, such situations had given rooms for variety of ideas and practices. When, in the 1890s, the Japanese government needed to stipurlate a set of values to sharpen model citizens through the educational system. During the crisis of the 1930s, nationalism mobilized the Japanese to the highest degree, the state tuned to Yamazaki Ansai’s ideology. After the second World War, the focus of their attention was on Japan’s economic success. And again they had begun to praise the capitalists benefits to be drawn from a maintenance of “feudal” and the military values (the bushido which covered the Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto values). So far Japanese Confucianism stood for the worldly life and socialization in the Japanese society. It affirms the Japanese to be realistic and pragmatic. Thus, Confucianism has provided favorable atmosphere for the Japanese characteristics to promote the rapid modernization. Without pragmatic and humanistic Confucianism, Japan might still have been a conservative and agrarian country.