Intellectual Change in Early Eighteenth-Century Tokugawa Confucianism

Abstract

When teaching Tokugawa intellectual history, I consistently encounter a question that is at once deceptively simple yet so difficult to respond to in a convincing and substantial way. Why do Japanese historians argue that Confucianism had an important impact on Tokugawa society, when geographical, political, and ethical realities in Japan were so vastly different from those in China? There is, of course, good reason to be perplexed, I reply, and offer a generalization or two. Tokugawa society clearly was not “Sinified” as is sometimes implied; but, on the other hand, the imprint of Confucianism on Tokugawa thought and culture was undeniably deep. Although the picture is sometimes overdrawn, Japanese historians constantly refer to Confucianism as the “rationalizing” force that transformed Japan from a religious and ascetic culture to a bureaucratic and secular one. The same historians continue to debate the intellectual merit of Tokugawa Confucianism in Japan's modern culture, for while the precise ramifications are still controversial, there is little doubt as to the depth of the Tokugawa intellectual engagement with Confucian thought and of the profound legacy of that engagement for the modern history of Japan. Unfortunately, these generalizations, although helpful, do not add up to convincing historical instruction, a realization that has invariably left me searching for more cogent lines of interpretation and more detailed characterizations of Tokugawa thought.

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