The Invention of “Chinese Philosophy”: How Did the Classics Take Root in Japan’s First Modern University?

Introduction: research history and perspectivePost WWII research on Confucianism in modern JapanRegardless of our nationality, when we think about the development of Confucianism in modern Japan, we are likely to think first of Japan’s first modern university, Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo). Turning to its role, our attention is drawn to the scholars of Chinese philosophy for whom Confucianism was a space for discourse friendly to the government or, in other words, useful to ideologues who supported the nationalism and militarism that peaked in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.The first scholar to grapple with this question and produce serious research was not Japanese. He was Warren W. Smith, Jr., whose work Confucianism in Japan: A Study of Conservatism in Japanese Intellectual History was first published in 1959, when Japanese memories of the war were still fresh. Even now his book remains unrivaled for its comprehensive and expert coverage of Confucianism in modern Japan. In that book, Smith critically analyzed the political and ideological roles played in the 1930s by Tokyo Imperial University and the Shibunkai (斯文会), a powerful organization dedicated to the promotion of Confucianism and Chinese Learning, to which the university’s faculty members belonged. Togawa Yoshio was the first Japanese scholar to address this topic in the postwar era. In a magazine article published in 1966, he, too, sharply criticized the prewar Tokyo Imperial University’s scholars of Chinese philosophy. He, too, labelled them ideologues. Unlike Smith, however, Togawa did not publish his research in book form.Until relatively recently, this attitude toward Confucianism in modern Japan—in other words, the critical stance which saw scholarship and politics as too closely aligned in prewar Japan—remained deeply rooted. Until recent years, studies of Confucianism in modern Japan from other perspectives were almost nonexistent. In the context described by Kiri Paramore’s phrase, “Confucianism as taboo,” most Japanese researchers avoided making reconsideration of Confucianism in modern Japan the topic of scholarly research.It was, then, only in recent years (albeit nearly twenty years ago) that some serious research on this topic began to appear in Japanese or Chinese. But again the author was not Japanese.