Anti-Christian Ideas and National Ideology: Inoue Enryo and Inoue Tetsujiro's Mobilization of Sectarian History in Meiji Japan

Abstract

Christian and anti-Christian ideas played a major role in the formation of modern Japanese national ideology. This article focuses on the construction of a sectarian history of the Tokugawa state as one part of the anti-Christian ideological writing of late nineteenth early twentieth century Japan. Academic and semi-academic writing on history and philosophy at this time was intimately connected with the major political debates which accompanied the introduction of the Imperial Constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education. This article argues that these debates in many ways determined how these markers of state ideology would be interpreted in the future. Focusing particularly on the works of Inoue Tetsujiro and Inoue Enryo, this article shows how centrally historical discourses of sectarianism were deployed in the debates of the Meiji period, and how the historical, political and philosophical writings of figures like Enryo and Tetsujiro were integrated-both with each other, and with the pre-Meiji historical past.