Reviewed by: Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History by Kiri Paramore Samuel Hideo Yamashita (bio) Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History. By Kiri Paramore. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016. xx, 231 pages. $99.99, cloth; $29.99, paper; $24.00, E-book. At first glance, Kiri Paramore’s Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History struck me as a throwback, a cross between Arthur Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being and John Whitney Hall’s Government and Local Power in Japan. Like Lovejoy’s work, Paramore’s book follows a single topic, Japanese Confucianism, from its origins to the present, tracking its different manifestations over time. This book also is reminiscent of Hall’s Government and Local Power in Japan, which traces a single theme, institutional life in Bizen Province from antiquity to 1700, and relies almost exclusively on Japanese scholarship. Writing at a time when comparative history was becoming fashionable, Hall used Max Weber’s theory of rationalization to frame his material. Like Hall, Paramore relies heavily on Japanese scholarship, but his inspiration, he tells us, was studies of “world Christianities” (p. 7) that helped him see that “Confucianism is therefore best analyzed over the longue durée utilizing the plurality that its history possesses” (p. 6). Writing after the linguistic turn, he is also less interested in a single Confucian idea or a unitary Confucianism than in “multiple Confucianisms” (p. 2). Paramore’s book opens with a discussion of what he terms “Confucianism as cultural capital.” He starts at the beginning of Confucianism’s history in Japan when it was introduced by Wani, a “Confucian professor” (p. 16) from Paekche, in 402 ce. Confucianism was imported, he tells us, together with the institutions from China and the states on the Korean peninsula, and was adopted in the seventh and eighth centuries. Based on the Han dynastic state (206 bce–220 ce), this model had both Confucian and Legalist aspects, which Paramore characterizes as “conciliatory” and “coercive,” respectively [End Page 186] (p. 20). If Confucianism’s position in the new Chinese-style state was “passive” (p. 24), it was a reflection of its weakened and diminished position in the Sui and Tang states from which it was introduced. Paramore then moves on to medieval Japan, when Confucianism’s standing changed, owing to its place in the intellectual and cultural life of the Five Mountain Zen Buddhist establishments. A new variety of Confucianism was imported from China, one that had emerged as a response to the metaphysical and ethical challenges of Buddhism and Daoism in the Tang and Song dynasties in China and is known conventionally as Neo-Confucianism. The result, Paramore argues, following William Bodiford, was that Confucianism moved beyond its “sequestered and bureaucratic character” (p. 27) to have a broader social impact, influencing funeral rites, village life, and samurai households. Paramore would have found strong supporting evidence for this argument in medieval samurai house codes and last wills and testaments, which are full of both Confucian and Buddhist concepts. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Paramore offers bold new readings of Confucianism in the Tokugawa period. “Confucianism as religion” is the theme of chapter 2, which examines the several dramatic changes that reshaped Confucianism’s position in Japan in the seventeenth century. First, Confucianism was “vernacularized” and “popularized” (p. 41). As evidence, Paramore points to the Confucian schools emerging in the seventeenth century that shared “a clear focus on Neo-Confucian practice” (p. 44) as well as a syncretic approach to Shintōism, military science, and other indigenous Japanese traditions and a sense of what distinguished Japan and China. Second, Neo-Confucianism was used to theorize the place of samurai in contemporary society, which led the Tokugawa authorities to see the religious nature of the newly popular Confucianism as a political threat, as the careers of Kumazawa Banzan, Yamaga Sokō, Yamazaki Ansai, and even Hayashi Razan amply reveal. Third, the socioeconomic changes under way in the seventeenth century created the conditions for the popularization of Confucianism in a way reminiscent of the “modernity” of Song China. Finally, Paramore credits Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai with resolving the tension between Neo-Confucianism and other forms of spirituality, on the one hand, and the...
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Apr 28, 2018
Antonio Torres Del Moral 
Open Access
