Japanese Thought In The Tokugawa Era

Contents: 1. General, 2. Buddhism, 3. Christianity, 4. Confucianism, 5. Chu Hsi Confucianism, 6. Wang Yang-ming Confucianism, 7. Neo-Classical Confucianism, 8. Bushido, 9. Learning of the Mind, 10. National Learning, 11. Western Learning, 12. Various Thinkers of the 18th Century, 13. Mito School, 14. Late Tokugawa Thought, 15. Miscellaneous: Aesthetics, Commoners, Economic Thought, Educational Thought, Etiquette, Folklore, Foreign Relations in Thought, Geography, Historiography, Language and Thought, Legal Thought, Mathematics, Medicine, Methods, Research History, Natural Science and Technology, Political Thought, Religious Thought, Social Thought, Travel. Index.

A comprehensive study of changing political thought during the Tokugawa period, the book traces the philosophical roots of Japanese modernization. Professor Maruyama describes the role of Sorai Confucianism and Norinaga Shintoism in breaking the stagnant confines of Chu Hsi Confucianism, the underlying political philosophy of the Tokugawa feudal state. He shows how the new schools of thought created an intellectual climate in which the ideas and practices of modernization could thrive. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This study uses the I Ching (Book of Changes) to investigate the role of Chinese learning in the development of thought and culture in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868). I Ching scholarship reached its apex during the Tokugawa.

With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.

"The Japanese have often thought the Edo period as Japan's dark ages, when the nation, isolated under the Tokugawa shogunate's national seclusion policy, fell hopelessly behind the rest of the world. In this book the author argues that, on the contrary, Tokugawa Japan was in many ways ahead of the West in its long peace and widespread prosperity. After the anarchy of a hundred years of civil warfare, three extraordinary historical figures ushered in the Pax Tokugawa the lasted 265 years, from 1603 to 1868. Oda Nobunaga destroyed what remained of the medieval order, Toyotomi Hideyoshi brought Japan under a single authority, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun, constructed an enduring peace. Under Tokugawa rule control of flooding increased rice harvests, the samurai were transformed into a class of competent and highly moral administrators, and literacy spread. Japan in the eighteenth century was the most urbanized country in the world and boasted the most sophisticated culture of the time. Writing from his unique perspective as the eighteenth head of the house of Tokugawa, the author points out that a reevaluation of the Tokugawa era is long overdue. Indeed, the solid cultural values fostered during those three centuries of peace - egalitarianism, a small government leaving much to local autonomy, religious tolerance, living in harmony with nature - have much to offer the world in an age of rapid globalization and uncertainty."--Jacket.