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.

While many historians take the view that Japanese philosophy only started with the Meiji Restoration and the entrance of Western culture into Japan, Hajime Nakamura demonstrates that there has been a long history of philosophy in Japan prior to the Meiji. Beginning in 592 AD, when Japan first became a centralized state and continuing into the early modern era, this work deals with the important problems and salient feature of Japanese philosophical thought at all stages in its development.