“Handbook of Confucianism in Modern Japan” is now out with Japan Documents Imprint and Amsterdam University Press, after a few years of editing work by me. I’m very pleased with the hard work put in by the 13 other contributors to this book (including Dongxian Jiang , Alex Mustățea and Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth ), by the peer reviewers and by the translators of several Japanese and Chinese language chapters in the book, Ruth and John McCreery . This is, as far as I know, the first book wholly devoted to the topic of modern Japanese Confucianism, in any language, since Warren Smith’s 1959 “Confucianism in Modern Japan”.
Here is the back cover summary of the book:
In mainstream assessments of Confucianism’s modern genealogy there is a Sinocentric bias which is, in part, the result of a general neglect of modern Japanese Confucianism by political and moral philosophers and intellectual historians during the post-war era.
The essays in this volume can be read for the insight they provide into the intellectual and ideological proclivities of reformers, educators and philosophers explicitly reconstructing Confucian thought, or more tacitly influenced by it, during critical phases in Japan’s modernization, imperialist expansionism and post-1945 reconstitution as a liberal democratic polity. They can be read as introductions to the ideas of modern Japanese Confucian thinkers and reformers whose work is little known outside Japan—and sometimes barely remembered inside Japan. They can also be read as a needful corrective to the above-mentioned Sinocentric bias in the 20th century intellectual history of Confucianism. For those Confucian scholars currently exploring how Confucianism is, or can be made compatible with democracy, at least some of the studies in this volume serve as a warning. They enjoin readers to consider how Confucianism was also rendered compatible with the authoritarian ultranationalism and militarism that captured Japan’s political system in the 1930s, and brought war to the Asia-Pacific region.
Url for the Amsterdam University Press edition of the book here
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