A Culture Crystallized over Centuries: The Role of Edo Political Thought in Watsuji Tetsurō’s The Way of the Japanese Subject

Like much of the Kyoto School, Zen Buddhism and concern about modernity played a deep role in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō, with his description of Japanese culture as having “passed through several fires”, positioning “world religions” as an agonistic threat.1. However, The Way of the Japanese Subject was not written in a vacuum, defining Japanese culture through differentiation from its East Asian counterparts predates the Meiji restoration and can be seen throughout the Edo period.

The “Japanization” of Confucianism is a concept on which Tetsurō’s draws from extensive Tokugawa writings.2. Before the Meiji restoration, many Japanese writers had to contend with the idea of China being the “central flowering” of culture, making peripheral nations around China barbarians.3 Due to this reputation as Dōngyí or Eastern Barbarians, Japanese writers up to Watsuji Tetsurō made a conscious effort to argue that Japanese cultural imports had been distinctly differentiated, making them on par with China. An example of this can be seen in the writings of Katsube Seigyo (1712-88), who argued that “Japan is an ingenious nation. We may not be particularly good at inventing things, but we can take something from China, study and learn from it, and make something that works even more splendidly”.4 Similarly, Hattori Taiho (1770-1846) summarized Japanese culture as excelling at “at taking something that someone else has made, utilizing it fully, and adding our own ingenuity to it”.5 Tetsurō takes this idea a step further that while Confucianism is the origin of Japanese obedience, this philosophy “was not an original strain of Chinese Confucianism. It was the Japanese samurai who gave shape to the concept from their own experience.”6

Whilst they reach the same conclusion, the argument that “bushido” was the “living embodiment of the Confucian Way” and the method to which it was Japanized is a major distinction from earlier authors and worth examining.7 The aforementioned emphasis on Bushido is emblematic of the widening cult of the samurai in Japanese culture following the 1890s, however this concept is somewhat anachronistic and therefore the role of warrior codes is less common in Tokugawa writings.8 This could partly be explained with Tokugawa insecurities about being identified with barbarians, as if they overemphasized violence it could play into negative Confucian tropes.9

However, not all Tokugawa writers attempted to define Japan relative to China, the importance of Imperial worship in Japan was emphasized before the Meiji restoration and the Sonnō jōi movement.10. Japan’s position at the “eastern crown” of Asia gave it’s unique claim to the land of the rising sun, and some Edo authors would emphasize its unique position to define Japanese culture 11  . Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863) would write that the sun was “the source of the primordial vital force sustaining all life and order. Our Emperors, descendants of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, have acceded to the Imperial Throne in each and every generation, a unique fact that will never change. Our Divine Realm rightly constitutes the head and shoulders”.7 This statement of Japanese particularism which would put it above its neighbours to the west mirrors the writings of Watsuji Tetsurō that “venerating the emperor embodies the absolute in the Japanese nation” and that this way was “already understood by our ancestors more than one thousand years ago.”6 Even if the Meiji and Showa eras saw a distinct rise in imperial worship, these ideas did not spring out of nowhere but developed naturally from philosophy written during the Shogunate. Similarly grappling with the Japanese place in the world predates contact with Europeans and the crisis of “Modernity”. 

  1. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, eds., Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, vol. 22, Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 581
    Wm Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition: 1600 to 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 997. [↩]
  2. Ibid [↩]
  3. Watanabe Hiroshi, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 1600-1901, trans. David Noble (Tokyo: I-House Press, International House of Japan, 2012) 279. [↩]
  4. Ibid, 281-282 [↩]
  5. Ibid 282 [↩]
  6. De Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 998. [↩] [↩]
  7. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
  8. Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 76. [↩]
  9. Watanabe, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 279-280 [↩]
  10. Robert N. Bellah, “Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsuro,” The Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (August 1965): 573-74. [↩]
  11. Watanabe, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 283. [↩]