The conventional thinking about Confucianism is that it was never a religion per se but a value system in service to the state. But according to Kiri Paramore, this line of thinking doesn't go nearly far enough in explaining the various manifestations of Confucianism in Japan. The Japanese variant was by turns a religion, a basis for Shinto, the blueprint for the formation of Japanese bureaucracy and Chinese medicine as practiced in Japan, the forerunner to Japanese education, the beginning of the "leisure learning" and "circle" movements, a substitute for Christianity when borrowing from the West during Meiji, and an apologia for Japanese imperialism during the Pacific War (1930-1945).
Few would argue about the positive sides of Confucianism and its role in the bureaucracy still makes perfect sense. Those in positions of power have a responsibility to serve while subordinates have an obligation to respect authority and follow the rules. When everyone works faithfully in the role they have been assigned, the system works very well.
Confucianism's benefits for Japanese medicine and education are also well documented. For much of Japan's history, medicine was Chinese medicine and learning meant the study of the Chinese classics including the principal Confucian texts. The particularly Japanese innovation was to shift the study of Confucianism from government schools with ties to the bureaucracy to what Paramore calls "the public sphere."
The "leisure learning" movement that began in the Tokugawa period started out as a way for private individuals with some degree of disposable income to study Confucianism "in small schools and reading groups." (66) This was the beginning of "the circle" – a privately organized and funded community group that met together on a weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly basis for learning and self-development.
In a later chapter, Paramore discusses Confucianism and "Liberalism". The challenge for Japanese intellectuals during the Meiji period was to find a way to posit the British utilitarianism so helpful to commerce and industry in the West into a Japanese context. The economic parts could be rendered easily enough. The problem was that most of the seminal works of J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham were Christian-based at a time when Japan had a ban on Christianity. The solution? Substitute all of the Christian allusions and references "with Confucian terminology." (126)
While the balance sheet on Confucianism in Japan has been generally positive, there have been two times when Confucianism has been severely discredited. The first came in the nineteenth century when the West was busy carving up China into fiefdoms and "spheres of influence." Nothing Chinese was equated with strength then. A civilization that couldn't defend itself was bound to fail. The second was when Japan used Confucian precepts to impose its will on East Asia and nearly half the world.
As Paramore suggests, the deep-seated resentment that the Chinese feel for Japan has as much to do with ideological usurpations as it does with Japanese territorial incursions into Northern China during the Pacific War. The East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere may have held a shred of legitimacy for the countries of Southeast Asia, but to the Chinese it had none. What the Chinese found particularly offensive was that Japan was using Confucianism to justify the colonization of China itself. (159)
The pay-off to Japanese Confucianism comes in a brilliant nine-page epilogue on the future course of China entitled "China and Japan: East Asian Confucian modernities and revivals compared." As Paramore sees it, there are three ways China can go: 1) a return to "the increasingly corrupt Leninist party system", 2) a more pronounced embrace of an "equally corrupt global laissez faire neo-liberal capitalist order", or 3) by following the revival "of conservative Chinese cultural nationalism" with Confucianism at its base advocated by contemporary Chinese thinker Kang Xiaoguang. (185)
Since Choices #1 and #2 have already been tried, that would seem to leave China with Choice #3. Paramore has his doubts. The downside of a resurgent China using Confucianism as its pretext is that the line between benevolent autocracy and fascism is never far apart. As Japan made clear during the Pacific War, over-subscribing to the will of heaven as articulated by the state can get you (and a lot of other people) killed.
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