On the Historical Importance of Fujiwara Seika

Extract

Long ago in my early reading on Japanese literature and thought—I think I was studying G. W. Knox and A. Lloyd in their essays in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan—the name of Fujiwara Seika was mentioned as that of the founder of a movement of great historical importance. But until very recently the history of Japanese culture has not aroused much interest, and the local neo-Confucianism tended to be seen as a pretty poor reproduction of the Chinese models. This assessment of Japanese culture in such modest terms was accompanied by the standardized conception that saw in Shushigaku nothing more meaningful than an instrument of power in the hands of the Tokugawa family, a kind of intellectual build-up stimulated and protected merely because it served to prop up the régime that Ieyasu had founded, and to organize support for it.