Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-qs9v7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T06:44:15.678Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 7 - Modern Contextual Turns from “The Kingly Way” to “The Imperial Way”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2023

Shaun O'Dwyer
Affiliation:
Kyushu University, Japan
Get access

Summary

Introduction

On January 1, 1946, the Japanese emperor’s New Year address included the “Humanity Declaration:”

The ties between Us and Our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine, and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world.

In this declaration, the emperor declared that he was not a “living god,” calling that belief a fiction spread by the military, political, academic and business worlds to unify the nation prior to the war. During the prewar period this fiction was treated as fact. Belief that a human emperor was divine and, thus, that the Japanese people were a superior race descended from the gods was propagated through ceremony, government and education. All three used the same formula, and, repeated over and over again, it became deeply embedded in Japanese hearts. Propagating those beliefs was part of the construction of modern Japan as required by the 19th-century concept of the nation-state. Japan became a model for nation-building throughout East Asia, and thus these beliefs continue even today to influence discussion of the nation-state both past and present.

The denial that the emperor is a living god brings us to the topic discussed in this essay, the relationship between the Confucian “Kingly Way” (王道 ōdō) and the Japanese “Imperial Way” (皇道 kōdō) and how during Edo there was a long period of fermentation during which the Confucian Kingly Way was injected into Shintō.

In this essay “contextual turn” refers to a concept developed by Huang Chun-chieh after many years of research on annotations of the Confucian classics from the perspective of cultural interaction. According to Huang, “The history of interactions among East Asian cultures reveals how interactions among texts, individuals and ideas from different regions resulted in the phenomenon called “contextual turns.” “Contextual turn” refers here to the process by which threads of logic found in foreign texts or thinkers are severed and replaced by new threads of logic, depending on which versions of texts are transmitted, and what local individuals or thought adds to them, to better fit the recipient culture.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×