Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan (review)

Making a Moral Society makes a valuable contribution to the ever-growing literature on modern Japanese intellectual history by exploring the emergence of rinrigaku, or "the discipline of ethics." In doing so, it treats rinrigaku "not as an objective and value-neutral form of academic inquiry" but "as one among many competing normative views on how society ought to be ordered" (p. 153). The significance of this study is manifold, as is clear from recent developments toward ethical instruction in Japan's public schools and publication of controversial works associated with the same, such as Nishibe Susumu's Kokumin no dōtoku (Sankei Shinbunsha, 2000) and Nishio Kanji's Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho (Fusōsha, 2001). The latter have elicited many, many concerns, objections, and protests regarding where education and the study of ethics are heading in twenty-first-century Japan. In the process, they have reflected a dynamic process that Reitan calls attention to in his book, specifically, how calls for intensification of moral instruction often generate the very form of behavior they are so intent on eliminating. Yet the purpose of Making a Moral Society is not to take a stand on the present so much as to examine the past, focusing on the historical development of rinrigaku, especially as successive and shifting appeals were made to moral "universals" as a means of legitimizing rinrigaku claims and producing along the way a more moral and modern Japan.

The text defines a "universal" as "the idea that all humanity or all those of a particular national or cultural community share certain common moral sensibilities, or that one's own moral perspective is in fact a timeless moral truth" (p. ix). Reitan adds that these are not eternal truths but instead "contingent products of the epistemological and normative context out of which they emerge" (p. ix). And, it is into those "shifting epistemological conditions for moral truth" that Making a Moral Society most distinctively inquires. At another level, the study takes as its concern "modernity, not as a point in time but as having to do with a particular set of authoritative and fundamental presuppositions about knowledge and truth that (re)shaped thought, action, and (of particular concern in this work) the good" (p. xiv).

While it is an oversimplification to say so, readers will notice that in large part this study is focused on Inoue Tetsujirō (1855-1944), a figure of ever-increasing importance in the intellectual world of the late Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods. Regrettably, there is no book-length study of Inoue's many roles in the philosophical and ideological definition of modern Japan, especially from the time of the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), for which he authored a Monbushō-commissioned commentary, through 1944, by which time Inoue had long since emerged as the most prolific and respected author and editor of works on bushidō, including the Bushidō zensho, published largely in the 1940s. Inoue's most important contributions, however, were indeed ones toward the articulation of what came to be referred to, innocuously enough, as kokumin dōtoku, or "the ethics of the Japanese people."

It was, to a considerable degree, the kokumin dōtoku literature, produced so prolifically by Inoue and others that Maruyama Masao (1914-96) later saw himself as reacting against in authoring the essays, in the early 1940s, later published as Nihon seiji shisōshi no kenkyū (University of Tokyo Press, 1952). Translated by Mikiso Hane as Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 1974), Maruyama's interpretations of Tokugawa Confucian thought opposed Inoue's interpretations on any number of counts and exerted a major impact on Western studies of Tokugawa thought, an impact that continues today in some corners. Maruyama's greatness was in part a function of his ability to stand as the antithesis of his predecessor at the University of Tokyo, albeit in the field...