Opinion and Comment

Reply to Review by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Many thanks to Samuel Yamashita for taking the time to review my book, Japanese Confucianism (JJS, Vol. 44, No. 1 [2018]). There were a few errors in the review which I should correct. The Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo) was not written by Inoue Tetsujirō, as Yamashita claims. He wrote Chokugo engi (a commentary on the rescript). As I describe in chapter 6 of my book, "[a]lthough the content of the half-page long Rescript itself was the result of negotiations between figures like Motoda Eifu and Inoue Kaoru, its interpretation and particularly the politics it came to represent was very much determined by Inoue Tetsujirō's over one-hundred-page commentary which was distributed to all schools in Japan together with the actual rescript in 1891" (p. 151). A longer discussion of this text and its reception appeared in my Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Routledge, 2009, pp. 142–60). Also, in defining the concept of "useful knowledge," used in the framing of chapter 4, I did not cite Jürgen Habermas, as Yamashita does (p. 188), but rather the economic historian Joel Mokyr (p. 94). My references to Habermas were in relation to the framing of chapter 3 on the public sphere (p. 67). The description of samurai in Tokugawa Japan as "a kind of Neo-Confucian missionary" is not mine, as Yamashita claims; I used this phrase to explain an aspect of Yamaga Sokō's imaginary ideal of a samurai (p. 74).