Introduction: The roots of postwar Confucianism in Japan, the “Spiritual Asianism” of Yasuoka Masahiro and his role in wartime politics

In 1945, Japanese Confucianism appeared to be clinically dead, its status collapsing with the fall of Japan’s wartime regime. As an invented tradition promoted by Inoue Tetsujirō under the name Nihon jukyō (日本儒教) to create the fiction of a Japanese Confucian school as a philosophical equal of European philosophy, Confucianism had become part of the official ideology as early as 1890. The need to renew Confucian ideology after 1918 became vital for the regime due to the growing attraction of Marxism and the development of the so-called Taishō Democracy. During this era the philosopher Yasuoka Masahiro played an essential role in giving a new expression to Confucianism as a tool for the imperial regime. Yet after 1945 his thought became one of the roots of postwar conservatism and Liberal Democratic Party ideology. This central role of Yasuoka in the formation of postwar conservatism can be explained partly by his participation in the writing of the imperial declaration of surrender, which ended the war on August 15, 1945, but this participation itself was largely the result of his intellectual trajectory in the previous decades. I would like here to introduce briefly this trajectory in the prewar period, in terms of Yasuoka’s thought and his networking with influential government officials. Then I will discuss how he made use of his intellectual status and prewar networks to put his thought at the service of the new, postwar dispensation forged by conservative Japanese politicians and business leaders.

Yasuoka is an interesting case for a global history of modern Confucianism as he was the only one of the few examples in Japan of the so-called “New Confucians” (新儒家 shinruxia), who in China opposed the May Fourth (1919) Movement—which itself had called for radical modernization against Confucianism. Yasuoka can be compared to Liang Shuming and he often praised Liang for his defense of Confucianism. Yasuoka was originally a Pan-Asianist just like Kita Ikki and Ōkawa Shūmei, the leading figures of Pan-Asianism, and joined their organizations, the Yūzonsha (猶存社) and the Kōchisha (行地社).