Confucianism's Prospects by Shaun O'Dwyer;

Author:Shaun O'Dwyer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Unity of Loyalty and Filial Piety: An East Asian Horror Story*

The Parable of the Upturned “Japanese” Moustache

In his 1924 satirical essay My Moustache, Lu Xun identified the moustache as a signifier for national identity, remarking on how often his own, which once pointed upward, had led people to think he was Japanese. On visiting a temple of Confucius, he even overheard a fellow visitor, a Confucian scholar, inspect the turned-up moustache on one of the portraits of Confucian scholars and emperors on the walls, and say—“this was faked by the Japanese! Look at that moustache! Japanese style!” But recently excavated ancient statuary from the Han and Northern Wei Dynasties also featured upturned moustaches; was everyone really to believe that these were also fakes planted by the Japanese? Yet, Lu Xun added slyly, the turned-up moustache was after all not an immutable Japanese national characteristic. The Japanese only began to wear their moustaches like that after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, presumably under German influence, following the fashion of the Kaiser himself.1

Lu Xun’s story could serve as a bleak, ironic parable for the national morality (国民道徳 kokumin dōtoku) elaborated for the new Japanese nation-state in the early twentieth century under the influence of European (and specifically, German) nationalist thought. By the 1930s, this morality had become implicated in Japanese imperialism and hypernationalism, justifying Japan’s cultural and moral hegemony in East Asia, and its war against China. A modernized interpretation of Confucianism played a major role in this morality. In this morality Confucianism became “Japanized,” like the “Japanized” moustaches in the Confucian temple portraits and ancient Chinese statuary, in order to generate a moral self-image for Japan unique and distinct from that of other nations, including China. This Confucianism was held to be superior to China’s, and served to legitimate putting China in a position of moral tutelage under Japan. The ideal of the “unity of loyalty and filial piety” (忠孝一本 chūkō ippon) particular to the Japanese polity is central to these assumptions of uniqueness and superiority. The Tokyo University professor of philosophy, Inoue Tetsujirō, was a central player in the modern formulation of this “Japanized” Confucian ideal.

In this chapter I will sketch some of the philosophical waystations in which premodern and modern thinkers grappled with the problem of harmonizing two highly valued, and potentially conflicting, ethical ideals of filial piety and loyalty. These waystations include early Classical Confucian formulations of this problem, the protonationalist efforts of Japanese Mito School thinkers to harmonize these ideals in the early nineteenth century, and finally Inoue Tetsujirō’s harmonization and (Weberian) rationalization of these ideals in his own variety of Confucian statist nationalism.

My aim in this sketch is, alongside other scholars who have investigated the Japanese historical background to today’s “New Confucianism,”2 to issue a warning. Among New Confucian scholars writing for both English and Chinese audiences are those who see the elaboration of a Confucian civil religion as an effective bulwark against the effects of liberal individualism and globalization, which is at the same time faithful to, and continuous with, the Confucian cultural heritage of East Asia.

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