Confucian schools were
established in most of the chief provincial cities. For over two hundred
years this discipline in the Chinese ethics, literature and history
constituted the education of the boys and men of Japan. Almost every
member of the Samurai classes was thoroughly drilled in this curriculum.
All Japanese social, official, intellectual and literary life was
permeated with the new spirit. Their "world" was that of the Chinese,
and all outside of it belonged to "barbarians." The matrices of thought
became so fixed and the Japanese language has been so moulded, that even
now, despite the intense and prolonged efforts of thirty years of acute
and laborious scholarship, it is impossible, as we have said, to find
English equivalents for terms which were used for a century or two past
in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are
most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese
thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and
voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little
difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and those of Christendom.
Survey of the Intellectual History of China.
The Confucianism of the last quarter-millennium in Japan is not that of
her early centuries.
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