Paper short abstract:

Confucianism as jukyô can be seen as an invention in modern Japan, for which few research on Confucianism have been made. I will focus on sinologists like Uno Tetsuto or intellectuals like Nakae Chômin to explain this process in tension between shûkyô and tetsugaku, which are also modern creations.

Paper long abstract:

The debate to decide if Confucianism is a religion or a philosophy is still existing in China, as points out Anna Sun recently in Confucianism as a world religion (2013). In Japan, Confucianism is often associated with Edo period, in which he played an important role in the intellectual history. Despite the pioneer work of Warren Smith (1959), renewed by Kojima Tsuyoshi (2006), myself (2014) and Kiri Paramore (2016), very few researches addressed the modern period to study Japanese Confucianism and little have been made concerning the debate mentioned above. Yet the collective work leaded by Benjamin Elman, Herman Ooms and John Duncan (Rethinking Confucianism, 2002) have traced a new way, based on a deconstructive approach, that can be applied to Japan, exactly like Kuroda Toshio did for example in the case of Shintô. Same approach can be found for the notion of religion itself in the works of scholars such like Hoshino Seiji (2012), however without specific attention to Confucianism.

Since in Meiji era notions of shûkyô and tetsugaku were created to translate "religion" and "philosophy", a way to contribute to the debate on Confucianism can be done through historical approach. But, instead of bringing directly an answer, we would like to question the debate itself by showing that the so-called Confucianism, jukyô, have been created itself as category just as much as shûkyô and tetsugaku. Then, as we will show, according to the personal goal of the author, jukyô have been defined as religion as well as philosophy, in a tension between Japanese identity and "Eastern" (tôyô) identity. We will focus on the specific cases of sinologists like Uno Tetsuto, Yamada Jun or Yamaguchi Satsujô, and also intellectuals like Nakae Chômin, Takase Takejirô or Yasuoka Masahiro to clarify the dynamic process of invention of Confucianism in modern Japan.