Introduction

On January 1, 1946, the Japanese emperor’s New Year address included the “Humanity Declaration:”

In this declaration, the emperor declared that he was not a “living god,” calling that belief a fiction spread by the military, political, academic and business worlds to unify the nation prior to the war. During the prewar period this fiction was treated as fact. Belief that a human emperor was divine and, thus, that the Japanese people were a superior race descended from the gods was propagated through ceremony, government and education. All three used the same formula, and, repeated over and over again, it became deeply embedded in Japanese hearts. Propagating those beliefs was part of the construction of modern Japan as required by the 19th-century concept of the nation-state. Japan became a model for nation-building throughout East Asia, and thus these beliefs continue even today to influence discussion of the nation-state both past and present.

The denial that the emperor is a living god brings us to the topic discussed in this essay, the relationship between the Confucian “Kingly Way” (王道 ōdō) and the Japanese “Imperial Way” (皇道 kōdō) and how during Edo there was a long period of fermentation during which the Confucian Kingly Way was injected into Shintō.

In this essay “contextual turn” refers to a concept developed by Huang Chun-chieh after many years of research on annotations of the Confucian classics from the perspective of cultural interaction. According to Huang, “The history of interactions among East Asian cultures reveals how interactions among texts, individuals and ideas from different regions resulted in the phenomenon called “contextual turns.” “Contextual turn” refers here to the process by which threads of logic found in foreign texts or thinkers are severed and replaced by new threads of logic, depending on which versions of texts are transmitted, and what local individuals or thought adds to them, to better fit the recipient culture.