IT IS AN honour to be invited to give the Carmen Blacker lecture. Carmen was an inspiring teacher at Cambridge when I was an undergraduate studying for the Oriental Studies (Japanese) tripos during the years 1959—62. Subsequently, I became her professional colleague at another place, but I have felt permanently in statu pupillari in my relationship with her. As seems likely to be a common response to those who have formatively influenced their education and mindset, I still constantly ask myself when doing a piece of work, how would Carmen evaluate this? For me, she is always present as my mentor.

Carmen is celebrated chiefly as a scholar of Japanese religion and folklore and is best known for her masterwork on Japanese shamanism, The Catalpa Bow. She is less known for her early work in a rather different field, that of intellectual history. Her first book, more read in Japan I suspect than in the West, was an important study of the nineteenth century Japanese intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi. Along with such works as Ronald Dore's great Education in Tokugawa Japan, this belongs to a group of studies that, not so long after the war, found positive value in the Japanese mhentance. Carmen's Fukuzawa monograph was supported by her knowledge of the Confucian tradition in Japan, a field in which Fukuzawa himself was educated and on which Carmen also published articles that remain valuable for their clarity of exposition and insight. This lecture is on an aspect of Japanese Confucianism and is intended to pay tribute to Carmen not least as an intellectual historian.

Confucianism is generally associated with an elite stratum of Japanese traditional society. Carmen herself was also undeniably a member of the elite of this country. But there was another side to her, a deep sympathy for those from different walks of life, particularly for Japanese who had suffered from poverty, depnvations or loss. One of the reasons for the success of The Catana Bow, surely, lies in her empathy for the figure of the miko who intervened to mitigate the suffering often of humble people. But Confucianism, too, at its best was not simply an ideology of authonty, hierarchy and deference; it was not only associated with the ruling samurai estate in Tokugawa Japan.