vation. Innovation is easily cloaked in the guise of tradition—all the more so
when it occurs by opening levels of abstraction and lines of questioning that
are not included in the classical categories or antitheses, and hence pass
unnoticed until they become deeply rooted.
In world perspective, the drive toward secularization of education often
comes not from a strong anti-clerical or secularist party, but from the fact that
rival religious conservatives fight to block one another’s control. Thus in
England during 1830–1870, pressure built up to remove the universities from
church control in a struggle among rival factions within the established Church
of England (see Chapter 12).^46 In the Tokugawa, de facto secularization of the
educational market was promoted because the rival Confucian proto-religions,
as well as state-mandated Buddhism, were so widely at odds. In the Meiji, the
imposition of State Shinto was in effect a compromise, window dressing for
nearly total secularization of education and the effective separation of state
and church. It elevated the flimsiest and least organized of Japanese religions
into a cult devoted solely to the emperor (who continued to be a figurehead
without influence on the political elite), while cutting off the Confucian schools
of the intellectuals, and the Buddhism of the masses, from influence over state
cultural policy. Here again traditionalist conservatism did not prevent massive
structural innovation, and even provided ideological cover.
The Myth of the Opening of Japan
The Meiji restoration and the opening of Japan to the West is by no means
the turning point of Japanese history. Japan was not so very secluded from
outside resources; its elites were merely in a position to be very selective about
what they included. In fact, émigrés continued to bring in cultural imports. In
this way in the 1650s there arrived the Obaku sect of Zen, as well as the
Chinese dynastic historian (98 in Figure 7.4) who was invited to join the Mito
school. Western learning was available through Chinese contacts, as well as
through the channel of Dutch Learning, which in Eurocentric retrospect has
received more attention than it deserves. If these materials had only minor
impacts on Tokugawa intellectual life, it was because the creativity of indige-
nous networks was already quite high enough to fill the attention space.
Secularization of the Means of Intellectual Production
The major institutional structures of modern Japanese society were already
laid down in crucial respects by the eve of the Tokugawa. Market capitalism
was accelerated by the Meiji opening, not created by it. The same may be said
for secularization. As sociologists of religion know from the perspective of the
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 369