late 1900s, secularization is not an all-or-nothing shift in the realm of belief;
it does not require that a majority of the populace reject the supernatural.
What is more important is that an institutional watershed is crossed when
the means of cultural production become preponderantly independent of the
church. Once this institutional shift takes place, intellectuals—of all people
those most directly concerned with the conditions of authority inside the sphere
of cultural production—defend the autonomy of their own ideas. This does
not require that many (or indeed any) intellectuals become militant atheists;
rather they open a sphere of activity which they recognize as autonomous from
ultimate religious commitments, and attack intrusions in this sphere as illegiti-
mate, just as Ito Jinsai and Sorai did in the period around 1700.
Several forces press in the direction of secularization in this institutional
sense. (1) An independently staffed governmental administration develops, no
longer dependent on clergy for literate skills. This divide had been crossed by
around the second generation of the Tokugawa. (2) A mass publishing market
arises. It can of course sell religious tracts. When it is not controlled by church
producers, their wares enter into competition with all manner of other mass
entertainment.^47 Such a market was very much in evidence by 1665–1700. (3)
Schooling becomes independent of the church. This mass educational market,
which started up with the proprietary schools of the mid-1600s, had burst out
into a mass system for all social class levels by 1735 or 1765. That is not to
say that church schooling did not exist, especially in the rural areas, or that
some of the proprietary schools did not attempt to make themselves into
religious cults. The distinctiveness of the expansion of Japanese secular educa-
tion was that it happened primarily through the private marketplace; govern-
ment schools were a rather small and late part of the expansion.
What the Meiji regime did in the realm of secularization was to implement
mass public education under government control. Japanese society now under-
went a phase of de-clericalization in the strong sense of the term. There was
a period of active defrocking of Buddhist monks, the suppression of Confucian
schools, and the creation of a mass school system under governmental control
(Ketelaar, 1990; Collcutt, 1986). These actions of the various parties in the
de-clericalization struggle were well within the range of conflicts over the
staffing of public education and the tax privileges of the church which occupied
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, the French Third Republic, or Italy following its
unification. Again the coincidence of dates with Japan is striking.
The ethos of intellectual life established in the Tokugawa educational
marketplace flowed without much of a hitch into the new conditions of mass
public education. The proprietary schools had become secularized and politi-
cized; their orientation toward public policy, ranging from economics to the
utilitarian engineering of social arrangements, carried over directly into the370 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths