period of explicit reform. Such had been the prime interests of Japanese
intellectuals in the preceding two generations of Tokugawa, from 1800 on-
ward.
The one truly significant structural change of the Meiji, as far as intellectual
life was concerned, was the importation of the European (which is to say
German) university. Why should this be important? I have noted the similarity
of Tokugawa intellectuals to European philosophes of the 1700s: their orien-
tation toward practical affairs or to literature and their disparagement of
metaphysics and abstract philosophy. The Enlightenment intellectual style was
that of non-academic intellectual networks, antagonistic to the philosophical
discourse that had grown up in connection with theology in the church-domi-
nated universities. Abstract philosophy reemerged in Europe only with the
German university reform in the generations of Kant and Fichte. Tokugawa
intellectuals resemble those of Enlightenment Europe before the penetration of
German university reform.
School teaching provided a more central base for philosophical creativity
in Japan than was the case in Europe, but this differed from the university
structure in two crucial respects. Japanese schooling was largely undifferenti-
ated beyond the elementary level. The reformed European university, in con-
trast, instituted a hierarchy of topics and levels of training, between secon-
dary/preparatory studies and advanced training; at the highest levels, scholars
were trained to become advanced teachers in their own right, and to display
their competence by the publication of independent research. It was this
hierarchic structure which provided insulation for university specialists from
the practical or literary concerns of the lay world, and thus encouraged the
development of philosophical abstraction. The second unique aspect of the
European university enhanced the tendencies of the first: it is that the univer-
sities were organized as a collegial group. The university professor was not
an individual teacher but a member of a teachers’ guild, which claimed mo-
nopoly rights to certify new members. This guild structure, which in Europe
had its roots in the medieval guilds as applied to the academic vocation,
supported collegial autonomy (Huff, 1993); indeed, its rites of passage in the
form of the dissertation or Habilitationsschrift emphasized the membership-
defining significance of specialized and esoteric intellectual production. In
Europe, with the long development of struggles among the branches of the
university faculty, the self-conscious identity of philosophy was connected with
its independence of theology, its appropriation of a distinctive metaphysical
and epistemological turf.
It was these academic structures which Japanese education largely lacked.
Japanese schools were organized around individual teachers, without a collec-
tive guild organization. The predominant form in the Tokugawa, the Neo-Con-
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 371