fucian academy, had begun with the fusion of philosophy and theology in the
sage religion. The institutional revolution carried out by Jinsai and Sorai broke
with religious concerns; the result was the Japanese version of the Enlighten-
ment intellectual, not the equivalent of Kant or Hegel. The lack of autonomous
university guild structures reinforced the propensity of Japanese intellectuals
toward a politicized stance. Given the differences in content, the late Tokugawa
is full of equivalents of the non-academic European intellectuals of that period.
The predominant style is the parallel to Rousseau, Marx, and Mill, the non-
academicized branch of intellectuals in the West. Political and social activism
on the part of intellectuals is not distinctive to the West; its uniqueness is to
add the intellectual stance of the university.
As if in experimental proof of this thesis, the introduction of the university
into Meiji Japan resulted in an outburst of abstract philosophy. This was not
merely a matter of importing European ideas along with the university struc-
ture. The philosophical effects of the introduction of the university into Japan
took two generations.^48 In the first generation, 1865–1900, Japanese intellec-
tual life was overwhelmed by European idea imports. In Figure 7.5 this
generation has no thinkers of outstanding originality. The predominant lines
of thought were materialism and evolutionism. Nishi Amane, the pioneer of
Western philosophy in Japan, introduced an eclectic mixture of British utili-
tarianism, Mill, and Kant. Others brought in Comte, Haeckel, Spencer, and
Lotze. Weaker at first, but growing in influence by the end of the century, were
importers of Idealism, variously in the version of T. H. Green (Onishi Hajime)
or a combination of Hegel with Amida Buddhism (Kiyozawa Manshi). The
imitativeness and unoriginality of this generation are typical of idea importers.
When we compare other periods of world history when the ideas from a deep
intellectual lineage are imported into another region, the striking feature of
Meiji Japan is how brief was the period of subservience to foreign imports.
Such periods (early medieval China under Indian Buddhist imports, Renais-
sance Europe under the revival of classical antiquity) typically take some four
to six generations before indigenous creativity takes off.^49 In Japan, however,
major new thinking broke out as early as the second generation, with the Kyoto
school of philosophy.
As usual, creativity takes off in the networks which have achieved the
greatest degree of prominence in the previous generation. It was a combination
of European teachers—some visited at their home bases by sojourning Japa-
nese, others who taught in Japan—and local Japanese intellectual leaders that
flowed together to produce the creativity of the Kyoto school. Nishida Kitaro
was the great star of this school, but it will be convenient first to examine the
network around him.
Inoue Tetsujiro was the first Japanese to hold a philosophy chair at Tokyo.
372 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths