On The Transformation Of The Japanese View Of China At The End Of The Edo Period

After the opening of the Edo shogunate,Confucianism,as the official designated school of prominence of the Japanese shogunate,always dominated the intellectual and cultural dimension of Japan.In the middle and early Edo period,there were many intellectuals such as Hayashi Roshan and Nakae Fujiki who followed the Chinese example of Confucianism in politics and Confucianism in ideology,and who had a strong sense of self-awareness.By the time of the"Sea Ban",Nishikawa Kisame,Arai Shiraishi and Ogii Feedback were the leading Confucian scholars in Japan,generally admiring China and Chinese civilisation,but already actively criticising the"Chinese and foreign order" and turning their They began to look to Japan’s own cultural strengths in order to find their own’specialness’.After the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties,the concept of ’Hwa-yi perversion’ became popular in Japan,and Confucian scholars with Zhuzi scholarship as the core of their thinking,such as Kumazawa Fanshan and Amamori Yoshishige,emerged during this period,although superficially using Confucianism as a veneer,in essence the focus of their scholarship was more on the pursuit of Japanese cultural ’uniqueness’ or even’superiority’.They were also interested in the "uniqueness" and even "superiority" of Japanese culture,so as to "transform the barbarians into Chinese" and to escape from the margins of the East Asian cultural sphere.Although the Confucianists of the Edo period never abandoned the articulation of their own cultural independence,they were unable to break out of the "Chinese and Japanese framework" of the East Asian international order.The later school of Yangming,however,fused the core of the Japanese national spirit and developed into the school of Mito,whose"imperial respect" and "pragmatic Its "respect for the emperor"and "pragmatism" were used as the guiding principles of reform by many feudal states at the end of the Shogunate,and the Late Mito School,which was established under its guidance,provided a systematic theoretical source for the "Respect for the King and the Expulsion of the Barbarians" movement.The Western powers’ domination of Asia was an unprecedented shock to both China and Japan.Faced with repeated defeats and the forced opening of ports in China,the Japanese began to take a fresh look at China.In the middle and late Edo shogunate,the Yangming school gradually took over from the Zhuzi school and to a certain extent contributed to the development of the Shogunate movement.During this period,in addition to the Tang boat style sermons and Nanban studies and later Lan studies,the Haikoku Tuzhi,as another important way for the Japanese to understand China and the world since modern times,had a profound impact on the transformation of Japanese society and the change of Japanese thinking.This was followed by the dispatch of Japanese envoys to China,most notably the Japanese ship Chitose Maru,which arrived in Shanghai in 1862 to record and observe China.Other writers,such as thinkers,reformists and poets,also wrote travelogues or poems about their experiences in China,which were passed on to Japan,causing a dramatic change in the Japanese perception of China from one of reverence to one of contempt.After the establishment of the Meiji government,Japan’s ideology of national power expanded to an unprecedented extent,and national consciousness became distorted.This led to a series of ideas on foreign expansion,such as "national expansion" and the "theory of conquest of Korea".This series of changes began the restructuring of the East Asian landscape.