From the Imperial Rescript on Education to the official promotion of “national morality,” the language of morality played a prominent political role in Meiji era Japan. Yet, few studies have directly addressed the philosophical underpinnings of moral discourse and placed them in their political context. Richard Reitan's illuminating study of rinrigaku, or the academic study of ethics, fills this gap in the intellectual history of modern Japan. Historicizing morality, Reitan traces “the process by which the good as a contingent perspective is recast as a timeless truth or universal principle” (p. x). He principally studies the birth of a scholarly enterprise dedicated to articulating the good and which thus “helped expand the role of the state in shaping the moral interiority of the individual” (p. xii). The organizing argument for the book concerns the character of moral discourse, which authorizes itself as a universal and timeless truth while betraying “the epistemological context in which it was produced” (p. 56). Reitan provides a penetrating survey of the shifting epistemological context for moral discourse in Meiji Japan as well as its political function.

The book, consisting of five chapters bookended by an introduction and an epilogue, counterposes examples of asserted moral universals with the resistance they engendered. Chapter 1, for example, ties the birth of rinrigaku to the adoption of “civilization” as a hierarchical measure of progress in the 1870s. Reitan describes how morality first became an object of discourse when the universal standards of civilization (bunmei) were applied in contrast to putatively barbaric elements of Japanese life. At the same time, he turns to the satire of Kanagaki Robun and others to demonstrate that those hierarchical standards of civilization were contested from the beginning.

The analytical core of the book concerns the epistemological foundations for moral discourse in the Meiji period. Chapters 2 and 4 contrast the “ethics of civilization” with the “ethics of spirit,” each with their own epistemic systems and political contexts. A modern epistemology that distinguished subject from object, value from fact, provided the foundation for the ethics of civilization. Through close readings of texts by ethical scholars, Reitan indicates that this discourse endowed the good with inherent and immutable properties that a detached subject could objectify and study. As a result, the ethics of civilization affirmed the schema that organized societies in a hierarchy of progression from barbarism to civilization. The ethics of spirit emerged as a rejection of this hierarchical schema in the 1890s. By methodically tracing the shifting epistemic foundations of moral discourse, Reitan deftly sidesteps the simplistic binary of a native rejection of foreign categories in the middle of the Meiji period. The ethics of spirit, which relied on a hylomorphic epistemology, “wherein dualisms such as the opposition between subject and object, self and other, are collapsed” (p. 108), drew as much from German Romanticism and British idealism as it did on Confucian and Buddhist categories. Reitan is to be credited for providing lucid connections between Meiji period discourses on morality and early-modern precedents, while at the same time drawing on postcolonial theory to conclude that the pursuit of an essentialized Japanese morality “was by no means part of an ‘uncontaminated inner realm’” (p. 112).

Chapters 3 and 5 foreground the resistance that these dominant ethical discourses and their epistemic foundations generated, often with surprising results. In chapter 3, for example, Reitan tells us that religious apologists competed with scholars of ethics to define public morality and in the process came to share many of the central terms of the modern moral discourse, especially appeals to rationality and universality. Reitan keenly indicates that the attempt to match the rational and universalist claims of rinrigaku shaped the reform and redefinition of religious traditions, including Buddhist and Christian, in the late nineteenth century. The most ambitious argument comes in Chapter 5, where Reitan examines the most hegemonic and state-centered form of moral discourse in prewar Japan: national morality (kokumin dōtoku). Demonstrating how it relied on identifying and suppressing alternate moral visions such as individualism, socialism, and anarchism, Reitan argues that “the state's pursuit of this ideal…sustained the very social reality it sought to transcend, one of moral disarray, dissension, and violence” (p. 117). This results in a seemingly paradoxical conclusion that the pursuit of a homogeneous moral community as an ideal in early twentieth-century Japan relied on a permanent “heterogeneous social reality of conflict and dissension” (p. 151). Contestation and violent suppression were constitutive of claims to moral universalism. Hence, when he traces Japanese moral discourse throughout the twentieth century in an efficient epilogue, Reitan warns that recurring appeals to a notion of the moral universal is “as much in need of critical scrutiny today as it was in Japan a century ago” (164).

This is an illuminating book, both for those familiar with the terrain of Meiji intellectual history and those new to the issues and texts. Reitain sensitively reads familiar and lesser known intellectual figures (he gives perhaps the most serious and nuanced reading Inoue Tetsujirō has received in a very long time), and provides a convincing philosophical analysis of moral discourse that looks beyond mere ideological production to the epistemic contexts that enabled certain forms of thought. The attention to context is sound and nuanced, though one small criticism concerns some missed opportunities to enlarge that context further. While he addresses the role of moral societies in disseminating the discourse of rinrigaku, for example, Reitan misses the opportunity to relate his analysis to Janine Sawada's study of shūshin, or self-cultivation, as a powerful conduit linking officially sanctioned moral values with popular concerns in the Meiji period (Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteeth-Century Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004). Doing so would have allowed readers to see how this study relates to a broad and relevant conversation concerning the intersection of official and academic articulations of orthodoxies and popular concerns and aspirations. This is, to be clear, a meticulously researched volume that serves its readers well. A broad range of scholars interested in modern Japan will find much in this that sheds new light on the philosophical and political history of moral discourse.