In refreshing contrast with past scholarship, James McMullen's The Worship of Confucius in Japan treats the development of the Confucian tradition in Japan through the lens of ritual practice rather than intellectual history. The focus of analysis is a single rite, covered in all its vicissitudes from ancient to modern times (with particular attention to the Tokugawa period): the ritual veneration of Confucius, known as the sekiten (Ch. shidian) or, in some contexts, sekisai (Ch. shicai). The monograph is magisterial in its scope and documentary detail; it encompasses twenty chapters, grouped into four parts, as well as an introduction, conclusion, epilogue, and seven online appendices.

This study presents itself as a history of the Japanese reception of an arguably quintessential Chinese state practice, but McMullen's meticulous description of that rite as it evolved in Japan is firmly tethered to a specific argument. The author's premise is that whereas the premodern Chinese polity was grounded in a fundamentally meritocratic educational system, Japanese sociopolitical structures were not. In this view, while the civil service examination in China provided an opportunity for achievement that could lead to a government position, in Japan, in contrast, appointment to official service under the auspices of the imperial house or later shogunal rule did not depend on assessment of individual accomplishment so much as on family lineage and hereditary social position. Because of these sociopolitical constraints, even state-approved institutions that offered a Confucian curriculum and sponsored seasonal reverence of Confucius—the ancient university (Daigakuryō) and later the shogunal college run by the Hayashi family—did not successfully position the Sage as a cosmic source of truth that sacralized the rule of the emperor or shogun. Indeed, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, for much of Japanese history the country's rulers regarded obeisance to Confucius with ambivalence and the ceremony itself as an opportunity to further their own political and cultural interests.

Sacrifice to the spirit of Confucius first became a regular practice during the Tang dynasty. In the early part of McMullen's book, we learn that its performance, especially the main rite associated with the crown prince, placed Confucius at the symbolic center of the Chinese imperial polity and civil bureaucracy “as the agent of Heaven, the revealer of cosmic, natural, and human truths, and the patron of human culture” (p. 38). In Japan, the imported rite was allocated to the university in the early eighth century but excluded from the central organ of the ritual state, the “Office of Deities” (Jingikan). In this account, from its earliest stages in Japan the sekiten presented rulers with the dilemma of two conflicting demands—the desirability of modeling the authority of China's Confucian-style wisdom versus the need to represent themselves as embodiments of the lineage of Amaterasu, the progenitor deity of Japan and, implicitly, of the cosmos.

McMullen develops the theme of ambivalence toward the sekiten as well as the related notion of “cultural display” in his discussion of the ninth century. As the Fujiwara clan gained in political power, students’ success in the university increasingly depended on hereditary status; the Confucian emphasis of the curriculum gave way to literary studies, and the associated sekiten protocols began to deviate from their Tang precedents. McMullen makes a persuasive case that these early Japanese modifications to the Chinese model enhanced the “liturgical superiority” of the emperor over the university scholars, effectively rendering the rite less egalitarian than its Chinese precedent. For the most part, rites associated with the imperial family, which claimed authority based on its purported lineal identity with the gods, were privileged over ritual practices that aimed to celebrate Confucian ideals. McMullen also suggests that even positive nuances in the official Japanese reception of Chinese ritual culture were driven by a desire for cultural display—notably, the verse composition and banquets that accompanied the sekiten rite. These activities offered participants the prestige of Chinese culture without suggesting allegiance to “the meritocratic ideal sacralized by devotional commitment to the Sage” (p. 93) and thus any hint of challenge to imperial authority.

The first surviving instructions for performing the sekiten in Japan, recorded in the Engishiki and largely based on Tang ritual documents, comprehend everything from how to cut the carcasses of the sacrificial victims to how to differentiate the participants by the color of their vestments. By the tenth century, however, the Japanese imperial house had stopped participating in the Confucian rite, and thereafter the ceremony, originally conceived as a public or state affair, devolved into a private practice of aristocrats. The ritual worship of Confucius confronted even greater challenges in the medieval period: political and economic stresses at court, the dearth of appropriate personnel, and conflicts over ritual issues led to repeated postponements of the seasonal event and its gradual loss of meaning. In McMullen's estimation, the medieval sekiten served as an opportunity for hereditary elites to engage in aesthetic and social pursuits rather than in serious veneration of Confucius.

Most of McMullen's study is devoted to Japan's more lively engagement with the sekiten in the Tokugawa period. The ceremony was spearheaded by the well-known neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan, who, with shogunal approval, mounted a full-fledged version of the rite in 1633; the well-attended 1670 iteration under Razan's successor, Hayashi Gahō, in turn set the pattern for Japanese veneration of Confucius through the eighteenth century. The Hayashi ritual encompassed the standard components—the sacrificial service, the exposition of classic texts and reading of verses, and a later feast and sharing of sacrificial wine—and symbolically affirmed Confucius's status as a great sage-king. Yet in this early Tokugawa context, McMullen argues, the rite was not really an exhibition of the interests of the shogunal state so much as a means for the Hayashi to assert their authority in Chinese learning and culture. Related issues in the Japanese interpretation of the sekiten recurred in subsequent Tokugawa generations. The protocols that the Ming refugee Zhu Shunshui recommended to Tokugawa Mitsukuni were not implemented; Tokugawa Tsunayoshi lavishly enhanced the cultural aspects of the ceremony in 1691 but later lost interest; and Arai Hakuseki's revised 1710 program, in which the shogun himself performed the sacrifice for the first time in Japan, was politically motivated and short-lived. Shogun Yoshimune, known for promoting the Confucian ethical ideology through public lectures, nonetheless reduced the status and resources of the Hayashi establishment. The shrine associated with the Confucian school declined thereafter, with the performance of the sekiten reaching an all-time low by the late eighteenth century.

McMullen's research into the details of the ceremony under various administrations succeeds in demonstrating that while the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars, beginning with Razan, was able to establish the rite as a symbolic resource for the shogunate in the early to mid-Tokugawa period, it remained a “family affair” that was subject to the predilections of whichever shogun was in power. The ceremony continued to be performed into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both in the imperial palace in Kyoto and in the Bakufu College (Shōheizaka Gakumonjo). However, under the reformist policies of the Kansei era the Hayashi school rite was significantly reduced in scale; the shogun's presence was not even required, and the “softer” cultural aspects of earlier versions were simply eliminated.

In short, the sekiten never became a major state ritual that positioned Confucius and Confucianism at the center of Japanese political power. Even so, the ceremony continued to be performed, and in diverse styles, in various domain schools outside Edo until 1871 (when the Meiji prefectures were established), despite the multiple derogations of the sekiten and Confucian learning in general during the late Tokugawa period, such as the harsh critiques put forward by Hirata nativists in Mito. The Mito case in fact epitomizes the fully assimilated yet subordinate status of Confucius in the late Tokugawa polity, in McMullen's account. He cites, for example, the opening ceremony for Mito's new domain school during which the officiant of a minor ritual dedicated to the Sage informed the spirit of Confucius in no uncertain terms that loyalty and filial piety were “already correct” in Japan long before the Sage's teachings arrived from China (p. 412). McMullen concludes that “in liturgical terms the Mito ceremony and its derivative can be seen as the distinctively Japanese resolution of the tension between the universalism of Confucianism and the Japanese dedication to particularism” (p. 454).

I should caution that McMullen's frequent use of sociological abstractions such as “universalism” and “particularism” to frame his discussion here and throughout the book, even if only “heuristic” in aim, may give pause to some readers who wish for more interrogation of their meaning and applicability in specific contexts. Despite McMullen's modulated definitions early in the volume, one comes away from the book associating “universalism” with Confucius and Confucianism in the Chinese context, and “particularism,” on the other hand, with “Shinto” rituals dedicated to the gods in Japan. The latter practices, variously sponsored by the Fujiwara family, the imperial court, and, later, the shogunal and domain clans, are not unreasonably characterized as forms of “hereditary, kin-based particularism” because they consecrated clan interests, centered on Japanese divinities, rather than a “public bureaucratic state” founded on a civil examination system. Nevertheless, occasional acknowledgment that these organizing concepts may in some cases oversimplify the nature of religious views or practices in particular sociohistorical contexts (whether Chinese or Japanese) would have added welcome nuance to the discussion.

The Worship of Confucius in Japan has persuaded this reader, in any case, that for most of Japanese history, the ruling powers wanted to have their cake and eat it too—they variously portrayed themselves as respectful of Confucian wisdom and appreciative of its associated culture but did not venture to pay wholehearted obeisance, as heads of state, to the great Chinese teacher. Admittedly, we are left with a rather bleak picture of the fate of the Sage in Japan. McMullen believes that potentially subversive Confucian ideas, such as the “privileging of familial over political loyalty and [the] underwriting of the possibility of autonomy associated with protest based on transcendent values,” were effectively nullified by a “suffocating ideology of loyalty” to the Japanese emperor and state (p. 413). Still, he notes, while treatment of Confucius as an icon of ultimate truth never took hold in Japan, the sekiten fostered refined cultural activity in certain elite quarters and at least symbolically upheld “visions of a fundamental equality, of moral transformation, [and] of beneficent social harmony” (p. 459). Accordingly, even though McMullen has marshaled an enormous quantity of evidence to show that the ritual veneration of Confucius was repeatedly exploited in Japan to enhance political power and sociocultural status, given the sekiten's association with these broadminded humanistic values, he nonetheless cautions us not to conclude that it was simply a “narrowly political ritual or instrument of political domination” (p. 458).

Other expansive treatments of the Japanese reception of the Confucian tradition have appeared in English-language publications in recent years, such as Kiri Paramore's Japanese Confucianism.Footnote ¹ McMullen's work is eminent, however, not only for the profound stock of knowledge that informs it, but also for the author's fine-grained, inductive method and scrupulous readings of his raw materials—all qualities that contribute to the holding power of his argument for the endemic ambivalence and performativity of Japanese state devotions to Confucius. The Worship of Confucius in Japan will be an enduring point of reference for specialists of East Asian political and intellectual history for the foreseeable future. The later parts of the book in particular should be required reading for any scholar who wishes to understand the real place of Confucius in the Tokugawa political world.