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Exploring ‘Japanese Philosophy’ in the Face of the ‘Twofold Other’: Contradiction and Conformity in the Thought of Inoue Tetsujirō

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2025

Meimao Lin  and
Chun Gu
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Abstract

The publication of Inoue Tetsujirō’s (1855–1944) The Philosophy of the Japanese Yangming School (1900) marked the birth of ‘Japanese philosophy’. In the early exploration of Japanese philosophy, the existence of a ‘twofold other’ – the ‘others’ of ‘philosophy’ and of kanji and kango components of Chinese origin in the Japanese script and language – became an unavoidable problem. In modernizing traditional scholarship to adapt it to the Western paradigm of ‘philosophy’, the first problem was the ‘other’ of ‘philosophy’. Discussions of the kokugo reform and the nationalization of the Japanese language originated precisely from kanji and kango representing the ‘other’. Inoue actively advocated abolishing kanji and creating a ‘new national script’ (shin kokuji). Nevertheless, he took the kanbun texts of early modern Confucianism as his object, and wrote his three ‘Japanese philosophy’ books, the so-called Trilogy of Tokugawa Confucianism. We argue that Inoue overcame the inconsistency in his positions on language politics and philosophy and paved the way to construct ‘Japanese philosophy’ through his ‘pan-philosophical’ outlook while advocating the creation of a new national script only for linguistic convenience. Thus, he was able to avoid the problem of twofold ‘otherness’ and cohere his theoretical position. However, Inoue’s path was soon abandoned.

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Type
Research Article
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Philosophy , Volume 100 , Issue 1 , January 2025 , pp. 130 - 153
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy.

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