Confucianism In East Asia

Introduction

Since its birth, Confucianism has reigned supreme with no serious challenger in East Asia. While Christianity has attempted to move in from the West into places like China, it has been marked as a western tool of imperialism and oppression while Confucianism is seen to be truly Chinese. Even in Japan, where until 1945, State Shinto was the predominate religion, State Shinto can trace its roots to Confucianism as a way to control the population. Confucianism has fundamentally changed East Asia and without the region would be incalculably different.

Body

In China there has always been an enormous relationship between religion and political reform, especially when it came to Confucianism. In fact, an entire political class was dedicated

However, this was not always the case, “between 1870 and 1884, Shinto bureaucrats attempted to make a state religion out of Shinto through the Great Promulgation Campaign” (Bary 538). This campaign failed miserably due to the fact that, “the creed had no basis in popular religious life and because it was composed of platitudes about obeying authority and revering the emperor, the people found it incomprehensible and its priests ludicrous (Bary 538) When the campaign failed, Shinto fell out of favour among the people, however, there was another attempt in the works. After the Great Promulgation Campaign there was a movement to incorporate Shinto shrines and practices with imperial practices and traditions. This movement focused on the issue previously stated about the previous attempt at creating a state religion, and worked. From 1900 with the creation of the national association of shrine priests to 1940 with the formal creation of the Bureau of Divinity, State Shinto became more that a religion, it was a way of life. The Japanese government able to make State Shinto, “suprareligious in that, first, it transcended the beliefs of a mortal founder and, second, it embodied the essence of the Japanese nation, its divine creation, and the divinity of imperial rule” (Bary 539). A prime example of the supremacy of State Shinto is the suppression of other religions. Between 1921 and 1935 a new religion,

The adaptation in the beginning was rocky to say the least. However, the Japanese seem to possess the ability to learn from the mistakes of the past. Learning from the failed Great Promulgation Campaign, the government went to great lengths to incorporate State Shinto into people’s everyday lives. This effort was met with great success, in fact, the adoption and practice of State Shinto was so effective, that in 1945, at the end of World War II, the United States of America banned State Shinto and dissolved the Bureau of Divinity. The United States of America saw State Shinto for what the government had created, one of the most effective propaganda tools in history. Thus, with the fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945, along went State