“Yōmeigaku” in Motion: The Japanese Interpretations of Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucianism and Its Resonance in Early 20th-Century China

This paper examines the revival of Wang Yangming’s (王陽明, 1472-1529) Neo-Confucianism in modern East Asia within the framework of transnational history. Conventional scholarly consensus views Japan as the epicenter of this intellectual movement at the turn of the twentieth century because Japanese scholars claimed Wang’s Neo-Confucianism as a major resource for their successful Western-style modernization. Inspired by the Meiji Restoration, Chinese cultural elites assimilated the Japanese interpretation of Wang’s Neo-Confucianism by claiming “the unity of knowledge and action (zhixing heyi 知行合一)” as the core of his teachings. Unlike their modern counterparts, this paper argues that neither Japanese nor Chinese cultural elites in premodern times emphasized this philosophical slogan. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Japanese activists, such as Yoshida Shōin (1830-1859), transformed Wang’s Neo-Confucianism into a philosophy of action for political purposes. Chinese intellectuals and politicians subsequently adopted this Japanized version of Wang’s Neo-Confucianism, transitioning terminologically from “wangxue 王學” to yangmingxue 陽明學, the latter term being a direct translation from the Japanese “Yōmeigaku 陽明学.” This paper also argues that, despite their differing attitudes toward Japan, Chinese political leaders Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887-1975) and Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883-1944), both of whom studied in Japan, further propagated this interpretation of Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucianism through the institutional support of successive ROC governments during the 1940s.