Contribution Of Confucian Moral Ideology To Japanese Moral Education Tradition And System

Moral education in China has always highly been valued and placed in the heart of education. The concern of the "moral decline" of contemporary society attracts many attentions from the public as well as the academic community. For this concern, we have to examine the essence of our moral education and identify as well what has gone wrong in today’s moral education. As well known, Confucianism contributes a great deal to the Chinese ethics, which is considered as orthodox in the Chinese ideology. In Japan, South Korea, and else where in many other oriental nations and regions, Confucianism has been the crux of social norms in these cultures and their other value systems which have had a major impact on their society. However Japan is the country that renders us a best example of Confucian ethics beyond China, and it is thus worth our research.Confucian ethics was first introduced to Japan around the period of Taika Reform, and then was developed into an indigenous morality that penetrates Japanese culture and religion including Shinto. In modern times, Confucian ethics continued to expand under the national policy of "Japanese Soul and Western technology". This continuation made an important contribution to Japan’s industrialization and its rapid economic growth. After World War II, Japan was soon transformed and converted into a democratic country. However Confucian ethics still remained strong and undefeated even at the time of American occupation. Furthermore, it was considered as catalytic to reinforce democratic ideas and establish the corner stone for socio-cultural norm and legal establishment in modernised Japanese society.Today, in the process of globalization, we are inevitably confronted with challenges and moral crisis imposed by side effects of human invention, new technologies and economic development. We thus have to make a review of what counts shared human value system, and how education should function and take responsibilities for developing an universal human morality that can be applied to individual cases. No country has ever avoided the dilemma or paradox of maintaining national cultural merits and absorbing foreign advancement. However Japan has prorided us a unique picture for our reference. The innovative part of this dissertation is that we have positioned Confucius and Confucian ethics in a cross cultural perspective; we have identified its impact through Japan, one of the oriental countries, and thus contexturalised its commonalities as well as specialties. Japan offers lessons of cross-national comparison in ethic education and shares in common the discourse of finding equilibrium between tradition and innovation, and between inherent culture and intervened hegemony.