Kiri Paramore
Biographic Data
| ID | 266835 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kiri Paramore |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kiri |
| FAMILY NAME | Paramore |
| SIGNATURE | PARAMORE K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0325-3831 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Origin of Early Modernity
The earliest sustained use of the concept of “early modernity” by academic historians anywhere in the world occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century in Japan. This was a time when China and Japan were still under significant Western imperial pressure and Japan was engaging in its own imperial adventures in China and Korea. Early modernity was conceived partly in reaction to how the contemporaneous academic periodization of Ancient-M…
Confucianism for Kids: Early Childhood Employments of Confucianism in Taipei and Tokyo
This article focuses on two examples of Confucian early childhood education in contemporary Taiwan and Japan. Based on fieldwork conducted by the author in 2015, it contrasts the use of Confucianism in a grass-roots community early childhood educational setting in suburban Taipei with attempts to create elite Confucian "kids' seminars" in central Tokyo. The study reveals the roles of gender, elitism, religious plurality, and modern early childhoo…
Opinion and Comment
Opinion and Comment Kiri Paramore Reply to Review by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Many thanks to Samuel Yamashita for taking the time to review my book, Japanese Confucianism (JJS, Vol. 44, No. 1 [2018]). There were a few errors in the review which I should correct. The Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo) was not written by Inoue Tetsujirō, as Yamashita claims. He wrote Chokugo engi (a commentary on the rescript). As I describe in chapter 6…
Liberalism, Cultural Particularism, and the Rule of Law in Modern East Asia: The Anti-Confucian Essentialisms of Chen Duxiu and Fukuzawa Yukichi Compared
How and why are universalist modes of political thought transformed into culturally essentialist and exclusionary practices of governance and law? This article considers this question by analyzing the interaction between Confucianism and liberalism in East Asia. It argues that liberalism, particularly as it was used in attacking Confucianism, was instrumental in embedding ideas of cultural particularism and cultural essentialism in the emergence …
In Search of the Way: Thought and Religion in Early-Modern Japan, 1582–1860, by Richard Bowring
‘The Way is nothing other than the way of governance’, said Ogyū Sorai, Japan’s premier Confucian political thinker at the height of the country’s early modern period in 1717. Bad news for anyone reading Richard Bowring’s present book hoping for tips on yoga, zen meditation or other modern meccas of mindfulness. Although common modern clichés of ‘the East’ look towards ‘the Way’ in search of some kind of spiritual salvation, most philosophical an…
Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia
This article argues that Chinese state intellectual approaches to medicine significantly influenced the institutional reception of Western medicine in early modern Japan. Confucian-inspired general reforms of government in late eighteenth-century Japan encouraged an increase in state medical intervention, including the introduction of Western medical practices, achieved primarily through the use of transnational Confucian intellectual knowledge a…
Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History
For more than 1500 years, Confucianism has played a major role in shaping Japan's history - from the formation of the first Japanese states during the first millennium AD, to Japan's modernization in the nineteenth century, to World War II and its still unresolved legacies across East Asia today. In an illuminating and provocative new study, Kiri Paramore analyses the dynamic history of Japanese Confucianism, revealing its many cultural manifesta…
Opinion and Comment
Opinion and Comment Katsuya Hirano and Kiri Paramore Reply to Review by Kiri Paramore In his review of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, published in the winter 2015 issue, Kiri Paramore seriously misrepresents the book’s argument. Contrary to what he suggests, I make it clear that my goal in using overdetermination is to go beyond the simplistic and reductive dichotomy of oppression/suppression and subversion as a way of understanding politi…
Confucian Ritual and Sacred Kingship: Why the Emperors Did not Rule Japan
This article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured 'as if' realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in …
"Civil Religion" and Confucianism: Japan's Past, China's Present, and the Current Boom in Scholarship on Confucianism
This article employs the history of Confucianism in modern Japan to critique current scholarship on the resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China. It argues that current scholarship employs modernist formulations of Confucianism that originated in Japan's twentieth-century confrontation with Republican China, without understanding the inherent nationalist applications of these formulations. Current scholarly approaches to Confucianism trac…
Political Modernity and Secularization: Thoughts from the Japanese Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Although some politics and international relations discourses continue to maintain that there is a causal link between secularism and political modernity, religious studies, anthropology, and history research over the past decade has been rather merciless in debunking this idea as one of the tropes of Western imperialism. This article considers at how Japanese political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engaged this trope, and h…
The Nationalization of Confucianism: Academism, Examinations, and Bureaucratic Governance in the Late Tokugawa State
This article examines the causes and effects of the shogunate’s establishment of a state academy and examination system from 1788 onward. It concentrates on the role of state academicians in reforming Tokugawa processes of governance, suggesting that they effected the creation of a new structural engagement between knowledge and power which had surprisingly “modern” characteristics. Countering arguments that Neo-Confucian political thought encour…
Ideology and Christianity in Japan
Ideology and Christianity in Japan shows the major role played by Christian-related discourse in the formation of early-modern and modern Japanese political ideology. The book traces a history development of anti-Christian ideas in Japan from the banning of Christianity by the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, to the use of Christian and anti-Christian ideology in the construction of modern Japanese state institutions at the end of the 1800s…
Anti-Christian Ideas and National Ideology: Inoue Enryo and Inoue Tetsujiro's Mobilization of Sectarian History in Meiji Japan
Christian and anti-Christian ideas played a major role in the formation of modern Japanese national ideology. This article focuses on the construction of a sectarian history of the Tokugawa state as one part of the anti-Christian ideological writing of late nineteenth early twentieth century Japan. Academic and semi-academic writing on history and philosophy at this time was intimately connected with the major political debates which accompanied …
Early Japanese Christian Thought Reexamined: Confucian Ethics, Catholic Authority, and the Issue of Faith in the Scholastic Theories of Habian, Gomez, and Ricci
Many late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Japanese Christian texts worked directly within arguments that could be found concurrently in Confucian, syncretist, and other traditions in at this time. Japanese Christian has often been characterized as an example of non-Japanese other, or as playing a primary role of importing Western thought during this period. This article argues, on contrary, that importance of many of major currents of Japanes…
Hayashi Razan's redeployment of anti-Christian discourse: The fabrication ofHaiyaso
Haiyaso, a short text found in the collected works of the early Tokugawa Confucian Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), purports to be a record of a debate held in 1606 between Razan and the famous Japanese Jesuit scholastic Habian (1585–1621). The debate is presented in the text as a confrontation between Confucianism and Christianity. In the modern period, right up to the present, the text has been used prolifically to present ‘a conflict between Western…
"Civil Religion" and Confucianism: Japan's Past, China's Present, and the Current Boom in Scholarship on Confucianism
This article employs the history of Confucianism in modern Japan to critique current scholarship on the resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China. It argues that current scholarship employs modernist formulations of Confucianism that originated in Japan's twentieth-century confrontation with Republican China, without understanding the inherent nationalist applications of these formulations. Current scholarly approaches to Confucianism trac…
The Nationalization of Confucianism: Academism, Examinations, and Bureaucratic Governance in the Late Tokugawa State
This article examines the causes and effects of the shogunate’s establishment of a state academy and examination system from 1788 onward. It concentrates on the role of state academicians in reforming Tokugawa processes of governance, suggesting that they effected the creation of a new structural engagement between knowledge and power which had surprisingly “modern” characteristics. Countering arguments that Neo-Confucian political thought encour…
Hayashi Razan's redeployment of anti-Christian discourse: The fabrication ofHaiyaso
Haiyaso, a short text found in the collected works of the early Tokugawa Confucian Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), purports to be a record of a debate held in 1606 between Razan and the famous Japanese Jesuit scholastic Habian (1585–1621). The debate is presented in the text as a confrontation between Confucianism and Christianity. In the modern period, right up to the present, the text has been used prolifically to present ‘a conflict between Western…
Early Japanese Christian Thought Reexamined: Confucian Ethics, Catholic Authority, and the Issue of Faith in the Scholastic Theories of Habian, Gomez, and Ricci
Many late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Japanese Christian texts worked directly within arguments that could be found concurrently in Confucian, syncretist, and other traditions in at this time. Japanese Christian has often been characterized as an example of non-Japanese other, or as playing a primary role of importing Western thought during this period. This article argues, on contrary, that importance of many of major currents of Japanes…
Anti-Christian Ideas and National Ideology: Inoue Enryo and Inoue Tetsujiro's Mobilization of Sectarian History in Meiji Japan
Christian and anti-Christian ideas played a major role in the formation of modern Japanese national ideology. This article focuses on the construction of a sectarian history of the Tokugawa state as one part of the anti-Christian ideological writing of late nineteenth early twentieth century Japan. Academic and semi-academic writing on history and philosophy at this time was intimately connected with the major political debates which accompanied …
Ideology and Christianity in Japan
Ideology and Christianity in Japan shows the major role played by Christian-related discourse in the formation of early-modern and modern Japanese political ideology. The book traces a history development of anti-Christian ideas in Japan from the banning of Christianity by the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, to the use of Christian and anti-Christian ideology in the construction of modern Japanese state institutions at the end of the 1800s…
Political Modernity and Secularization: Thoughts from the Japanese Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Although some politics and international relations discourses continue to maintain that there is a causal link between secularism and political modernity, religious studies, anthropology, and history research over the past decade has been rather merciless in debunking this idea as one of the tropes of Western imperialism. This article considers at how Japanese political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engaged this trope, and h…
The Nationalization of Confucianism: Academism, Examinations, and Bureaucratic Governance in the Late Tokugawa State
This article examines the causes and effects of the shogunate’s establishment of a state academy and examination system from 1788 onward. It concentrates on the role of state academicians in reforming Tokugawa processes of governance, suggesting that they effected the creation of a new structural engagement between knowledge and power which had surprisingly “modern” characteristics. Countering arguments that Neo-Confucian political thought encour…
"Civil Religion" and Confucianism: Japan's Past, China's Present, and the Current Boom in Scholarship on Confucianism
This article employs the history of Confucianism in modern Japan to critique current scholarship on the resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China. It argues that current scholarship employs modernist formulations of Confucianism that originated in Japan's twentieth-century confrontation with Republican China, without understanding the inherent nationalist applications of these formulations. Current scholarly approaches to Confucianism trac…
Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History
For more than 1500 years, Confucianism has played a major role in shaping Japan's history - from the formation of the first Japanese states during the first millennium AD, to Japan's modernization in the nineteenth century, to World War II and its still unresolved legacies across East Asia today. In an illuminating and provocative new study, Kiri Paramore analyses the dynamic history of Japanese Confucianism, revealing its many cultural manifesta…
Opinion and Comment
Opinion and Comment Katsuya Hirano and Kiri Paramore Reply to Review by Kiri Paramore In his review of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, published in the winter 2015 issue, Kiri Paramore seriously misrepresents the book’s argument. Contrary to what he suggests, I make it clear that my goal in using overdetermination is to go beyond the simplistic and reductive dichotomy of oppression/suppression and subversion as a way of understanding politi…
Confucian Ritual and Sacred Kingship: Why the Emperors Did not Rule Japan
This article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured 'as if' realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in …
Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia
This article argues that Chinese state intellectual approaches to medicine significantly influenced the institutional reception of Western medicine in early modern Japan. Confucian-inspired general reforms of government in late eighteenth-century Japan encouraged an increase in state medical intervention, including the introduction of Western medical practices, achieved primarily through the use of transnational Confucian intellectual knowledge a…
Liberalism, Cultural Particularism, and the Rule of Law in Modern East Asia: The Anti-Confucian Essentialisms of Chen Duxiu and Fukuzawa Yukichi Compared
How and why are universalist modes of political thought transformed into culturally essentialist and exclusionary practices of governance and law? This article considers this question by analyzing the interaction between Confucianism and liberalism in East Asia. It argues that liberalism, particularly as it was used in attacking Confucianism, was instrumental in embedding ideas of cultural particularism and cultural essentialism in the emergence …
In Search of the Way: Thought and Religion in Early-Modern Japan, 1582–1860, by Richard Bowring
‘The Way is nothing other than the way of governance’, said Ogyū Sorai, Japan’s premier Confucian political thinker at the height of the country’s early modern period in 1717. Bad news for anyone reading Richard Bowring’s present book hoping for tips on yoga, zen meditation or other modern meccas of mindfulness. Although common modern clichés of ‘the East’ look towards ‘the Way’ in search of some kind of spiritual salvation, most philosophical an…
Opinion and Comment
Opinion and Comment Kiri Paramore Reply to Review by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Many thanks to Samuel Yamashita for taking the time to review my book, Japanese Confucianism (JJS, Vol. 44, No. 1 [2018]). There were a few errors in the review which I should correct. The Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo) was not written by Inoue Tetsujirō, as Yamashita claims. He wrote Chokugo engi (a commentary on the rescript). As I describe in chapter 6…
Confucianism for Kids: Early Childhood Employments of Confucianism in Taipei and Tokyo
This article focuses on two examples of Confucian early childhood education in contemporary Taiwan and Japan. Based on fieldwork conducted by the author in 2015, it contrasts the use of Confucianism in a grass-roots community early childhood educational setting in suburban Taipei with attempts to create elite Confucian "kids' seminars" in central Tokyo. The study reveals the roles of gender, elitism, religious plurality, and modern early childhoo…
The Origin of Early Modernity
The earliest sustained use of the concept of “early modernity” by academic historians anywhere in the world occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century in Japan. This was a time when China and Japan were still under significant Western imperial pressure and Japan was engaging in its own imperial adventures in China and Korea. Early modernity was conceived partly in reaction to how the contemporaneous academic periodization of Ancient-M…
Japanese History and Culture (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · History (10 works) · China (8 works) · Religious studies (6 works)