At the same time, the exact nature of Japanese “martiality” varied greatly among different thinkers, often to the extent that definitions of the concept could be polar opposites. The identification of Japan as the “martial country” and China/Korea as the “civil countries” came to be broadly accepted by intellectuals in all three societies. In comparison, many Japanese Confucians and related schools of thought had otherwise tended to revise ideas imported from China in ways that removed them from their source and relocated the moral center to Japan. As a result, at least in the context of wen-wu, many Japanese were willing to accept, rather than invert, the China/barbarian binary that marked continental interpretations. Whereas in China and Korea, primacy has traditionally been given to civil virtues over martial ones, the unique warrior-centered social and governmental structure that developed in Japan led its thinkers to more strongly emphasize the martial. This paper examines the transmission of Chinese wen-wu thought to Japan, and its subsequent independent development in that country. Abstract The binary of martial and civil virtues (wen-wu) is one of the oldest and most pervasive concepts in East Asian thought.
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