Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/155

 sufficient allusion has been made in a previous chapter.

Having thus become acquainted with the general character of these Chinese philosophies as interpreted by Japanese scholars, it remains to notice briefly their relation to education.

Education and learning were naturally much neglected during the disturbances of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras (1192–1565), nor did Oda Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, the Taikō, find leisure to effect any change in that respect. It was on the advent of the Tokugawa to power that a new spirit began to show itself, and the credit belongs partly to Iyeyasu and partly to Fujiwara Seika, a scholar who by his profound learning and nobility of character won the esteem of the Tokugawa leader. Fujiwara was not an originator: the philosophy of the Chinese writer Chu, with which alone he concerned himself, had long been studied in Japan. But not until Fujiwara became its expounder did it win many believers. Around him gathered a band of brilliant scholars, the most remarkable among them being Hayashi Razan, to whom and to his successors the Tokugawa chief granted the presidency of an university in Yedo. The teachings of this school received the name "metropolitan learning," while those of another school (founded by Minamimura Baiken and having for its most distinguished representative Ogura Sansho) went by the name of "Nangaku" (southern learning). Both schools