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"The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy" is a comprehensive reference book that complements the previously published "Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook." It includes pre-modern philosophy and reflects the mainstream view that Japanese philosophy extends to earliest times. While the handbook is relevant, it may require a revised edition due to potential shortcomings in interpretations. The book features authoritative contributors and is readable for a broad audience. Its solid factual information ensures its continued demand for years to come. [Extracted from the article]

This essay shows how a new understanding of the animal – and thus the human – developed in Japan over the course of the nineteenth century. Inspired by Linnaean nomenclature, the delineation of a new ‘animal kingdom’(dōbutsukai) in Japan led to a radical rethinking of the human place in the natural world. Given early form by the natural historian Udagawa Yōan (1798–1846) in his 1822 Botany Sutra (Botanika kyō), that vision – in which people became ‘animals who can reason’ – carried ramifications for the emergence of the modern sciences in Japan, most notably biology and zoology (dōbutsugaku). By the close of the century, the once-foreign kingdoms of Animalia and Plantae were fully naturalized, and they were quickly put to political use. Fueled by the emerging debate over social evolution, the new natural history gathered a diverse assemblage of living creatures together into a single classificatory kingdom, elevating nomenclature to the level of a natural order that seemed to transcend concerns of individual people even as it gave structure and meaning to their lives. The imagination of the modern ‘civilized’ human being, then, was impossible without the definition of a new animal world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sakuma Shōzan (1811-1864), a late Edo scholar, urged shogunal authorities to adopt Western science and technology, which he represented as consistent with the Confucian epistemological framework, in particular the rationalist metaphysics of the Zhu Xi school. His ideas are commonly credited as the basis for the key Meiji slogan wakon yōsai, but this article argues against that interpretation, discussing important differences in the way Sakuma conceived the 'national realm'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]