근대 일본의 ‘동아의 주자학’과 이퇴계

Abstract

This article explores the pathway of research on Yi T’oegye’s philosophy in modern Japan with a focus on Abe Yoshio (a representative scholar of Yi T’oegye) who published a book entitled YiT’oegye in 1944 when he was an assistant professor at Keijō Imperial University. By examining what both the scholars of the Kimon (Yamazaki Ansai) School and those of the Kumamoto Practical Learning School discussed about Yi T’oegye’s philosophy, I find that Abe actually combined the interpretations of both schools, which maintained different academic orientations, into a coherent whole. Before Abe amalgamated the interpretations of both schools, Oka Naokai (a disciple of Kusumoto Sekisui who was a Confucian scholar in the Hirado domain of Hizen) had already suggested such amalgamation in his edited volume Kimongaku myakukeifufuroku(崎門学脈系譜付録) in 1940. Oka’s volume clearly showed that both Yamazaki Ansai (Kimon School) and Motoda Nagazane (Kumamoto School) had already been influenced by Yi T’oegye. When seen through the key concept “morality,” the debates on Yi T’oegye in the 1940s had little to do with discussions of Yi T’oegye that had unfolded in the Meiji period. Instead, Abe’s interpretations of Yi T’oegye’s philosophy from the perspective of “morality” were rather grounded in a variety of discourses that gained currency in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea. Abe characterized Yi T’oegye as “the founder of morality studies in the peninsula and the pioneer of moral philosophy” and he related Yi’s philosophy to the theories of morality proposed by Yamazaki Ansai and Motoda Nagazane, respectively. In particular, Abe tried to shed light on Yamazaki Ansai’s thought from the perspective of “morality.” In this article, I contextualize how the interpretations of Yi T’oegye’s moral philosophy, which the Kimon scholars and Kumamoto Practical Learning scholars (who are often discussed in the context of “Imperial Rescript on Education”) proposed, were closely interconnected.