section_path: National variations/Japan
section_name: Japan
paragraph_text: Japan
  
  From 1641 to 1853, the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan enforced a policy called kaikin. The policy prohibited foreign contact with most outside countries. Robert Bellah found "origins of modern Japan in certain strands of Confucian thinking, a 'functional analogue to the Protestant Ethic ' that Max Weber singled out as the driving force behind Western capitalism." Japanese Confucian and Enlightenment ideas were brought together, for example, in the work of the Japanese reformer Tsuda Mamichi in the 1870s, who said, "Whenever we open our mouths...it is to speak of 'enlightenment. ' "
  
  In Japan and much of East Asia, Confucian ideas were not replaced but "ideas associated with the Enlightenment were instead fused with the existing cosmology—which in turn was refashioned under conditions of global interaction." In Japan in particular, the term ri, which is the Confucian idea of "order and harmony on human society" also came to represent "the idea of laissez-faire and the rationality of market exchange." By the 1880s, the slogan "Civilization and Enlightenment" became potent throughout Japan, China, and Korea and was employed to address challenges of globalization.