Confucian Origins of Modern Japanese Evidential Scholarship.

The two centuries that precedes the arrival of Rankean methods to the Japanese archipelago (approx, ca. 1650-1850) saw a massive and innovative evolution in the qualities of philology and exegesis, especially, historical chronology, and the study of edition and variants among the Japanese Confucians, all of which had contributed to the departure of'Confucian studies' from being merely ethical, rhetorical or literary perse; they provided the country with an important scholarly foundation for historical studies in later years. Scholarly exchange between China and Japan had benefited both; a massive influx of evidential Confucians' achievement from China nurtured the Japanese counterpart, whereas the textual criticism and discrepant readings in China from the mid-eighteenth century onwards had largely been 'triggered' by the arrival of the works of japanese Confucians. Scholars in eighteenth century Japan had begun to work across disciplines far more intensively than ever before that eventually nurtured new methods to approach old texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]