 For the most part, Confucianism in the Edo period functioned more as a secular philosophy than a religious tradition and so it was no threat to the “Japanese spirituality” being cultivated in modern Japan. Edifying narratives of Edo-period virtuous (often samurai) Confucians made their way into the National Morality curriculum and the Confucian emphasis on academic study was esteemed as a model for the modern student. Yet, because a prevailing view was that Confucianism was a foreign tradition based in archaic texts instead of empirical data or utilitarianism, it seemed to many Westernized intellectuals embarrassingly unmodern. Inoue Tetsujirō, who saw Western utilitarianism and Christianity as threats to the official kokutai and bushidō theories, did make the case in three books that Edo-period Confucianism was indeed a Japanese premodern tetsugaku, implying Japan had no need to seek ethical theories from the West. Yet, he did little to contribute to the Japanese Confucian traditions of Japan since philosophically, after eight years of study in Germany, his own academic philosophical sympathies remained very strongly planted in the German idealism which he promoted vigorously in his home department at Tokyo University.