 Here, rather than trace the historical vicissitudes of Confucianism in Japanese culture, or explore the thinking of individual scholars, Confucianism will be approached as a systematic conceptual discourse defining the contours, philosophically, of much that was said and thought about the everyday world of common sense reality. In particular, the focus is on Confucian thinking about language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, the mind, political theory, education, spirituality, and the environment. In this way, the foundations of Confucianism as intellectual discourse are hopefully laid bare.