 Insofar as the ultimate achievement of Japanese Confucian philosophizing amounted to a relative turn away from nominalist Buddhist claims about the semantic emptiness of words and the merely conventional nature of meaning and truth, it set the philosophical stage in profound ways for the conceptual assimilation of Western philosophical learning during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Because it was, when viewed comprehensively, a conceptual movement of enormous consequence relative the development of modern philosophy in Japan, the period from the seventeenth through the early-nineteenth centuries is referred to here as “early modern,” emphasizing its role in establishing the foundations of modernity, rather than in terms of the more traditional terminology of historical periodization where the “Tokugawa” or “Edo” period is often associated with either “late medieval” or “feudalistic” developments. Apart from the contributions of Confucian philosophy to early-modern understandings of language, meaning, and discursive truth, Confucian philosophizing in Japan during this period was simply not always related to or an expression of the interests of the Tokugawa shoguns, nor did it always issue from the shogun’s capital, Edo. Thus, the terms “Tokugawa” and “Edo” as historical categories do not satisfactorily convey the generally progressive proto-modern thrust of Confucian philosophizing as a whole during this period.