 With the defeat of Japan in 1945, Confucian notions came to be regarded negatively because of their unfortunate appropriation by Inoue and other philosopher-ideologues. They had manipulated the core ethics of Confucian philosophy into a teaching of loyalty to the imperial state and self-sacrifice for the sake of its glory. Those Confucian philosophers whose writings had been most enthusiastic about Japan, and so easily appropriated – as was the case with Yamaga Sokō who had argued at one point in his multifaceted philosophical corpus, that Japan, not China, was the true Central Kingdom – have consequently suffered from significant neglect in the postwar period. By contrast, those earlier Confucians whose writings had disparaged Japan and celebrated China, such as those of Ogyū Sorai, rebounded from their former pariah status in jingoistic Japan to becoming the focus of repeated postwar studies. Usually, however, because of the overall feeling that Confucianism of any sort was more ideology than philosophy (and this was surely the most egregious legacy of its prewar appropriation) Confucianism has most frequently been interpreted simply as “thought” (shisō) or “ideology” (ideorogii), typically of a “feudalistic” sort. In other countries, including contemporary China, interpreters are reexamining Confucianism as a living philosophy of ongoing significance, but Japanese scholars have more viewed it as a historical artifact, not a vital philosophy. Instead, philosophy departments in most major Japanese universities today continue to define “philosophy” as western philosophy, finding relatively little place for the study of Confucianism under its rubric.