 For the most part, Confucianism brought to proto-Shintō a new set of detailed ideas about how to organize a harmonious hierarchical society in which roles of respect directed to those above were reciprocated by roles of caring directed to those below. The analysis was that society can be construed as constructed out of five binary relations: ruler-subject, parent-child, husband-wife, senior-junior, and friend-friend. If those five relations are lived with ritualized propriety and an attention to being appropriate to the roles they name (a praxis called in Japanese seimei “trueing up the terms” or “the rectification of names”), harmony will prevail not only in those relations but in the whole society constructed out of those relations. An implication of the Confucian view of role-based ideals is that the sharp separation between the descriptive and the prescriptive collapses. There is theoretically no gap between knowing what a parent (or a ruler, or a husband …) is and the role that person should perform. Thus, Confucianism can be understood as a type of ethico-political utopianism, but it is emphatically insistent that it is based neither in speculation nor rationalistic theory, but in historical paradigm. The prototype is found in the harmonious society depicted in the ancient Chinese classics: the histories, the odes, and the rites that inspired Confucius’s insights. It follows that the Way to become ethically and politically accomplished is to study the classics and to model oneself after the ancient paradigms of the roles exemplified by the sages of the past.