 Additionally, Japanese Confucian philosophy emerged in no small part in opposition to the western religion of Christianity and all that was associated with it, including the threat of possible domination. While this was true throughout the Tokugawa period and in the Meiji as well, it is nowhere more conspicuous than in an early Tokugawa work, Ethics (Irinshō) by Matsunaga Sekigo. Writing shortly after the brutal defeat of the Christian-nuanced Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38, Sekigo used words rather than swords to combat what he viewed as the dangerous foreign heterodoxy might mean ruin to the Japanese polity. Unlike the earlier debates against the Christians carried out by the Buddhists on strictly metaphysical grounds Seikigo aimed to demonstrate the superiority of Confucianism as a philosophy that was universal, in his view, and yet distinctively East Asian and Japanese in its cultural roots. Arguably, later affirmations of Confucianism were meant to do much the same, even long after the effective threat of the spread of Christianity had been stopped by government policies such as Buddhist temple registration. Somewhat similarly, in the late Meiji, Inoue Tetsujirō defined Japanese Confucianism as Japan’s first philosophy, yet he also stood as one of the most outspoken and vehement critics of Christianity as a system of thought that was inherently mistaken and completely inappropriate for Japanese. Throughout much of its history, Japanese Confucianism has therefore implicitly if not explicitly opposed Christianity on philosophical grounds.