 While there is a religious dimension to Confucianism, its teachings – ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, political, and aesthetic – are typically understood in relation to the socio-political world of humanity, beginning with the individual and his/her pursuit of moral and intellectual perfection, the family and its pursuit of harmony and order, and the polity and its pursuit of peace and prosperity throughout all below heaven, i.e., the world at large. In this respect, Confucianism was the secular philosophy operative in the ordinary world of everyday existence, at one level or another, throughout Japanese history, well into modern times. As often as not, however, its teachings have become so thoroughly integrated into Japanese culture without being explicitly identified as “Confucian” that many have naively assumed them simply generic to the Japanese mind and its myriad expressions in history and culture.