ABSTRACT
Japan experienced rapid economic growth only after 1868. The question whether an intensified religious preoccupation can account for the innerworldly asceticism of an economic lifestyle remains unsettled, probably because both critics and defenders of the Protestant Ethic thesis have discussed it entirely in the context in which Weber first formulated his idea. This chapter probes for the relationships which Max Weber had in mind in the different context of Japanese economic development and its cultural-educational preconditions. It advances two suggestions. One is that the mass effect of cultural patterns can be understood better if their political context is observed. In the Japanese case the evidence points unequivocally to a massive redirection of effort as a response to the Western challenge. The other is that both Tokugawa Japan and Catholic Europe were characterized by protracted discrepancies between orthodox doctrine and practical accommodations, giving rise to moral “tokenism” on one hand and moral “rigorism” on the other.
