Note (return) — Chapter V · - CONFUCIANISM IN ITS PHILOSOPHICAL FORM

Though the apparatus of distribution was early known, block printing having been borrowed from the Chinese after the ninth century, and movable types learned from the Koreans and made use of in the sixteenth century,1 the Chinese classics were not printed as a body until after the great peace of Genna (1615). Nor during this period were translations made of the classics or commentaries, into the Japanese vernacular. Indeed, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries there was little direct intercourse, commercial, diplomatic or intellectual, between Japan and China, as compared with the previous eras, or the decades since 1870.