Minagawa Kien, a Japanese Confucianist, painter, and writer, was born in Kyoto. At the age of twenty-eight, having established himself as a Confucianist, he became the official scholar for Lord Matsudaira Nobumine. His literary skill made him an outstanding figure in Kyoto circles; he had a following of three thousand. For a Confucianist his life was unusually dissipated. His era was a time of moral decline, but this was eventually checked by several edicts. The 1790 edict against "heterodox doctrines" affected Minagawa and he reformed his habits, though his ideas did not change.

Minagawa's philosophical reputation has recently grown among Japanese philosophers because of his positivist approach to Confucian studies. He is considered an eclectic because he upheld neither the official Zhu Xi school of Neo-Confucianism nor the rival Wang Yangming school. Minagawa was analytic and positivist, which made him a kind of forerunner of...