Today there is an extensive literature on the indigenous ideological drivers for Japan’s descent into ultranationalism and war in the 1930’s. State Shinto, Shinto ultranationalism, militarist Zen Buddhism and Bushido are often referenced as the main contributors to these ideological mobilizations. However, much less is known of Japanese Confucian justifications for war in the same era, for the simple reason that 20th century Japanese Confucianism was, until recent years, seldom researched in mainstream Japanese and Anglophone East Asia history of ideas scholarship. In the past two decades, however, a small group of Chinese, Taiwanese, South Korean and some Japanese and European researchers have begun to focus on the ideological role Confucianism played in legitimating Japanese cultural and spiritual Pan-Asianism: a Pan-Asianism that moralized Japanese expansionism in the Asia-Pacific during the 1930’s-1940’s. This article builds on the research of these scholars to conduct an introductory investigation of the wartime activities and ideological output of a now obscure educational and research association formed in 1918 by Japanese Confucian scholars and Sinologists, the Shibunkai (斯文会). Its leadership was drawn from the uppermost reaches of Japan’s political elite: Princes Tokugawa Iyesato and Tokugawa Kuniyuki both served as war era presidents of the organization, while a member of the Japanese royal family, Marshal Admiral Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, served as the organization’s governor. Among its senior membership were Japan’s most prominent Sinologists and philosophers of Chinese thought, including Hattori Unokichi, Shionoya On, Inoue Tetsujirō, and Takada Shinji. Industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was also a founding member. The Shibunkai reached the peak of its national standing in the 1930’s, when members of the Japanese government regularly attended and spoke at its annual festivals. Researchers are now raising questions about the degree to which Shibunkai Sinologists were influential in providing “orientalist” policy advice and ideological cover for Japan’s invasion of China. This article reviews the Shibunkai’s early efforts to revive traditional Confucian morality and promote Chinese learning in Japanese schools, its pursuit of “Confucian Diplomacy” with the Kong family estate at Qufu in Shandong Province, where it focused on the teenaged 77th descendent of Confucius, Kong Decheng in its hope for a Chinese imperial restoration under the descendents of Confucius, and its elaboration of a Confucian Pan-Asian doctrine that accorded Japan, with its supposed purified version of Confucianism, the role of guardian of East Asia’s spiritual culture. The increasingly anti-western “occidentalism” of this Pan-Asianism complemented the Shibunkai’s Confucian orientalism, which justified Japan’s paternalistic and imperialistic leadership aspirations in East Asia. Last, it analyses some of the seldom-studied war-era literature produced by Shibunkai scholars to argue that a modern Japanese “Imperial Way” Confucianism played a role in the moral legitimation of Japan’s war against China in 1937-1945. It focuses in particular on an article published in the December 1937 issue of the Shibunkai’s journal Shibun by historian of China Iijima Tadao, “Clarifying the National Polity and the Awakening of China”. This article draws on ancient Chinese texts such as the Mencius to provide Confucian justification for the “punishment” of the Chinese Nationalist government by the Imperial Japanese Army. Based on its analysis of the Occidentalism and self-Orientalism in the Shibunkai’s wartime publications, the article concludes with a warning to contemporary political philosophers urging the development of different types of democratic, liberal or illiberal Confucian polities in East Asia. It argues that there is a need for more critical reflection on occidentalist and self-orientalist trends in such Confucian normative theorizing amidst the troubled geopo