This story is part of a package on Confucius. The introduction is here.
"The Analects" and other Confucian texts were brought to Japan by the Korean envoy and scholar Wani in the fourth or fifth century A.D., some 800 years after Confucius' death. Buddhist sutras were also among the gifts he bore.
What kind of pupils Wani found the courtiers of preliterate Japan to be is not recorded. But the first fruits of Japan's early education were summarized two centuries later in the 17 articles of the "Constitution" of Prince Shotoku, dated 604. Its very first words, "Harmony is to be valued," are Confucian to the core. So is the exhortation in Article 4: "The ministers and functionaries should make decorous behavior their leading principle, for the leading principle of the government of the people consists in decorous behavior. If the superiors do not behave with decorum, the inferiors are disorderly: if inferiors are wanting in proper behavior, there must necessarily be offences."