April
20, 2000
Maruyarna Masao Lecture
University o f California, Berkeley
On History and Politics in the Thought
o f Maruyarna Masao
University o f Chicago
fter multiple delays over a six-hour
period at
Airport and flying through a lightning storm,
I
am very, very
happy to be here today. Should
I
stumble, it's because we arrived in San Francisco
airport at
4
o'clock this morning-the Japanese term for my state o f mind
is
jisaboke.
I am deeply grateful and honored t o speak to you today as this year's
Maruyama Masao lecturer. I should like to use this extraordinary opportunity to
share with you some o f my thoughts on Maruyama's historiography as
it
relates t o
his political and social criticism over a lengthy period o f time.
I
shall, o f course,
refer only t o those portions o f his vast and complex oeuvre that have been o f
interest t o me in my own work as a student
intellectual history.
Even before Maruyama Masao passed away on August
1996,
one heard
speculations in Japan about what intellectual life might be like in the
Maruyama" era, the supposition being that, in terms o f intellectual history, his
death would mark the end
"postwar" period. Indeed, his presence for over
half a century as critic, social scientist, and historian was so extraordinary that
everyone agreed he would be an impossible act to follow. While these comments
were often sincere expressions o f regret, others were not quite so.
There were suggestions about "going beyond," "overcoming," and, occa-
sionally, "avoiding" him altogether-leaving him aside, circumventing him and
going down another path. Going beyond or avoiding Maruyama suggested also
turning away from his view o f modernity. Maruyama's understanding o f moder-
nity in Japan, or any modernity for that matter, was that
it
should not be defined
in terms o f a geographically limited national history, but that
it
must always
incorporate critical perspectives from abroad or from another vastly different
period o f time. The idea o f going beyond or overcoming Maruyama seemed to
resonate with some o f the views voiced at the highly publicized symposia to
"overcome the modern"
(kindai
no
held in the spring o f
1942,
when
intellectuals and journalists gathered t o discuss how, after the war to end all wars
was over, Japan might be rescued from the assaults o f modern historical change.
We know, o f course, that this vision o f overcoming the modern was not
realized. Instead there emerged in the immediate postwar years a movement for a
new democracy with Maruyama Masao, the powerful proponent o f modernity,
standing at the forefront as its most prominent leader. I do not believe he sought
this position, but
I
do believe he enjoyed
it
with an intellectual excitement and
emotional gusto that was special t o him.
Some fifty years later, there is today a movement dedicated to reclaim or
"restore" national history so that
it
might belong once again to the nation, to the
people-a history that
is
uncontaminated by the interpretive interventions from the
outside.
It
is a conservative nationalist undertaking to rewrite history mainly "by
ourselves on our terms." Writing history is viewed as a privileged extension o f
nationhood.
Maruyama's historiography, o f course, was diametrically opposed to this
view. For him there was only one kind o f history, which he called
oriented history," the content
problem being for him the issue o f moder-
nity. The exploration o f this problem could not rest on an exclusively insider's view
o f national history, as perspectives must continually be introduced from other
places and times to challenge the present, stimulate debate, and gain distance and
objectivity. Maruyama's intellectual heroes were individuals who did just that. In
the early eighteenth century,
Sorai referenced political criticism with the idea
o f ancient historical beginnings that might explain the ethical purpose o f politics
o f his time; and in the early decades o f the modern era, Fukuzawa Yukichi explored
ideas from the Western Enlightenment that he believed to be pertinent
future. While Sorai turned to an ancient Asian past and Fukuzawa the modern
West, both individuals emphasized the point that national boundaries alone did
not shape intellectual visions in history. Thus, when Maruyama unashamedly
endorsed democracy he did so not with the aim o f promoting a foreign idea, but
rather to challenge the present to transform itself into something
else,
to seek a
new ideal that, in the end, he believed depended on human desire in the present.
As graduate students, we all read this Maruyama thesis as it was woven into
his critique o f ultranationalism, and we were moved by the power o f his language
that called on citizens o f his day to choose democracy and steadfastly refuse to
retreat to the dark days o f the
1930s.
In going over his impressive historiography,
especially seeing
it
all together in his collected works o f seventeen volumes
( 1
it
clear that the
theme informs the overall "logic
J
' o f his work.
Despite the incredible breadth in his choice ofsubject matter, there is a sturdy
consistency in his critical point
that is certainly at odds with the view
currently being circulated by the self-styled wizards o f national memory. I'm sure
some o f you are aware o f the heightened activities o f these people in recent years.
It will be interesting to see how Maruyama will be remembered,
if
at all, in their
accounts.
In the early 1960s when I first read
essays in the slim volume
Japanese Thought (Nihon no
1961
),
felt that his criticism o f contemporary
Japanese culture, while provocative and exciting, was somewhat excessive.
A
recent rereading
essays has made me reevaluate them, and I have come to
appreciate more than before the strategic place these essays occupied in his
thinking as a critic. They are actually extensions o f his earlier writings against
ultranationalism, although stated this time under conditions o f economic recovery
rather than the bleak conditions o f the immediate postwar years.
Maruyama characterized Japanese thinking as "structureless" and as
uncritically permissive, characteristics that encouraged individuals to acquiesce to
things as they are
(de
aru)
rather than engage in the process o f shaping things that
were in a process o f becoming
(to naru).
There was the habit o f mind that
shunned open, public debates and found comfort instead in the solace o f isolated
"octopus
one
the disquieting metaphors he used to great effect. There
was further the uncontroversial assumption ofcultural identity that underneath all
the turbulence o f reality a collective unconscious could be relied on for psychologi-
cal security and certitude.
Maruyama extended this discussion o f the collective unconsciousness in a
subsequent essay about a decade or so later on the idea o f a deep note
in
national history that resurfaced to gloss over change and transformation. He
identified one o f the main sources o f this idea to be the eighteenth-century scholar
and ideologue o f national studies Motoori Norinaga. History, to Norinaga, was
not what humans acted on as agents, but something they accepted as the unfold-
ing o f events in an effortless, undifferentiated, and inevitable manner
ni
It was a view ofongoing historical time that
l e t
people accept the
dissonant surge o f events in history as being somehow in harmony with the deep
note and therefore allowed them to remain aloof or indifferent to actual political
and social problems. The present, again, was not a dynamic process producing
something new;
it
was always the "eternal present"
no ima). Although
Maruyama's essays were written under conditions o f high-growth economics and
within the new constitutional order, Maruyama could very easily have written these
essays against Japan o f the 1930s.
Most noteworthy for me
is
Maruyama's underlying thesis in these essays o f
the importance o f individual resistance to all-embracing ideologies. This was a
position he held to with great consistency throughout his career. However
unpopular they might seem, intellectual risks must be taken to challenge and resist
static ideologies.
It
was for this reason that Maruyama assigned great value t o
closely reasoned heterodoxies in history. He believed that without intellectual
taking against the mainstream o f history, Japan's modernity, however inadequate
and incomplete
it
turned out to be, would not have been undertaken at all. As he
outlined in his brilliant essay on "loyalty and
to
(1
loyalty was never absolute because the flip side o f
it
was radical rejection and
revolt, each being opposite sides o f the same medallion. The ethics o f loyalty and
o f revolt were embedded in the same historical and philosophical texts.
For Maruyama the
lshin o f 1868 was the historical event that mani-
fested this deep tension in an explosive and unprecedented manner. The lshin
stood for the meaning assigned t o
it
by the ideograph for "new" (shin), the vision
o f new things t o come, including a completely new intellectual environment. As
Maruyama expressed in many different places, the lshin was the revolutionary
upheaval
henkaku) that ushered in Japan's modern history. There is no
hint in Maruyama's writings that the lshin was a "restoration" as
it
came to be
translated, or should
I
say
into English.
Maruyama's view o f the
lshin is worth recounting here because it
underscores his conviction that modernity is about historical change-change
potentially, although not necessarily, for something better. Maruyama stayed
away from' the great debates among contending Marxist schools on the revolution-
ary nature o f the Ishin, but he held strong views o f his own as an intellectual
historian o f politics.
In the late
the Japanese government announced plans to celebrate
what
it
termed "The
Era Centennial." Maruyama conceded that
it
was
appropriate t o have a centennial celebration o f some kind, but he objected
strenuously to the language being employed by the government, which he felt
concealed an extremely important event. The use o f the broad chronological term
"Meiji Era," he contended, was being utilized actually to celebrate the establish-
ment o f the Meiji State, and the ideology o f a Confucian-based national morality
within that state. The term "era" was being used to gloss over the Ishin. The
Ishin, however, was not the "era" but a specific event, a revolt against the old
feudal regime, which then established a new history in which a public discourse on
representative government had become possible for the first time in Japanese
history. What the state sought to "celebrate" was closer to the twentieth-century
movement into heavy industrialization and colonial expansion. The Meiji, how-
ever, should be celebrated for the Ishin, an event that must be historicized accord-
ing t o the conditions o f the
not the 191
Let me quote from Maruyama's own words on this subject:
I believe [the celebration] should be called the 'lshin Centennial'
and not the 'Meiji Centennial.' The symbolic significance here is
quite enormous. What the current government wants to do
'Meiji Centennial.' I think what I'm about to say is common sense,
but the lshin marked the overthrow o f the Tokugawa regime. After
all is said and done this was a momentous revolution, realized by
people within Japanese history. When we construct an ideal image o f
a revolution numerous negative points will surface. The end result
was the imperial state system. However,
view events in this way,
we must say that even the French Revolution resulted in Napoleon;
and the Russian one in Stalin. Thus,
do not judge from the final
consequence only and see things in terms
original point o f the
lshin itself, we may see that event as a transformation for which we
may
feel
a sense o f pride. The issue is what o f the lshin do we feel
proud of, that is, what should be the legacy o f the event. We must
persist in our struggle over this issue."
[Maruyama
7,
Whether a revolution
is
capitalist or socialist, Maruyama continued, was
determined by world historical conditions and should not be dogmatically
reduced to a simple definition. The Ishin, for example, set the terms o f political
discourse for Japan's modernity, namely the struggle between centralization and
equality, between authoritarian governance and democracy. These issues had not
been part o f political thought and practice in Japan prior to the Ishin, and they
would be a legacy from the lshin that would last into the indefinite future. The
lshin was, therefore, a fundamental break, a revolution that marked the begin-
nings
he would term toward the end o f his career as the unending struggle
for democracy. "Put in terms o f literature," Maruyama noted,
simply
connect [Takizawa] Bakin and [Natsume]
in a seamless flow, nothing
makes sense." Bakin wrote in the late Tokugawa era about good triumphing over
evil; Soseki lamented the tragic human costs o f industrialization in the early
twentieth century. Maruyama's word for "seamless flow," which conveys better
through sound the meaning
he had to say,
Maruyama believed that the government's intention to celebrate the
formation o f the authoritarian
state and not the revolutionary lshin was
hardly innocent.
It
was clearly intended to refocus on the establishment
Confucian-based national moral ideology (kokumin
with which to discipline
and mobilize the people. Through such a celebration, comparable efforts in the
present to revive patriotism, such as bringing back into classrooms the national
anthem and the flag, would regain legitimacy.
Maruyama urged scholars not to flinch over this issue and encouraged them
to challenge the government's stance as a matter o f intellectual and civic responsi-
bility. As he put i t in his own feisty way, do
by which he meant take i t on as
a political contest, a fight, a match.
The sentiment expressed here was typical o f Maruyama. Historical scholar-
ship must relate to the politics o f resisting attempts t o establish ideological
domination from above. Perhaps because he reached intellectual maturity in the
1
Maruyama was adamant on this point, It even led him to critique one o f
the two mentors who had a decisive influence on his intellectual upbringing,
Hasegawa Nyozekan (the other being Nanbara Shigeru). While he admired
Nyozekan immensely and was deeply grateful for his many acts o f friendship and
intellectual encouragement, Maruyama
felt
Nyozekan tended to assume a "non-
political" (nonpori) stance on public issues. Maruyama noted that Hasegawa's
brief involvement in the early 1930s in the Research Society on Materialism
was an anomaly rather than the rule.
Thus for Maruyama, the struggle over the meaning
lshin was not only
historical but also about politics in the present. From quite early in his academic
career, Maruyama had set his sights on the problem
Confucian
thought and its ideological implications for modern Japan. Although the lshin
had rejected Confucianism, it was rejuvenated some twenty years later under the
guidance o f scholars, lnoue Tetsujiro being the most prominent among them, who
sought to reestablish Confucianism within a new academic discipline o f "ethical
studies"
t o serve the ideological needs o f the Meiji state. Indeed,
Maruyama thought that much o f twentieth-century intellectual history along a
broad spectrum from liberalism and Marxism to folk studies was, in one way or
another, a reaction to the formulation in the late
era o f a national morality.
One o f Maruyama's earliest essays
(1942)
was on Fukuzawa Yukichi's
rejection o f Confucianism as unacceptable
future because o f
i t s
reliance on hierarchy, obedience, and other moral absolutes. This was accompa-
nied by an examination o f
Sorai's political philosophy, a study for which
Maruyama gained widespread renown, especially for his thesis on "artifice" and
"nature," and on human agency in the creation or "fabrication" o f history. The
connection between Fukuzawa Yukichi and
Sorai, however, was not genea-
logical, although some have seen
it
to be so. The link was a conceptual one, held
together by Maruyama's understanding o f "problem-oriented history" -the only
way, as far as he was concerned, that intellectual history should be done.
In making his break with Tokugawa Confucian studies in order to face the
brave new future, Fukuzawa argued that claims o f total truth by any single
philosophy or religion were misleading to the individual and potentially harmful to
the polity. Sorai also set himself apart from the intellectual history o f his immedi-
ate past and pointed out fatal flaws in Sung Confucianism, especially
i t s
meta-
physical philosophy that fixed absolute truths upon which the Tokugawa regime
sought to rest
i t s
claim to power in the eighteenth century. With a consistent
scholarly method, Sorai held to a heterodox position against what he saw as a
faulty moral system in a premodern setting, while Fukuzawa provided theoretical
support for such intellectual opposition in the modern era. Drawing on John
Stuart Mill, Fukuzawa called for resistance t o totalistic claims o f truth because
such claims may turn out to be false in the future, while minority positions in the
present might someday be correct or closer to the truth
and therefore
should not be suppressed out o f hand. Sorai, too, had resisted the idea that
moral truth could be fixed by a cosmological absolute. Sorai presented a minority
view in which ancient beginnings were crucial because they were man-made; this
theory of original creation had a direct bearing on why history is always changeful,
being made and unmade and made again, and that, therefore, politics must
constantly address changing conditions in the present.
Because o f his uncompromising defense o f this scholarly position Sorai
would be labeled an advocate o f heterodox teachings in the proscription o f
heterodoxy o f 1787, Kansei
no kin.
And, quite interestingly, Sorai would also
not be looked upon with favor by the modern
state. The
government
extended posthumous honors sanctioned with the imperial seal to scholars from
the premodern era. These honors were extended in the late 1880s and again
midway in the 191 0s and 1920s. While virtually every scholar o f significance in
the Tokugawa era was recognized with such a rank o f honor, Sorai was not
recognized in this way. Indeed, all o f the students o f his academy, the Keien, with
one exception, would similarly be excluded from this honor. The one exception
was Yamagata
who was the head teacher at the domainal academy in
(the Meirinkan, in the mid 1750s).
was one o f the domains that
had led the attack on the old Tokugawa regime in the name o f loyalty t o the
monarchy.
Some years ago while doing research on my dissertation-sometime in late
1961 and 1962,
if
my memory serves me correctly, shortly after the mass protest
movement against the Mutual Security
encountered a passionate defense
o f
Sorai as a scholar and thinker by lnukai Tsuyoshi, the liberal politician
and defender ofcivilian government against the military. I was intrigued t o read
Inukai's accusation offigures in the inner sanctum o f the imperial court for
committing an injustice by excluding Sorai from the list
receiving posthu-
mous imperial honor. lnukai questioned the objectivity
review committee
and whether the standards were consistent, as he believed there could not be a
rational basis to exclude a scholar o f such eminence as Sorai. lnukai had weighed
the pros and cons o f "idealistic" as against "rationalistic" action theories handed
down from the Tokugawa period, and, in the end, firmly came down on the
rationalistic end represented by Sorai.
I
remember that this episode whetted my
appetite to study Tokugawa intellectual history. That the ideas o f a premodern
figure such as Sorai still generated such high emotions among modern-day party
politicians such as lnukai intrigued me greatly, but I quite frankly did not appreci-
ate at that time its implications for modern Japanese politics.
I
later discovered that almost twenty years after this Maruyama had zeroed
in on this issue as well in a lengthy essay that he wrote (1979) on the probable
reasons behind
exclusion from imperial favor. He agreed with Inukai, o f
course, that
it
was patently unfair that a scholar
great eminence was not
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