Maruyama Masao

Works

• 1946Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism

  The essay, published in the journal Sekai in May 1946, that made him famous: the imperial state claimed authority over values themselves, and since everyone derived authority from closeness to the emperor, no one bore responsibility.

• 1952Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan

  Essays written 1940–44: the dissolution of Zhu Xi orthodoxy through Ogyū Sorai, who saw social order as made by human beings, and through the National Learning of Motoori Norinaga.

Position

Maruyama’s essay on ultra-nationalism argued that the prewar Japanese state, unlike the modern European state, did not leave questions of value to the conscience of individuals but claimed to embody value itself in the emperor. Since everyone derived authority from their distance to the emperor, pressure from above was passed downwards – a “transfer of oppression” – and in the end no one regarded themselves as responsible; in a later essay he called this a “system of irresponsibility”. His studies of the Tokugawa period traced how Ogyū Sorai broke with the Zhu Xi orthodoxy: instead of seeing social order as part of nature (shizen), Sorai saw the Way as made by the sages (sakui), which opened the idea that order is a human construction and can be changed. Maruyama used Weber’s sociology and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, and he took Hegel’s picture of an unhistorical, stagnant China as a challenge to show that Japan had developed modern forms of thought from within. In “Japanese Thought” (1961) he described a culture of closed “octopus pots” in which ideas accumulate without being confronted. Later critics, including Yoshimoto Takaaki and postcolonial scholars, objected that he measured Japan against an idealised Europe; his defence of democracy as a “permanent revolution” remains a reference point.

Life & context

Maruyama Masao was born on 22 March 1914 in Osaka, the son of the journalist Maruyama Kanji. As a high-school student in 1933 he was briefly detained by the police for attending a meeting of a left-wing study group. He studied law at Tokyo Imperial University and in 1937 became the assistant of the political philosopher Nanbara Shigeru; between 1940 and 1944 he wrote his essays on the political thought of the Tokugawa period. In 1944 he was drafted into the army and served in Korea and then in Hiroshima, where he experienced the atomic bombing on 6 August 1945. His essay “Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism”, published in May 1946, made him the leading intellectual of postwar democracy. He was professor at the University of Tokyo from 1950. In 1960 he took part in the protests against the renewal of the security treaty with the United States. During the student protests of 1968–69 his research office was occupied, and he left the university early in 1971. He then devoted himself to the history of Japanese thought and to studies of Fukuzawa Yukichi. He died in Tokyo on 15 August 1996.

Further main works

• Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō, 1956–57)
• Japanese Thought (Nihon no shisō, 1961)
• Reading Fukuzawa’s Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1986)
• Loyalty and Rebellion (Chūsei to hangyaku, 1992)