Table Of ContentSTUDIES IN
THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF
TOKUGAWA JAPAN
STUDIES IN
THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF
TOKUGAWA JAPAN
MASAO MARUYAMA
translated by MIKISO HANE
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO PRESS
1974
© UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO PRESS, 1974
Printed in Japan.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any infor
mation storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Gopublished by
Princeton University Press
and
University of Tokyo Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
70-90954
ISBN: 0-691-07566-2
CONTENTS
Translator's Preface vii
Introduction xv
Part I The Sorai School: Its Role in the Disintegration
of Tokugawa Confucianism and Its Impact on
National Learning
I Introduction: The Formation of Tokugawa
Confucianism 3
II The Chu Hsi Mode of Thought and Its
Dissolution 19
III The Unique Characteristics of the Sorai School 69
IV The Sorai School's Relationship to National
Learning, Especially to the Norinaga School 135
V Conclusion 177
Part II Nature and Invention in Tokugawa Political
Thought: Contrasting Institutional Views
I The Problem 189
II Chu Hsi Philosophy and the Idea of Natural
Order 195
III The Sorai School Revolution 206
IV The Historical Significance of the Transition from
Nature to Invention 223
V The Logic of Invention as Developed by Shoefa
and Norinaga 239
VI Further Developments and Stagnation in the
Bakumatsu Period 274
Part III The Premodern Formation of Nationalism
I Introduction: The Nation and Nationalism 323
II National Consciousness under Tokugawa
Feudalism 327
III Varieties of Premodern Nationalism 341
Bibliography 369
Index 375
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The author, Masao Maruyama, is one of the most brilliant and
influential thinkers to emerge in modern Japan. His incisive and
original analyses mark him as the leading theorist of Japanese
modes of thought and behavior. One observer compared his
emergence in postwar Japan to the appearance of a comet, a
bright spark that illuminated the darkened skies of a nation that
had just suffered a devastating defeat. Just as Ogyu Sorai, the
central figure of this work, is seen by the author as the "discoverer
of politics" in Japan, he himself can be regarded as the founder
of "modern" political science and intellectual history in Japan.
His rare analytical faculties allow him to cut through masses of
unstructured external material and to extract what is essential,
while delineating configurations that remain undetected to less
discerning eyes.
Professor Maruyama is wholly committed to scholarly and intel
lectual excellence and remains an uncompromising perfectionist
and an unrelenting purist. Hence, he refuses to publish anything
unless he has meticulously examined the evidence, deliberated
upon the problems under study until he is thoroughly satisfied,
and has concluded that he has something unique and worthwhile
to say. As a result the body of his published works is not volumi
nous, although over the years he has produced a considerable
number of highly original and profoundly perceptive treatises.
via TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The chronological range of the subjects he has examined extends
from antiquity to the present. His first major work, the treatises
included here, dealt with Tokugawa thought. He then proceeded
to examine the Meiji thinkers, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, modern
nationalism, contemporary political thought and behavior, and
the Japanese mode of thinking in general. Recently he has turned
his attention to the early roots of Japanese thought, going as far
back as the Kojiki, discerning in the "ancient substra \koso] certain
patterns that have persisted to the present."1 He has also re
turned to the study of Ogyu Sorai and has been making meticu
lous textual analyses of his writings.
Not only is Professor Maruyama steeped in classical Chinese
and Japanese learning, but he is also deeply grounded in Western
scholarship, especially in the works of the German idealists (Hegel
in particular), German sociologists, and Western positivists. He
once stated that his early intellectual life had been the object of
a tug of war between German idealism and Western positivism;
ultimately he settled somewhere in between German historicism
and English empiricism, that is, in the scholarship represented by
men like Max Weber, Hermann Heller, and Karl Mannheim.2
As a college student he was exposed to Marxism, but he did not
embrace the ideology that came to hold such fascination for so
many Japanese students and intellectuals of the pre- and postwar
years. He ascribes his inability to commit himself to Marxism to
"my inbred scepticism of any 'grand theory' as well as my belief
in the force of ideas operating in human history."3 He has con
tinued to eschew all forms of dogmatism and has remained a
rationalist and a pragmatist and a sympathetic but stern critic of
Marxism.
The dogma that Professor Maruyama had to confront and
combat early in his life was the ideological complex that sup
ported the Emperor system. His early interest in Marxism led him
into confrontations with the special higher police (tokko), the for
midable foe of intellectual freedom and handmaiden of the sys-
1 Cf. citations in author's introduction.
1 Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modem Japanese Politics (London:
Oxford University Press, 1963), p. xvi.
3 Ibid.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE IX
tem, who held him suspect and even abused him physically. As
the author explains in his introduction, the current work was a
form of protest against the authoritarian ideology. In the postwar
years, after the collapse of the Emperor system, Professor Maru-
yama turned his attention to the examination of the mode of
thinking that had sustained the system. He was convinced that a
new world outlook would not emerge in Japan without thorough
exposition and understanding of the mode of thinking and be
havior that contributed to the rise of fascistic ideology. The result
of his studies was the publication of Gendai seiji no shiso to kodd.4
He continued his examination of the Japanese mode of thinking
in a series of treatises, several of which were collected and pub
lished in his Nihon no shiso.5 The thesis of one of the key essays is
the absence in Japan of an axial intellectual system comparable
to Christianity in the West. This left the Japanese, when they
were exposed to Western thought in the nineteenth century, with
out the frame of reference necessary to properly sift, adopt, adapt,
and assimilate Western ideas. Consequently, all sorts of theories
and concepts were indiscriminately imported and allowed to jos
tle each other in a helter skelter fashion. In addition, Japanese
intellectual life lacked the tradition of individuals, as independent
subjects, or autonomous minds, confronting the objective world,
and through a logical process extracting from it significant con
cepts that could be raised to the level of transcendent ideas.
The task facing the Japanese, in Professor Maruyama's opinion,
is the creation of an autonomous mind that can function as an
intermediary between reality and ideas. It would seek to objectify
reality and, on the basis of a fixed standard of values, bring order
to the complexities of the external world by a process of con
ceptualization and abstraction. Such a mind (subject), because
of its sensitivity to the process by which ideas are abstracted from
reality, would not turn them into fetishes and worship them as
absolute dogmas. On the other hand, it would not rely upon non-
conceptualized, felt, or immediately apprehended truth as the
1 2 vols., Tokyo: Miraisha, 1956-57. About half the essays were translated into
English and published in the West in 1963, as Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese
Politics, op. at. revised edition, 1969.
5 Tokyo: Iwanami, 1961.
