Table Of Content

STUDIES 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.