Masao Maruyama (scholar)

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Masao Maruyama
BornMarch 22, 1914
Osaka, Japan
DiedAugust 15, 1996(1996-08-15) (aged 82)
Tokyo, Japan
NationalityJapanese
Alma materTokyo Imperial University
Occupations
  • Thinker
  • political scientist
  • historian
  • professor[1]
Years active1950–1971 (as prof.)[1]
ParentKanji Maruyama[1]

Masao Maruyama (丸山 眞男, Maruyama Masao, 22 March 1914 – 15 August 1996) was a leading Japanese political scientist and political theorist. His expertise lay in the history of Japanese political thought, to which he made major contributions.

Early life

Maruyama Masao was born in

Taishō democracy. After graduating from Tokyo Furitsu Number One Middle School (currently known as Tokyo Municipal Hibiya High School), he entered the Tokyo Imperial University and graduated from the Faculty of Law
in 1937. His thesis "The Concept of the Nation-state in Political Science" earned a Distinguished Thesis Award, and Maruyama was appointed assistant in the same department.

Originally he had wanted to specialize in European political thought, but changed his focus to concentrate on Japanese political thought, a subject that until that time mainly centered around the concept of an imperial state, and was influenced by a foundational ordinance that required subjects to be taught "in accordance with the needs of the state."[3] Maruyama brought to the discipline a theoretical perspective grounded in extensive comparativism. The person who originally recommended this path to him was his mentor, Professor Shigeru Nambara, who was highly critical of military and bureaucratic obstructions to the growth of a constitutionally defined "national community."[4] An expert in European political thought, Nambara steered the young Maruyama into working on these topics.

In March 1945, Maruyama was drafted and stationed in the Army at Hiroshima. After experiencing the atomic blast at Hiroshima and seeing out the end of the war there, he returned to his post at the university in September. He caught tuberculosis at the time, and after an operation, spent the rest of his life on one lung.

Rise to fame

Maruyama first attracted attention from the scholarly community immediately following the war with his famous essay on wartime Japanese fascism, "The Logic and Psychology of

Meiji periods.[5] It was not until the late 1950s that Maruyama's earlier essays were anthologized and republished for the first time, bringing him fame and acclaim from a much broader cross-section of the Japanese general public.[5]

Role in protest movements

Maruyama became involved in the

US-Japan Security Treaty at an early stage, in 1959, and became involved in a variety of protest activities and publishing anti-treaty statements.[5] Shortly after the shocking ramming of the Treaty through the Diet by Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi on May 19, 1960, Maruyama emerged as one of the main faces of the anti-Treaty movement. On May 24, he gave a dramatic speech “Time for a Choice” (Sentaku no toki) to an over-capacity crowd at a hall in central Tokyo. Maruyama argued that Japan was about to choose between democracy and dictatorship. He also argued that due to Kishi's outrageous actions, ordinary Japanese people needed to support the anti-Treaty protests in order to protect democracy, even if they did not mind the Treaty itself.[6]

However, Maruyama later came to regret his starring role in the 1960 crisis. In the aftermath of the protests, Maruyama was attacked by opponents on both the right and the left. From the right, he was attacked as a supporter of communists and socialists, and from the left, he was accused of being a supporter of a very narrow vision of "bourgeois" democracy that only supported the interest of the ruling capitalist classes.

professor emeritus
at the same university in 1974.

Later life

Though Maruyama suffered from poor health especially in his later life, he continued studying and writing until he died in Tokyo on 15 August 1996.[2] The major work of his retirement years was a three-volume commentary on Fukuzawa Yukichi's principal work Bunmeiron no Gairyaku, based on a lengthy seminar he conducted with a small working group. This was published in 1986, as Reading 'An Outline of a Theory of Civilisation', (「文明論之概略」を読む) by Iwanami Shoten. Besides, he contributed several more noteworthy as well as controversial works on Japanese culture or the process of translation in modern Japan. Most noteworthy is his concept of basso ostinato. Maruyama referred to this musicological concept to capture a socio-historically substratum underlying human thought. Although basso ostinato is in constant flux, it is experienced by people as a relatively stable intellectual framework through which people give meaning to life.[11]

See also

Honors

Representative works in English

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Nakajima, Makoto (16 September 2016). 日本大百科全書(ニッポニカ)の解説 [The Nihon Dai Hyakka Zensho: Nipponica 's explanation]. Kotobank (in Japanese). Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  2. ^ a b James Kirkup (23 August 1996). "Obituary: Masao Maruyama". The Independent. Retrieved 8 September 2013.
  3. ^ Andrew E.Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan:The Public Man in Crisis, California University Press,,Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1988 p.39
  4. ^ Barshay, op. cit. pp. 104–108
  5. ^
    ISBN 9780674988484
    .
  6. ISBN 9780674988484
    .
  7. ISBN 9780674988484
    .
  8. ISBN 9780674988484
    .
  9. ^
    ISBN 9780674988484
    .
  10. ISBN 9784924971240
    .
  11. S2CID 148067564.[permanent dead link
    ]
  12. ^ L'Harmattan web site (in French)
  13. ^ Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 1993 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Archived 17 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine; retrieved 2011-05-31

External links

Further reading

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