Book review: Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan

Bibliographic Data: Maruyama Masao. Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan. Trans. Mikiso Hane. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974. [1952]

Main Argument: That the entirety of Tokugawa (samurai) intellectual thought can be traced via the introduction of the thesis of Zhu Xi Confucianism and its antithesis, the Sorai school, which in itself was succeeded by its antithesis, the kokugaku of Norinaga. These, combined with other elements, provided a new synthesis that gave birth to the intellectual movements backing up the rebellious young samurai of the bakumatsu period. (Yes, this is quite consciously put in Hegelian terms on my part, since Maruyama is uncritically Hegelian.)

Historiographical Engagement: Ostensibly with the writings of the scholars that he mentions, but mostly against Zhu Xi philosophy as understood in Japan, with the Sorai school, with kokugaku in the form of Norinaga, with Andô Shôeki, and with Fukuzawa Yukichi.

Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Maruyama's introduction, written in 1974 for the English edition, begins by outlining the intellectual conditions of production for the individual essays (the three parts of this book) which appeared in Kokka Gakkai Zasshi from 1940 to 1944. These conditions included vigilant paranoia about one's words being misunderstood (or too clearly understood) by the special thought police (tokkô) and a brief outline of imperial scholarship on earlier eras of Japanese thought, beginning with the concern for theories of national morality (kokumin dôtokuron) [for greater history of these movements, see Andrew Barshay's The Social Sciences in Modern Japan]. Maruyama mentions his debt to Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and says that in the first two essays, broadly speaking, he was trying to argue against the so-called Kyoto school of the "overcome by modernity" thinkers, specifically that 1) "contemporary Japan was still not so modernized that the 'overcoming of modernity' could conceivably be the greatest problem on the agenda" and that 2) "it was not true, as the glorifiers of tradition would have it, that there was an Oriental Spirit, quite alien to all concepts of 'modernity,' which was maintained intact and impervious to the vicissitudes of history" (xxxii). To his credit, at the end Maruyama correctly identifies two of the book's major problems, namely that the "evolutionary schema" of Neo-Confucianism he lays out does not "stand up to the historical evidence" and his assumption that Tokugawa Confucianism did not change at all in Japan (xxxv).

( Μεγα βιβλιον, μεγα κακον )

Critical assessment: When we discussed this book in seminar my professor remarked that it was the passing of an age in that we were largely anti-Maruyama. I accept that label; I think there are serious problems with Maruyama-dolatry, and I think that this book has serious problems, starting with the fact that this book is literally soaked in Hegelian thought patterns. I find the fact that Maruyama's entire argument rests upon a demonstrably partial understanding of the Chu Hsi school of philosophy and its context in the Tokugawa period mildly disturbing: if your argument isn't grounded in historical evidence, why don't we all just go home and get novel contracts? I'm mindful, of course, that the same criticism of partiality could be levied, mutatis mutandis, against some of my favorite works (such as Prasenjit Duara's Sovereignty and Authenticity), but I do think it's an important point to bear in mind when considering Maruyama. I also think we should bear in mind that people in Japan don't read this book anymore because it's mostly wrong about many important things, such as whether society was in "decline" in the Tokugawa period (hint: no). I think it's also worth mentioning that all the thinkers he investigates here, with the possible exception of Shôeki, were very much part of the feudal system in that they were all samurai. Tetsuo Najita's Osaka merchants would have very different things to say about the feudal order, as would the aristocrats of old Kyoto who were Japan's first historians.

My overarching complaint against him, however, is not that in his telling everything in modern Japan is always a tragedy conditioned by a lack (although it is; what is this, Nietzsche as badly rewritten through Freud?), but more fundamentally that Maruyama doesn't seem to want to confront the fact that, even in its anti-modern hypernationalism, Japan was irrefutably, un-overcomeably modern, through and through. This inability to acknowledge that fundamental paradox seems to have driven him to seek the roots of Japan's foreordained tragic defeat and the end of its empire in a particular intellectual strand of the "feudal" Tokugawa period. When you know what you're looking for in advance, it's easy to find it, particularly when you're willing to ignore inconvenient truths that could have provided strong counter-arguments. It may be that this aspect of the book was conditioned by the era in which the essays were originally written, but given Maruyama's introduction, which he wrote thirty years later, on balance it seems not.

I'm being, in my own way, as partial as I'm charging Maruyama is. It would be more charitable to say that the entire book is founded on a series of productive misreadings, particularly of the European intellectual tradition (my political theorist roommate's rant about Maruyama's misreadings of Hobbes could easily fill several paragraphs). More disturbing is the way that Maruyama wholesale appropriated the prejudices of his favorite writers such as Weber and applied them uncritically to the Japanese situation: the entire diatribe on the historical significance of the ascendancy of the chônin is transparently founded on second-hand anti-Semitism by way of Weber and his fellows, who tried desperately to find the roots of capitalism in good upright German Christians, not those nasty foreign usurious Jews. Maruyama's later airy anti-Semitic comment that the Sorai school was "like the Jews" almost doesn't deserve to be singled out in light of the larger underlying problems with his adaptation of the Weberian paradigm, but I'll be thorough for the sake of driving the point home.

Again, my point here is not even so much that this is objectionable (although it is) as that it should, I think, give us all an existential pause: if Maruyama, who was widely acknowledged as a genius in his own lifetime (note the translator's introduction to this volume, which basically implies that he can walk on water), couldn't get beyond the biases he inherited from his influences, what hope is there for the rest of us to be able to overcome (har) our intellectual forebears? My only thought for a way forward is that criticism of this type is the essential first step.

Further reading: Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism

Meta notes: 1. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 2. But the age of chivalry has ended. That of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded… 3. History is not always already a tragedy.