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Maruyama's Achievement: Two Views*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

H. D. Harootunian
H. D. Harootunian
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

The long-awaited English-language publication of Maruyama's famous study is a major event for scholars of Tokugawa Japan. Those of us engaged in teaching Toku-gawa intellectual history have often known a malaise and even frustration which this work will ease considerably. Faced with English-language material that is sparse and often of limited usability, communicating the richness or simply a sense of the vitality and development of Tokugawa thought to students who know no Japanese often becomes a problem. This work, however, opens for them the possibility of new levels of sophisticated analysis and discussion.

For over three decades now this seminal work, consisting of three long essays written between 1940 and 1944, has dominated Tokugawa intellectual studies. As the translator, Mikiso Hane, rightly suggests, Maruyama's stature in this field is comparable to the place occupied in Tokugawa thought by the main figure of his work, Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728). Just as Sorai is seen as the “discoverer of politics,” Ma-ruyama can be regarded as the pioneer of intellectual history in Japan, especially of political thought.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , May 1977 , pp. 521 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1977

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References

1 See, among others, pp. 15, 17, 26, 31–32, 195, 202.

2 See Akira, Öta, “Shushigaku seigakuka no katei: Kansei-ki shakai shisō kenkyū no ikkiku,” Chiba Daigaku rigakubu kiyō (Bunka kagaku), II (1957), 2, pp. 57–67Google Scholar. Also my Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu, 1758–1829 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 123–24, 132–33.Google Scholar

3 A good part ofthe following critique in the form ofsupplement to Maruyama's study is based on Abe Yoshiō, Nibonsbusbigaku to Chōsen (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku suppankai, 1965); see pp. 333, 495.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., pp. 204, 331.

5 Ibid., pp. 208ff., 331.

6 Ibid., pp. 204, 209.

7 Ibid., p. 200.

8 Ibid., p. 168.

9 Ibid., p. 295.

10 Ibid., pp. 364–65; also Bitō Masahide, Nihon hōken shisōshi kenkyū (Tokyo: Aoki shobō, 1961), p. 65.

11 Abe (n. 3 above), pp. 229–403.

12 Tetsujirō, Inoue, Nihon shushigakuha no tetsu gaku (Tokyo, 1905), p. 410.Google Scholar

13 Bitō (n. 10 above), pp. 51, 65–67.

14 This view is especially prevalent among prewar scholars. See, among others, Hiraizumi Cho, Ansai sensei to Nihon seishin (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1932).Google Scholar

15 His essay “Neo-Confucian Cultivation and Seventeenth Century ‘Enlightenment’” in de Bary, Wm. T. (ed.), The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), pp 141–216; the reference to Ansai is on p. 205.Google Scholar

16 Abe (n. 3 above), pp. 528–31.

17 Compare with de Bary (n. 15 above), p. 201.

18 Ooms (n. 2 above), pp. 27–28.