Maruyama Masao.  Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Mikiso Hane, trans. (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1974)

Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan was Maruyama Masao’s first effort in his overall attempt to find an explanation of the modern history of Japan which did not depend wholly on Marxist theory, nor give all of the credit for Japan’s modernization to the West.  In his introduction he makes clear the environment in which he was writing: Japan in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  The context Maruyama gives, including the war in Asia, the conference at Kyoto University on “Overcoming Modernity” and the general intellectual climate make it quite amazing that a critical analysis of Tokugawa era thought could be written at all.  Maruyama’s book, however, does the job well.

In the first part of the book, Maruyama attempts to explain the success of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan by likening that period to the Hegelian “static history” of China.  The relatively stable nature of Tokugawa society and its rigid, reified social structure make this period, unlike others in Japan, perfect for the growing popularity of Confucianism that Maruyama wants to talk about.

After setting the stage, Maruyama discusses the dominant school of Confucian thought in Tokugawa Japan, Chu Hsi Confucianism, discussing how early philosophers including Fujiwara Reika and Hayashi Razan uncoupled Confucianism from Buddhism, with which it had been closely related in Japan, and how it provided the thesis of Tokugawa social and intellectual organization.  Maruyama does an excellent job of showing how Chu Hsi Confucianism amalgamates other traditions in Chinese philosophy, including yin/yang ideology, among others, and creates a unique place for itself in Chinese intellectual history.  This very uniqueness, though, according to Maruyama, makes Chu Hsi Confucianism very inflexible, so that its followers really cannot evolve without punching irreparable holes in the overall system.

This sets up well the direction and target of the book:  an explanation of the development of the Kokugaku school of thought in the late Tokugawa, which, Maruyama says, turned Chu Hsi Confucianism on its head, and yet never escaped the feudal beginnings of the Tokugawa political economy.

Maruyama’s discussion of the tenets of Chu Hsi Confucianism is thorough, coherent, and lucid.  The organization of his essay takes a reader easily through a complex set of ideas.  The only critiques possible here are that Maruyama’s description is a little too coherent, giving the reader a sense that he has encapsulated the universe of Japanese intellectualism in Chu Hsi philosophy, which sends a false message that Confucianism was the only stream of thought in the Tokugawa era that mattered.  In fact, he makes special note of this fact later in the book when he shows that the Kokugaku scholars located the beginning of their own ideas in the 17^th century, so that the Chu Hsi thinkers of the Tokugawa period could not have been its intellectual progenitor.

Maruyama makes a case that the majority of Chu Hsi scholars were unable, because of the closed nature of Chu Hsi philosophy, to do anything more than reiterate the basic tenets of the founding thinker.   This means, though, that the rigidity of Chu Hsi thought was bound to change as the Tokugawa political and social system changed over their course of existence.  In a way, this is the antithesis of his original point – that Chu Hsi Confucianism was successful in Tokugawa Japan because of its feudal rigidity, which made it a static society analogous to that of China.  However, he also uses this idea of slow change in the Tokugawa period to underpin a history of the subtle variations in Chu Hsi thought that evolved over the course of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, as Tokugawa society evolved.  He discusses the objections to Chu Hsi orthodoxy of such figures as Yamaga Sōkō, Ito Jinsai, and Kaibara Ekken, each of whom put a crack in the foundation of the Chu Hsi school, either through innovative ideas, or through rigid adherents to the fundamental tenets.

Maruyama locates the real revolution in Japanese Confucian thought, though, in Ogyū Sorai, whose ideas, he says, led to a “complete collapse of the Chu Hsi school.”[1]

Maruyama then goes into the characteristics of the Sorai school, while acknowledging that there were still other Confucian lines of thought in existence, and that the Chu Hsi line was not completely gone by any means.  He gives an account of Sorai’s interest in philology, or kobunji-gaku – the investigation of the meaning of words and ideas in the context of their own time, and explains the secular, political leaning of Sorai’s ideas.

Using his system of uncovering the ancient meanings of words, Sorai cam to emphasize the Six Slassics, rather than the Four Books that were so important to the Chu Hsi scholars.  He devalued any works later than these as being essentially polemical – reactions against the thought of others in the Hundred Schools period, and thus impure ideas already changed by the changing meaning of words.  He also carefully defined The Way as belonging specifically to the Early Kings as human beings, and consequently, even though they were for him sages, they were also human, and not gods.  This made his thought both universal, and heavily political in focus.  Maruyama even compares Sorai here to Machiavelli.

In keeping with his own goals, Maruyama in chapter four makes the link between the Sorai School and Kokugaku, contending that the two were linked, if not in intellectual genealogy, at least in terms of association, common interests, and similar approaches to the problems they set themselves.

Maruyama’s first point here is that Sorai’s ideas were in two general directions, one secular and political, the other secular and social.  After his death, according to Maruyama, his students split along these lines, with the social/literary line moving more and more toward literary criticism, and the political line becoming increasingly uncompromising and inflexible in its application of Sorai’s ideas.

Both Sorai’s school and the Kokugaku school of Motoori Norinaga.  , he says, were interested in The Way as essentially political, but where Sorai and his followers saw The Way, and the examples of the Early Kings as universal, Norinaga made them specific, saying that there is no one Way, but that the Way is different depending on one’s cultural and political context.  Thus, the Way for Japanese must be different from the Way for Chinese.

What is important here is Maruyama’s method of analyzing this connection.  In a very Hegelian way, he sees the Kokugaku scholars as the antithesis of the Sorai school.  He emphasizes the connection between the two in order to juxtapose their ideas.  Since both are in fact dealing with The Way of Confucianism, even if one is in the process of rejecting it, neither has escaped it.  This is the way toward a synthesis which will bring a new paradigm according to the Hegelian model of historical change.  Maruyama is here trying to show that Japanese intellectuals, while they were still trapped in a feudal mode of thought (or perhaps because they were so trapped), were developing an indigenous kind of modernity.  His careful discussion of the development of political and philosophical differentiation of national morality and religion, as when he shows that Norinaga was able to use Sorai’s personalization of the Confucian Sages to make them human, and thus subject to error.  This allowed Norinaga to claim that Japan’s emperors were related to gods, and for the Kokugaku scholars, this made Japanese belief systems in fact more real than those of Chinese Confucianism, since the sages were humans reacting to social context, while Japan’s emperors were descended from the creators.

Ultimately, Maruyama comes back to his own reasons for doing the history that he has undertaken.  In his conclusion, he makes it clear that he sees an intellectual history of Tokugawa era Japan as legitimate in part because it does not fit within the political chronology, but shows a development of its own, and in part because, he admits, he is looking for the growth of a modern consciousness in Japanese thought.  He apologizes for concentrating solely on the disintegration of Confucianism by way of noting that Confucianism was at the beginning of the Tokugawa period the main stream of Japanese philosophical thought, and that its disintegration was unexpected.  Once again, in his conclusion, he turns to the Hegelian construction of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, by suggesting that the pre-modern consciousness of the early Tokugawa period had to be erased through a process by which Confucian rationalism was replaced by the irrational and the subjective (Kokugaku), and then the synthesis of the two would create a new modern paradigm.

What Maruyama leaves unsaid, but implicit in his formulation, is that this movement toward modernity was interrupted by the arrival of Commodore Perry and those who followed from the West, and necessity and contact forced a Western modernity on Japan, and that this uncomfortable modernity led to many of the problems that would become the cause of the Second World War.

Maruyama’s thesis is compelling, and his analysis and command of ideas and history superb.  However, the entire book is more complete than I expected it to be, with all loose ends tied up, even though, by his own admission, Maruyama fails to deal with other streams of political, moral, and religious thought that were available in the same period.  Such neatly tied up ends seem to suggest, and evidence Maruyama presents support this, that in many cases, the theory here has driven the evidence rather than the other way around.  Maruyama is searching for an alternative “Japanese Modernity,” and in the sophistication and concreteness of Kokugaku ideas, he finds what he is looking for.

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[1] Maruyama, p.67.