Remembering Yuji

REMEMBERING YUJI [/The following personal observations supplement the notices on the late Muramatsu Yüji in the August, 1974 Journal of Asian Studies by Professors Ramon Myers and Benjamin Schwartz. This issue of Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i commemorates the passing of Prof. Muramatsu Yüji.3 Some crucial years, I suspect, for Yûji's development as a scholar may have been 57-58 and 58-59. In the first of these periods he was a travelling fellow of the Tokyo Seminar on Modern China and in the second he was a research fellow of the Committee on East Asian Studies, Stanford University. As I recall he travelled the first year but did research at Harvard and Stanford. The second year he and his wife settled at Stanford. There my late wife Mary introduced Yüji and Haneko to the mechanics of American domestic life, and they settled comfortably in a small house in Palo Alto. Yüji mined incessantly in the great Hoover Library Chinese Collection. He gave a research paper at a faculty seminar, he accumulated material on his own favorite themes and, betimes, (this must have been in the spring of '58) worked on his paper for the Conference on Chinese Thought that took place the following summer. This was "Some Themes in Chinese Rebel Ideologies. " He was a lively participant at the conference , and his paper appeared in The Confucian Persuasion -2- (Stanford, 1960). It was during editorial discussion of his paper that he told me I was too addicted to the form of learned articles common m the West, with its unilinear drive from opening to conclusion . Japanese articles, he maintained, were a series of thrusts into the core of the subject followed by withdrawal and a thrust from another point on the perimeter. What made Yüji so endlessly interesting was a particularly Japanese kind of cosmopolitanism combined with remarkable reportorial skills and an abundance of good humor. He was, as you probably know, a splendid calligrapher and had at least one "one man" show in Tokyo. Though his life style was Taoist and his manner benign, this disguised a very shrewd understanding of the contemporary social and economic scene in various parts of the world. His reports on the Indian State of Kerala, on Mexico (where he taught one summer) and on Castro's Cuba were marvels of pungency and wit. He once said with his mischievous twinkle that being Japanese gave one an advantage as an observer of other societies because Japan was not a great civilization with values of universal appeal to be spread across the world, but a community like a village -- a pleasant place to live, a place, like a village, where one would come home to die. Arthur F. Wright Yale University ...