Maruyama Masao and the Fate of Liberalism in Twentieth-Century Japan (review)

Maruyama Masao (1914–96) has long been the Japanese social scientist best known outside Japan, but his scholarly life still offers ample opportunity for fresh interpretation and insight. This is especially true since the publication between 1996 and 2004 of three new collections of relevant materials, including not only the Maruyama Masao shū (Collected works of Maruyama Masao) in 17 volumes (Iwanami Shoten, 1996–97) but the Maruyama Masao shokan shū (Collected letters of Maruyama Masao) in five volumes (Misuzu Shobō, 2003–4) and Maruyama Masao zadan (Conversations with Maruyama Masao) in nine volumes (Iwanami Shoten, 1998).

Karube Tadashi's study of Maruyama, originally published by Iwanami Shoten in its shinsho paperback series in 2006 as Maruyama Masao: riberarisuto no shōzō (Maruyama Masao: portrait of a liberal), utilizes materials from all of the above collections, in addition to the Maruyama Masao kōgiroku (Collected transcripts of the lectures of Maruyama Masao), published in seven volumes by Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai in 1967, and numerous secondary articles and monographs on Maruyama. Karube has produced a thought-provoking synthesis which is likely to stimulate others to take up one or another of the arguments that he sketches out but, given the brief biographical format, could not fully develop.

Karube's study is intended "to trace the issues that occupied Maruyama throughout his life, and elucidate them by discussing them in the context of their times" (pp. viii–ix). Appropriately, Karube presents his subject less as a "system builder" than as what he calls a "problem poser." According to Karube, "Throughout his life, Maruyama thought continually of the issues presented by the contemporary world and addressed them individually" (p. 9). Such an approach is well suited to identify and accept at face value whatever changes and apparent inconsistencies might have appeared from one era to the next and, indeed, several of the book's valuable insights have precisely to do with Maruyama's shifts to new concerns and paradigms.

One such transition took place soon after Maruyama, as a 20-year-old student at First Higher School, was arrested and detained for a few days on suspicion of having violated the Peace Preservation Law. His offense had been to attend a public lecture sponsored by the Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai (Association for the Study of Materialism). Karube argues, understandably, that the experience of detention in a crowded holding cell and periodic interrogation made a lasting impression on Maruyama, affecting him intellectually as well as emotionally. Specifically, Karube suggests that incarceration led him to focus his attention increasingly on the self and autonomy. In doing so, and in a manner that reveals a strength as well as, perhaps, a danger latent in Karube's "contextual" approach, he suggests that through a form of transference (Karube does not use the term), Maruyama projected his own experience onto that of his entire generation. Karube writes,

Later Maruyama would argue that the youth of his generation started off with an early exposure to the influence of Marxism and a concern with social conflict, but that later, during the period of the mass defections from the Left that began in 1933, they began to grapple with the issues of self and identity. It would seem, however, that he is actually speaking of the process by which his own arrest led him to a dawning awareness of "the problem of the self" in terms of the establishment of inner autonomy.

(p. 43)

A second moment of change for Maruyama came in 1951, with his publication of the essay "Nihon ni okeru nashonarizumu" (Nationalism in Japan), after which he "virtually ceased calling for a rebirth of nationalism" (p. 141). Karube admits that this transition might merely have reflected a moment when, following negotiation of the peace treaty that ended the Allied occupation and restored Japan's sovereignty, there was no longer any need to emphasize national autonomy. He...