School Study Guides

On August 15, 1996, Maruyama Masao, leading Japanese

political scientist and scholar of the history of political

thought, died at the age of eighty-two. His profound writ-

ings, extensive research, and active lecturing made him a

formidable presence not only in the sequestered halls of

academia but in the broad movement for democratization

of post-World War II Japan.

He did seminal studies on the philosophical and psy-

chological background of Japanese ultranationalism, po-

litical thought in the Edo period (1603–1868), and the

nature of government. The depth and breadth of his work

are being made clear with the on-going publication of

Maruyama Masao shû [Collected Works of Maruyama

Masao] (Iwanami Shoten), which began in 1995 and is to

be completed in 16 volumes. 

Maruyama died on a day that carries special meaning

for Japanese as the anniversary of the defeat in World

War II. On August 15, 1945, the Japanese government,

which had accepted the Potsdam Declaration (the terms of

Japanese surrender as defined by the Allied Powers), in-

formed the people of the surrender through a radio mes-

sage by the Emperor himself. That day marked not just

the defeat of the nation but the failure of the moderniza-

tion drive that had started at the beginning of the Meiji era

(1868–1912). Aimed at catching up with Europe and the

United States under the slogan of “enrich the country and

strengthen the military,” that drive ultimately led to the

rise of militarism and the nation’s plunge into a senseless

war.

Maruyama’s scholarship as a whole was aimed at pro-

viding theoretical and practical prescriptions for the

proper course for postwar Japan, as well as finding out

why Japanese modernization led so inexorably to the na-

tion’s defeat. Even his major work on the transformation

of Confucianism during the Edo period, 

Nihon seiji

shisôshi kenkyû (Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai,1952; tr.,

Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan,

1974) may be considered part of, or at least an introduc-

tion to, that endeavor.

That August 15 had symbolic meaning for Maruyama is

reflected in a lecture he gave right after the “automatical

approval” in June 1960 of new U.S.-Japanese security

treaty in the Diet despite vehement popular opposition.

The title of the lecture was “Fukusho no setsu” [A Dis-

course on the “Return to the Beginning”], deriving from a

phrase favored by ancient Chinese Confucian scholars,

fukusei fukusho (Ch. fuhsing fuch’u, or “the recovery of

[originally good] nature and the return to beginnings”).

For Maruyama, who felt that the forced passage of the

treaty meant the process of postwar democratization had

become dead letter, the “beginning” that Japan had to re-

turn to was August 1945.

It is true that after the war the institutions of democracy

were established in Japan under the new Constitution. The

prewar emperor state, placing the emperor at the summit

of politics and society, was changed to a democratic state

with sovereignty residing in the people. Even before the

war, democracy was emergent, in the early-Meiji freedom

and popular rights movement and the “Taishô democracy”

that flourished in the years immediately after World War

I. But these movements were based on the assumption

that the people were the subjects of the emperor. Only

after the end of World War II was democracy established

with sovereign power invested in the people.

That democracy, however, was not so much acquired as

a result of the desire and efforts of the people as some-

thing gratuitously bestowed on them by the Allied forces

led by the United States. Because of this, some have

dubbed postwar democracy “Occupation democracy” and

they criticize the Constitution, the basis of that system, as

a charter thrust upon the Japanese people by the United

States. This kind of criticism was often cited by oppo-

nents of postwar democracy taking advantage of the “re-

verse-course” policies adopted by the Occupation after the

start of the Cold War, and they are loudly heard today as

well.

To argue that postwar democracy should be scrapped

because it was imposed by the Occupation and that a new

Constitution must be created by Japanese themselves be-

cause the current one was forced upon them from outside

violates the normal rules of logic. The important question

is not how democracy was introduced but how Japanese

give substance to it.

Appeal to Individual Conscience

Maruyama’s self-imposed task was to inject life into the

institutions of democracy that had thus been established

and to implant a genuine spirit of democracy in people’s

minds. Not only Maruyama but Ôtsuka Hisao (1907–96),

Kawashima Takeyoshi (1909–92), and many others

poured their energies into work outside the world of

scholarship in the endeavor to build up solid bastions of

democracy from within. They claimed that having estab-

lished the apparatus of democracy marked but the halfway

point in the process of democratization, and that only after

each and every citizen grew mature enough to support

democracy would it be here to stay.

For example, Ôtsuka Hisao, scholar of Western eco-

nomic history and Weberian thought, emphasized the role

of human ethos in modernization, arguing that in order for

democracy to strike root in Japan it needed to be widely

sustained by the modern and democratic ethos (or ethics)

of the people. (Kindaika no ningenteki kiso [The Human

Basis for Modernization], Chikuma Shobô, 1968).

Kawashima Takeyoshi, authority on civil law, asserted

that democratization of Japan could not be achieved

without abolishing the family system that had supported

the prewar emperor-system state and changing the feudal-

istic family-centered consciousness of the people (Nihon

shakai no kazokuteki kôsei [The Family Structure of

1

Japanese Book News

Number 17

Maruyama Masao and Democracy in Japan

Mamiya Yôsuke 

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