School Study Guides

2

Japanese Book News

Number 17

Japanese Society], Nihon Hyôronsha, 1950). Among

Marxist scholars, too, there were those, like Umemoto

Katsumi, who criticized deterministic and materialistic in-

terpretations of history and stressed the role of the people

as actors capable of changing the course of history.

Maruyama was no different from these thinkers in that

he considered it top priority for democratization to estab-

lish modern individualism in the people who would sup-

port democracy. “Democracy can be sustained, but only

through ceaseless effort,” said Maruyama in his Nihon no

shisô [Japanese Thought] (Iwanami Shoten, 1961). He ar-

gued throughout his career that democracy could not be

practiced without the commitment of individuals. Democ-

racy could never be completed or perfect, he said; it was,

rather, an endless process of perpetual revolution directed

toward the ideal of democratization.

Amid current post-modern intellectual trends,

Maruyama and the others who led Japan’s postwar de-

mocratization movement are often labeled as enlighten-

ment intellectuals who tried to educate the populace from

on high, so to speak, or as “modernists” who played

second fiddle to Western thinkers. Ôtake Hideo attacks

Maruyama, Kawashima, and others in these terms in his

Sengo seiji to seijigaku [Politics and Political Analysis in

Postwar Japan] (Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai, 1994).

Koyasu Nobukuni also chides Maruyama’s modernism

for being outmoded, saying that when Theodor Adorno

wrote Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) as a critique of Eu-

ropean modernism, Maruyama was complacently ex-

pounding the necessity of Japan’s modernization. (Kindai

chi no arukeoroji—kokka to sensô to chishikijin [Archae-

ology of Modern Intellect: The State, War, and Intellec-

tuals], Iwanami Shoten, 1996).

However, such criticisms are often based on hindsight

acquired from the vantage point of today, and their

paradigms are borrowed from the West. Typically, when

modernism is criticized in the West it is criticized in

Japan and when progressivism is attacked overseas it is

attacked in Japan. Western ideas have long been imported

as fashionable commodities, with little thought given to

their inevitable emergence as challenges to existing ideas.

Such is the standard by which critics today dismiss

modernism as outmoded. Maruyama’s thought was not in

the least, however, what they call modernism. When he

stressed personal commitment he was talking not only

about individuals as the torch-bearers of democracy but

intellectuals in the development of their thought. 

It was the lack of commitment on the part of Japanese

intellectuals that made Maruyama write Nihon no shisô.

He deplored the fact that Japanese intellectuals did not de-

velop ideas and philosophies to deal squarely with the is-

sues of their times and that concepts were not advanced to

challenge other concepts. “The various systems of thought

that are introduced to Japan in a certain chronological

order tend to coexist timelessly in parallel, only their spa-

tial positions changing within the mind,” he wrote, and

the result was the lack of a systematic structure or accu-

mulation of intellectual thought.

Because of the structureless tradition of Japanese

thought, Japanese intellectuals were quick to snap up the

word democracy, but they could not draw strength from

the spiritual foundations upon which it evolved, leaving

them impotent in the face of the reactionary anti-democ-

racy movement. The launching of the Occupation’s re-

verse-course policy gave some powerful people and

intellectuals under their influence the opportunity to

launch a campaign against postwar democracy. After the

signing of the new U.S.-Japan security treaty in 1960, it

was the leftist side this time that took up the attack,

calling postwar democracy “a myth” and “a fiction.”

Insights of Continuing Relevance

Reporting Maruyama’s death, newspaper articles carried

some comments by intellectuals who said the Maruyama

era, when the role of intellectuals had been to enlighten

the public, had passed. Are they right? Quite on the con-

trary, I am afraid that Japan’s “democracy” today is

moving along the dangerous path that Maruyama urgently

warned against.

First of all, Japanese politics has been increasingly rud-

derless since the end of the Cold War. The “1955

system,” in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)

maintained single-party rule with the Japan Socialist Party

(JSP) as the major opposition party for 38 years, was shat-

tered in 1993. Since then Japan has been governed by ad-

ministrations patched together by party coalition, and

politicians have taken to much agile switching of alle-

giances in order to remain in power. People are growing

quite disgusted by the repeated splitting of parties and the

facile compromising of the principles espoused by both

parties and individual politicians. Disillusionment and

apathy toward politics have grown widespread among

voters, as the less than 60 percent voter turnout for the

October 1996 general election demonstrates.

Political apathy became conspicuous in the 1990s, but it

had been growing gradually since the mid-1950s with the

advent of the rapid economic growth era and with the

consumer-oriented society. Maruyama once described this

apathy as a pheonomenon of the bipolarity between public

and private, or between “big politics” and “small poli-

tics.” He pointed out that whereas big politics increasingly

concentrated on notable issues at the top, small politics

would be widely dispersed around more mundane matters.

This tendency has grown stronger today, and inherent in

this bipolarity is the danger of the hollowing out of poli-

tics as a public domain.

Another recent concern is the fact that the American

call for the opening of the Japanese market is seen by

some Japanese as the third attempt by the United States to

forcefully open Japan. (One book on this subject is Matsu-

moto Ken’ichi’s Daisan no kaikoku no jidai ni [The Third

Opening of the Country], Chûô Kôron Sha, 1995). As in

the case with the first opening around the beginning of the

Meiji era and the second right after the Pacific War, na-

tionalism is rearing its reactionary head. A University of

Tokyo professor, for instance, accuses the postwar

Japanese history education of placing so much emphasis

on soul searching of the past that it has inculcated in

Japanese children’s minds self-negating interpretations of

their country’s history.

The close of the Cold War did not mean the end of

ideological confrontation. In Japan, on the contrary,

ideology appears to be concentrating on conservatism and 

Continued to p. 5

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