Civilization, Modernization, Westernization: Yukichi Fukuzawa as a leader and Masao Maruyama as a critic Taichirō MITANI The Japan Academy Introduction — Why did Masao Maruyama take an interest in Yukichi Fuku- zawa? The Tokyo Academy, predecessor of the Japan Academy, was established in 1879. The parent organization of the Tokyo Academy was the Meiji 6 Society or Meirokusha, the earliest voluntary association of the intellectuals of modern Japan, proposed in 1873 by a few intellectuals including Arinori Mori, and officially formed in February 1874. Most of the members of this society were, except Mori from the Satsuma Domain, like Joun Kurimoto, those who had served in various official capacities in the Shogunate, and had been dispatched to Europe by the Shogunate. These men not only had the experience of living in those places but were also well-versed in writings in foreign languages includ- ing English, Dutch, German, and French. They were some of the brightest intellects of the old regime, having been brought up in the original Japanese culture of Confucianism and scholarship, but simultaneously having a strong interest in and vast knowledge of Western cultures, and their usefulness was greatly appreciated even by the new govern- ment that came to power after the end of the Shogunate. The Meirokusha member who was appointed the first president of the Tokyo Acade- my, the position equivalent to the president of the Japan Academy today, was Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the forerunners of modern Japan. Fukuzawa’s social status under the old regime was low, but because of his proficiency in Western languages, he was picked to handle translation and other work, on the periphery of the Shogunate’s foreign affairs department. Alongside this, Fukuzawa was also actively involved in spreading aware- ness and knowledge of Western culture among the Japanese public through his popular works, including Things Western and All the Countries of the World, for Children Writ- ten in Verse, during the final years of the Shogunate and the early years of the Meiji Period. Although holding only a low-level post in the Shogunate, Fukuzawa was a sup- 61 Transactions of the Japan Academy, Vol. 72, Special Issue Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835‒1901) Sokichi Tsuda (1873‒1961) Masao Maruyama (1914‒1996) porter of the last Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu’s efforts to use the model of Napoleon III to modernize his forces, and gave direction to those efforts with his slogans “civilization and enlightenment” and “rich country, strong army.” Fukuzawa, while keeping in mind that the long-term goal of Japan was to walk the path that led to the civilization of all humanity, advocated that the medium-term goal was the Westernization and moderniza- tion of the country toward the formation of a nation state. On this issue, similar thoughts were held by Amane Nishi, who once served as the brain of Shogun Tokugawa Yoshi- nobu and was later appointed the second president of the Tokyo Academy. Nishi made a French language manual for Yoshinobu to help him in his efforts to emulate Napoleon III. In 1978, almost a hundred years after Fukuzawa became a member of the Tokyo Academy, Masao Maruyama became a member of its successor, the Japan Academy. Maruyama is known for his path-breaking research on Japanese political thought in an effort to trace the historical origins of modern Japan. Maruyama’s research began with Sorai Ogyu, a philosopher and one of the top scholars who represented the apex of Japa- nese civilization from mid-17th through mid-18th centuries under the rule of the Shogu- nate. Unlike most of his contemporary scholars of Confucianism, who studied the sub- ject based on a Japanese reading of the classical Chinese texts, Sorai studied Confucian texts using the original Chinese reading and conducted extensive philological research on Confucianism. In other words, rather than studying Confucianism as a doctrine of moral philosophy, Sorai’s research had a foreign studies aspect to it, wherein he used the basic Confucian texts to objectively and empirically study ancient China, the culture in 62 Civilization, Modernization, Westernization which these texts had been created. In this sense, Sorai’s studies can be placed alongside the studies of Fukuzawa, who was engaged in foreign studies targeting the countries of Western Europe — Dutch studies and Western studies — during the final years of the Shogunate. Thus, Maruyama’s research on Sorai, whose work he positioned as the har- binger of modernity in the history of Japanese political thought (similar to the position- ing of Machiavelli’s work in the history of Western political thought), lead to Maruyama’s research on Fukuzawa, who appeared 169 years after Sorai and was the ideological founder of modern Japan. What inspired Maruyama to study Fukuzawa, however, was not the external factor of Fukuzawa’s ideas, which were cultivated by an intellectual interest in modern Europe. The originality of Maruyama’s views on Fukuzawa lies in his positioning of Fukuzawa, who presented a radical antithesis to Edo Neo-Confucianism, on the trajectory of the self-effacing development of Japanese Confucianism post Sorai. In other words, it was inevitable that Maruyama, who attempted to discover the indigenous germ of Japan’s modernization in the establishment and flowering of Sorai’s study, would eventually ar- rive at Fukuzawa, who was the most devastating critic of Confucianism and the most avant-garde proponent of modernization in his time. Maruyama’s first academic article on Fukuzawa was “Yukichi Fukuzawa’s Criticism of Confucianism” (In Overview of Scholarship at Tokyo Imperial University, Faculties of Law and Economics, April 1942). Before that, two other articles by Maruyama on Confucian thought in early modern Japan had been completed, and all three articles were presented one after the other. The first one, titled “The Special Significance of Sorai’s Study of the Development of Early Modern Confucianism, and its Relation to the Study of Ancient Japanese Thought and Culture,” was presented between February and May 1940. This was followed by the second article titled “Nature and Artifice as Contrary Institutional Perspectives in the History of Early Modern Japanese Thought,” presented in August 1942. The above ar- ticles were connected, both time wise and content wise, to the article on Fukuzawa, which was presented in April 1942. Both the articles, through their close inquiry into the doctrine of Confucianism (Edo Neo-Confucianism), which was the source of the domi- nant ideology of the Shogunate, revealed the process by which this way of thinking disintegrated, and in doing so, attempted to discover therein the indigenous germ of Ja- pan’s modernization. What these studies then encountered was the views on Fukuzawa, which went on to become a major pillar of Maruyama’s research on the history of Japa- 63 Transactions of the Japan Academy, Vol. 72, Special Issue nese political thought. There were already references to Fukuzawa and/or quotes by Fukuzawa in the two articles on Sorai mentioned above. In the first article, there was a reference to Fukuza- wa’s “The Real State of Affairs of the Old Feudal System” in connection with a section pointing out the similarities between the political system of ancient China, which had given birth to Confucianism, and the class system under the Shogunate, which had ap- plied Confucianism (The Complete Works of Masao Maruyama, Volume 1, 1996, pp. 132‒133). The second article included a quote from An Outline of the Theory of Civiliza- tion (Volume 5), which pointed out that scholars were subordinate to the authority of the regime under the Shogunate (Ibid., Volume 2, p. 5). Undoubtedly, then, Maruyama’s views on Fukuzawa crystallized from the original perspective of Maruyama, who placed an importance on the indigenous origins of Japan’s modernization. “Modern Thought” (Ibid., Volume 3, pp. 3‒5) is a short essay published in January 1946, soon after Japan’s defeat in World War II, which concisely explains Maruyama’s views on the modernization of Japan. During Japan’s war with the U.S. and European nations, which erupted in December 1941, following Japan’s successful capture of Eu- ropean colonies in South East Asia including Indochina, Singapore and Indonesia, the idea that the “modernity” of Europe and the U.S. was a goal that Japan had already “surpassed” was widely popularized. Maruyama’s essay on Modern Thought mentions this fact. The euphoric mental state of the nation, however, underwent another reversal following the country’s defeat in the war. Regarding Japan’s view of modernity follow- ing its defeat in the war, Maruyama writes as follows: “The fact that modern thought in Japan had not just been ‘surpassed,’ it had not yet even been achieved in the true sense has finally become obvious to many people....On the other hand, however, the view that history has never witnessed indigenous growth of modern thought in Japan is certainly not justified either. The present heart-stricken and wretched conditions are a hotbed for the theory that Japan has never had any connection with modernity, which is the exact opposite of the theory that Japan has already sur- passed modernity. It deprives the people of this country of confidence in being able to think for ourselves, thereby encapsulating the risk of returning to the previous simplistic equation of modern thought with Western European thought. In this sense, I think that in order to explain the modernization of Japanese thought, it is proper to focus not just on the Meiji period but also on the history of political thought in the Tokugawa period. What is more, in doing so, it is important not to fall prey to rigid dichotomies that brand 64 Civilization, Modernization, Westernization Confucian thought as feudal while linking Dutch studies and the associated natural sci- ences to modernity, but rather to search for and find the source of modernity that contin- ues to bubble up quietly in the process of the unfolding of Confucian and/or ancient Japanese thought.