N E W S L E T T E R The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities April - May 1999 The Maruyama Lecture and the Humanities at Berkeley Two years ago my colleague and friend Andrew Barshay and I began to talk about inviting Kenzaburô Ôe to inaugurate a lecture series in honor of Masao Maruyama. Besides our admiration for the work of the two men, we shared the thought that it was vitally important to cross the cultural and institutional boundaries separating area studies and the humanities. In that spirit the first Maruyama Lecture will also be a culmination of the Townsend Center's program this year on international perspectives in the humanities. R.S. One of the themes of the Townsend Center’s programs this year is “Humanities Crossing Borders.” With this mandate, the Center for Japanese Studies and the Townsend Center have cooperated in creating a lecture series named for the late Masao Maruyama, historian of East Asian political thought and among the most influential political thinkers in twentieth century Japan. Over the next three years, lecturers in the series will use Maruyama’s work as a point of reference for reflections on the problems of political engagement and responsibility in modern times, the paramount concern of Maruyama’s work. Kenzaburô Ôe, novelist and 1994 Nobel Laureate, will deliver the inaugural Maruyama Lecture on April 19—one of two presentations he will make to the university community during his stay (For details, see page 16). Let me say a few words about the series’ namesake. Over a public life of nearly five decades, Masao Maruyama (1914-96) strove to imagine and realize Japanese modernity in which democratization— of politics, of society, and of culture—remained a moral imperative and overriding aim. His scholarship brought Maruyama international recognition: membership in the Japan Academy (1977), honorary doctorates from Harvard and Princeton, literary prizes including the Mainichi (1953), Ôsaragi Jirô (1976) and Asahi (1986), and the Distinguished Service Citation of the Association for Asian Studies (1993). At age nine, Maruyama witnessed the Great Kantô earthquake of 1923; his first written work describes that massive upheaval and its consequences. Educated at what was then Tokyo Imperial University, 1 he remained there for his entire career. sometimes humiliating but often fabulous Maruyama’s intellectual maturation encounters of Japanese with their coincided with the final, harrowing crisis conquerors. Ôe wrote in a wholly original, of the Japanese empire; his historical sinuous Japanese prose that (to say the vocation consisted of an attempt to grapple least) disturbed the complacency of with the deeper intellectual and contemporary writing and thought. psychological causes of the tragedy of Japanese modernization in its imperial Ôe found his political voice through phase. tragedy. In 1963 his son, Hikari, was born brain-damaged; shortly thereafter Ôe Maruyama’s major works, Studies in the began a series of interviews with A-bomb Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (1952), survivors that were collected and Japanese Thought (1961), and Thought and published in the 1964 Hiroshima Notes. Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (1969), That same year he published two novels, treat the role of nature and invention in Aghwee the Sky Monster and A Personal Tokugawa political thought, the Matter, each dealing with a father deciding psychological mechanisms of whether to keep, or abort, a brain- ultranationalism and “Japanese fascism,” damaged baby; mirror-like, the essays and the basic structures of Japanese spoke a politics of heroic survival, while historical, political and ethical thought. His the fictions inscribed that struggle in Contents analyses entered deeply, not only into imaginary form. Ôe pursued the theme scholarship in and on Japan, but into of the brain-damaged child in Teach Us to The Maruyama Lecture and the Humanities at Berkeley political thought and action as well. Outgrow our Madness (1969), The Waters are 1 Come into my Soul (1973), and The Pinch- Beyond Grants 3 It is thus entirely appropriate that Runner Memorandum (1983); for him the Guidelines for Applications in Kenzaburô Ôe should have chosen “The child has been a trickster, a sacrificial lamb, the Working Groups Program 5 Language of Masao Maruyama” as the title an image of unsullied nature, a conduit to Grants for Speakers and of his lecture. both the fabulous world of the imagination Symposia 5 and the spirit, and to the grounded sphere Working Groups Activities Born in rural Shikoku in 1935, Ôe was ten of ethics and human struggle. 6 years old when the war ended, and began Calendar 10 to publish while an undergraduate Ôe’s output has been massive. Between Events studying French literature at Tokyo 1973 and 1993 alone he wrote seventeen 16 University. His early stories exposed with new books. He has remained a political Announcements 22 brutal honesty the pain of adolescence in a voice: from his early critique of the right- spiritually vacuous postwar Japan, and the wing politics of novelist Yukio Mishima 2 (whose art he respected), to his refusal to Beyond Grants collections such as museums, libraries, accept the Order of Culture given by the [and other institutions].” And once Japanese government because of its It’s April and time to remind readers of this again, there are certain points to note in imperialistic past, to his passionate defense newsletter of the upcoming Fellowships this language: the emphasis upon of freedom for writers in China. Ôe once deadline at the National Endowment for “interpretation,” for example, or the remarked that he merely hoped to write the Humanities. Once again the date is vagueness of what it might mean to make for his own generation in a language only May 1; once again all eligible individuals a “significant contribution to thought and they could read; through that “minority” who can take up to twelve months leave knowledge in the humanities.” The NEH language “on the periphery,” he has in the period that can begin as early as avoids the thorny thicket of definition. The acquired a universal voice. January 2000, are urged to apply. NEH humanities are defined as a set of fields; Fellowship applications in hard copy will and if a given applicant identifies with that Andrew E. Barshay Department of History be available at the Townsend Center; field, then she or he is automatically Chair, Center for Japanese Studies guidelines, forms, and information on eligible. Most of us would no doubt say all NEH programs are also available on- that keeping the net broad and clear, in line at http://www.neh.fed.us/html/ institutional terms, cannot be a bad thing. forms.html. The deadline for NEH Fellowships, it should be emphasized, is As a federal grant-making agency, the the only one among the major humanities NEH is administered according to the fellowship funders that falls in the spring. language of the legislation that brought it May 1 is an important date. into being in 1965. The implications that lie “beyond grants” are not the business Though in no way negating its importance, of the Fellowships application guideline. there is a certain sameness in this reminder. One would be hard pressed even to find Perhaps quite rightly, application there any mention of the word “culture.” guidelines too are slow to change. We read The enabling legislation language specifies that NEH Fellowships have been that the term “humanities,” as promoted established “for individuals to pursue by the NEH, includes the “relevance of the advanced work that will enhance their humanities to the current conditions of capacities as interpreters of the humanities national life,” but what we would call and enable them to make significant cultural policy is not spelled out. The contributions to thought and knowledge notion of “moving beyond” in that sense in the humanities. Grants are open not belongs elsewhere. We find it at the only to individuals teaching in colleges and recently established Center for Arts and universities; but also to scholars and Culture (located also in Washington and writers working independently or in supported by several major private institutions with research or education foundations) whose first public program 3 entitled “Beyond Grants: Federal Cultural about and describe one’s work too Leadership,” will assert that federal narrowly. Although the issue of audience cultural agencies like the NEA and NEH and the “format the proposed study is do indeed promote the “nation’s cultural likely to assume” may seem ubiquitous in policy.” One of the speakers at that the Fellowship application guideline, it program will be William Ferris, chair of the opens up a whole range of questions about National Endowment for the Humanities. “whom we talk to or should talk to” and— to move even further “beyond”—what is Admittedly, the individual NEH the role of the scholarly monograph? Does Fellowships applicant probably does not it have a role at all? If it is “dead,” as some think about national cultural policy as she/ commentators have argued, what will take he prepares a proposal. There will be other its place? What does one write if not a concerns that seem closer to hand. The monograph and what qualifies as a question of language, always central to the “significant” intellectual product? To what rhetorical act of proposal writing, for degree does that product dictate the example, may be particularly relevant in a process that is being described in the year where the debate over so-called “bad proposal? April (or whatever the month writing” in the humanities raises issues not in which one is preparing a proposal) is only about what academic writing should also the time to think “beyond grants.” be, but also—as the New York Times suggests—what is the purpose of Christina M.