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A prominent thinker has many faces, and Maruyama Masao, the political scientist and professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo who died in August 1996 at the age of 82, is no exception. The most common image of Maruyama, as projected by his pronouncements and writings on post-World War II Japanese politics and society, is of a man who vehemently opposed the 1960 revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the attempts by conservatives to revise Article 9 of the postwar Constitution. The article has been regarded as a symbol of pacifism because it renounces "war as a sovereign right of the nation." In this respect, Maruyama appeared to be an opinion leader of the reformist camp, and it is in terms of this image that he is presented in both conservative and reformist journalism.
Others see Maruyama in a much broader perspective as a spokesman for democracy and public enlightenment in the postwar period. Along with scholar of law Kawashima Takeyoshi (1909-92) and economic historian Otsuka Hisao (1907-1996), they consider Maruyama outstanding among the many intellectuals whose research careers began during World War II and who, after the war, sharply criticized the pre-1945 emperor system that guided central government, and actively championed Japan's "modernization" (embracing democracy). In this sense, he was an intellectual who attacked the "backward" elements of Japan, holding up the West as a model. Traditionalists of whatever persuasion are generally very critical of Maruyama, because of the cold perspective they felt he had of Japan.
Both these images do convey certain aspects of Maruyama, but they oversimplify him. It is true that he spoke out on controversial and contentious political issues up to a certain point, but it would be almost brutal to confine the significance of his work to such a limited framework. He did play a leading role in postwar democratization, and he did openly attack various conditions in Japan from a Western-as well as leftist-standpoint. But this does not mean one can submerge Maruyama's distinctive perspective and profound insights under the overall current of postwar propagation of democracy. Maruyama was a far more unconventional thinker in his own right.
Apart from his work as a scholar of Edo Period (1603-1867) political thought, Maruyama made a tremendous contribution in...