MARUYAMA Masao, Essais sur l’histoire de la pensée politique au Japon

Translating "Studies in the History of Japanese Political Ideology" into French was a work that began in the 1980s, and it is no exaggeration to say that I had spent most of my life working on it. This project started out of the strong desire of two people. The first is Michel Foucault. On his second visit to Japan in 1970, he had an interview with Professor Maruyama and asked if he could give a lecture at the Collège de France, but Professor Maruyama declined the invitation, stating that his French was not good enough. The second is Claude Lévi-Strauss. His interest in Japan led him to ask Éditions Gallimard to publish an article about Studies in the History of Japanese Political Ideology in the inaugural issue of Le Depart magazine after his interview with Professor Maruyama.
Thus the translation project was set in motion in 1981 under the supervision of Pierre Nora, then editor-in-chief of Le Depart and now a member of the Academy, and was originally to be published by Éditions Gallimard. As a young calligrapher at the time, the translation process was a huge challenge for me, and the first stage, the first chapter, was not published until 15 years after the initiation of the project. The book, however, was later published as part of the Oriental series by the Presses Universitaires de France, of which François Jullien was the editor-in-chief.
Finally, in 2010, I resumed translating this work from scratch in the wake of my retirement from college and got to the end of the third chapter. First and foremost, I would like to thank Emmanuel Roslin, co-director of the Japanese series at Les Belles Lettres, for his help in completing this project. When I consulted Roslin when the Presses Universitaires de France had refused to publish the book, he was overjoyed and immediately accepted my proposal for a translation and worked diligently to publish it. I am very grateful for what Roslin has done for me. I would also like to thank my former professor and mentor, Professor Pidgeot of Paris Diderot University, who had been supporting me since the beginning of the project.
This is the story of the nearly 40 years it took to complete the complete French translation of "Studies in the History of Japanese Political Ideology". Originally published in 1952, this work consisted of three papers published in the Kokka Gakkai Zasshi (the journal of the Association of Political and Social Science) between 1940 and 1944, meaning that it took eighty years from its conception to a complete French translation!
It took me so long to have my translated work published partly because of my work situation, but also because of the difficulty of the original text. It took me about two years to edit the notes alone, since the original work itself was an extensively-researched paper, with lengthy quotations written in the Edo and Meiji period Chinese writing style appearing throughout.
Another challenge I faced was that I also had to translate from German to French, since Professor Maruyama frequently cited from German for his work. Through the project, I became acutely aware of how little progress has been made in German-French translation in the social sciences, and how sometimes even the most basic of literature had yet to be translated. The practice of citing from German sources is not only seen in quotations, but also permeates the conceptual terms used by intellectuals of Maruyama's time.
Unfortunately, French-speaking readers have so far missed out on the opportunity to read Professor Maruyama's work. However, it is important to acknowledge here that René de Belval played a pioneering role. In 1961, he published a French translation of Professor Maruyama's article, "Nationalism in Japan", in France-Asia Magazine.
Therefore, it was of great importance for the French translation of "Studies in the History of Japanese Political Ideology" to finally be published, and above all, the work itself was very important. This is not only the first work in the new field of history of Japanese political ideology, but also a masterpiece that transformed the image of the Edo period and brought about a leap forward that still stands strong today. The "Edo boom" seen a few years ago is a proof of this. The piece still exists today as a reference book, and, while the book sometimes ends up being criticized in different articles, it never fails to be mentioned at the beginning.
If you look at the content of the work, the concept of modernity is ubiquitous. Maruyama succeeds in drawing his premise from the emergence of historical consciousness in the academic essays of the Edo period, mainly from the essays of Sorai Ogyu and Norinaga Motoori. Professor Maruyama himself, however, invites us to take another approach - one that is more clever and reveals the tragic circumstances of the era in which the essay was written. “One so-called super-academic motive was also here.” This motive is one of resistance to the dictatorial order of the time. That is, this approach is meant to reveal the historical consciousness in the works of the Edo period and beyond, to prove that modernity is not a Western trait to be rejected or "surpassed" but that it existed in the land of the gods, albeit one that did not grow and turn into supranationalism, to subvert nationalist ideology as an intrinsic property of Japan by showing that this concept is a product of history, and to prove that Royalism was from the Tokugawa period, and not from the Meiji period. And finally, by concluding the first chapter of the original by stating, "It would be a foolish thing to hope that the same tree will bloom and be beautiful with flowers and fruit at the same time...", Professor Maruyama shows us that it is absolutely impossible to solve the problems of the present (modernity) by reviving the past (myths). Such a proposal must have been an attack on the totalitarian order that dominated the Japanese empire at the time from within.
However, Professor Maruyama, a great citizen of the 20th century, would continue this type of resistance throughout his life, including that seen in post-war debates on issues pertaining to peace. In this regard, we should be able to say that "Studies in the History of Japanese Political Ideology" is the application of academic knowledge to humanist values.