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After 1945

Maruyama Masao (1914–1996), historian of political thought, asked in Nihon no shisō (1961) how thought is held in Japan. His word is shisō, thought, not tetsugaku. As Karatani Kōjin sums it up, Maruyama pointed to “the enduring absence of a principle that functions as a coordinate axis [zahyōjiku] for various thoughts”: there is no orthodoxy that marks out heresy, imported ideas are taken in side by side and live together (zakkyo), and “because there is no confrontation between principles, neither is there a development nor an accumulation of thought”. His image for the institutions of learning was the octopus pot (takotsubo): specialised fields closed off from one another, where in the West, on his account, a common base of thought joined them (the sasara type).

Karatani answered that Maruyama’s picture of Western thought, “arranged … according to a coordinate axis of principle”, holds only “for a certain length of time”, and that a return to an ancient Japanese substratum beneath the borrowed ideas “tends to structurally merge into the nationalist project”.

Fujita Masakatsu takes up the student’s question whether philosophy, aiming at universal truth, can be “Japanese” at all (Nihon tetsugaku nyūmon, 2024). “Philosophy has indeed aimed from its beginnings at inquiring into universal principles; but being an inquiry into universal principles does not at once mean being free of the limits of the language used.” The same holds everywhere: “some hold that Greek philosophy and the European philosophy that inherits it are the only philosophy; I think Greek, French and German philosophy alike are activities carried on in their own languages within their own cultures and traditions, and are not free of those limits”. So the way to do it is dialogue: “what matters is not to deny or exclude a different view but to enter into dialogue with it; Japanese philosophy can contribute much to that dialogue”.