Maruyama Masao (historian)
Maruyama Masao ( Japanese 丸山 眞 男 ; * March 22, 1914 , † August 15, 1996 ) was a Japanese political scientist and historian .
Life
Maruyama graduated from Tokyo University Faculty of Law . In 1940 he became an assistant professor there . During the Second World War he was stationed in Hiroshima , where he also witnessed the dropping of the atomic bomb . At the end of the war he was 31 years old. In the following years he went public with a series of essays in which he subjected the history of mentality in Japan to a profound analysis with regard to its impact in the 20th century.
The great impact of his writings made him one of the leading intellectuals in his country, whose goal was to combine the democratization of Japan with a coming to terms with the past. According to his self-image, his works were "written in opposition to a tendency to bury those pathological phenomena that were visible in the thirties and forties as 'accidents' or exceptional phenomena in the grave of the past".
His work was directed primarily against the “suppression” of recent Japanese history and its ideological roots. For him, the cultural heritage of Japan was not a reservoir of the true, unspoiled Japan, but was itself deeply entangled in the ideological causes of the events in the twentieth century, which were condemned as undesirable developments.
In 1971 Masao was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1977 he received the Osaragi Jirō Prize for Senchū to sengo no aida ( 戦 中 と 戦 後 の 間 ) , and in 1985 the Asahi Prize .
Works in German translation
- Think in Japan. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-11398-4 .
- Loyalty and rebellion. Iudicium, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-89129-308-9 .
- Freedom and Nation in Japan: Selected Articles 1936–1949. Iudicium, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-89129-875-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ to: Sebastian Conrad: In search of the lost nation. Historiography in West Germany and Japan 1945–1960. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-35798-2 (also dissertation, FU Berlin 1999)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Maruyama, Masao |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 丸山 眞 男 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese political scientist and historian |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 22, 1914 |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 15, 1996 |