Tsunesaburo Makiguchi

Introduction to the Man, His Ideas, and the Special Issue

Bibliographic Data

ID8923583
AuthorsJason Goulah (DePaul University), Andrew Gebert (Waseda University)
Year2009
Volume45
Issue2
Pages115-132
Publication date2009-04-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducational Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-1946 • E-ISSN: 1532-6993
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131940902762144
OpenAlexW1981993776
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited17

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank Rebecca Martusewicz for the opportunity to guest edit this special issue and for her foresight in providing a space for discussion of Makiguchi's ideas. We also thank all of the contributors to this issue and Richard Walker for his editorial assistance. Notes 1. Makiguchi was clearly conscious of his standing within the intellectual hierarchy, comparing his criticism of the philosophers ensconced in national universities to a "mantis charging a dragon cart" (CW, 9:76). 2. In 1890, one year after the adoption of the Meiji Constitution, the Imperial Rescript on Education was promulgated. This document, written in a classical literary style that was incomprehensible to nearly the entire population, came to be recited regularly in Japanese schools and was, along with the photographs of Their Imperial Majesties, treated as an object of essentially religious veneration. One German observer is quoted as noting the number of elementary school principals who died trying to rescue copies of the Rescript and the Imperial Portraits from the fires that swept Tokyo following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. 3. As early as 1897, Makiguchi expressed the view that the state represented one aspect, or subset, of the totality of social life. Likewise, in 1903, he urged the need to develop a sense of multiple, overlapping identities—that people should understand themselves to be citizens of a local, a national, and a global community. In this same work, he criticized both "vacuous cosmopolitanism" and "narrow-minded nationalism." For Makiguchi, national identity, like community identity, was necessary to a real and rooted way of life. But at a time when nearly all references to Japanese national identity were framed in absolutist terms, Makiguchi was consistently relativist in his approach to the nation and the state. 4. The question of whether Japan was, indeed, a constitutional monarchy depended very much on how one read the constitution. Even in academic debate, the question was only just being settled, as Tatsukichi Minobe, law professor at Tokyo Imperial University, persuasively argued that real political power must rest ultimately with the people's elected representatives and not with an emperor invested with absolute powers. This view would predominate until the mid-1930s, when military officers acting "in the emperor's sacred name" would dismantle Japan's fledgling parliamentary democracy and Minobe himself would be purged. 5. The publication of the first volume, in November 1930, was the first time the name of the organization founded by Toda and Makiguchi, the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (Value-Creating Education Society), appeared in print, and this has come to be considered the founding date of the organization

Art history · Constitution · German · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Sociology · Veneration · Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Religious Education and Schools

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