ABSTRACT
With these remarks, a thirty-six-year-old intellectual historian brought to a close a wide-ranging discussion of how the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding of human nature shed light on ‘Japanese realities’. It was the autumn of 1950, five years after the defeat of Imperial Japan and five years into the US-led Occupation. A new constitution guaranteeing not only that ‘the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation’ but also that ‘freedom of religion is guaranteed to all’ had been in place for three years. No longer the spiritual axis of the nation and sole source of sovereignty, the Emperor had now been redefined as the ‘symbol of the state and of the unity of the people’. The four participants were historians of political and economic thought affiliated with Tokyo University, the elite national university that had recently dropped the word Imperial from its name. Among them was the liberal political theorist Maruyama Masao (1914-96). He was not a Christian but the speaker, Takeda Kiyoko (1917-), was. At this post-war moment, Takeda was one of a new generation of Christian social scientists whose assessment of their Japanese Christian forebears’ engagement with what they termed Tenno-sei, or ‘the Emperor system’, was key to their imagining of democracy for Japan.2
