Introduction

Under the rubric of “unexpected masters,” this essay explores the fivedecade long intellectual relationship between Robert Bellah (1927– 2013) and Maruyama Masao (1914– 1996), postwar Japan's preeminent theorist of democracy and among the most influential historians of Japanese political thought. I thank the editor of this volume for such an inspired rubric, one that captures the history of mutual incitement that was the Maruyama– Bellah friendship— though who was master to whom is not necessarily clear. It also fits my own observations of their encounters. I hasten to add that my interest in those encounters is more than autobiographical, and more than biographical. It is rather to show that their relationship was historically significant, illuminating both the American sociological imagination, and the Japanese political imagination, at a particular and highly generative moment. I hope to show, further, that religious preoccupations formed the core of those respective imaginations and constituted the ground for their interaction.

In her contribution to this volume, Amy Borovoy explores Bellah's career as a sociologist (of religion) working on Japan, and I must necessarily cover some, at least, of the same ground here. Bellah's academic career began in earnest with the publication in 1957 of Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Preindustrial Japan. In this work, which was based on his doctoral dissertation, Bellah sought and found an analogue in Tokugawa Japan for the “Protestant ethic” that Max Weber held to be the mainspring of the “spirit of capitalism” in the Western world. Bellah's encounter with Maruyama, in turn, began with Maruyama's extended and probing review of Bellah's first work. I discuss the content of Maruyama's review at length below, but here let me just note its concluding paragraph, which Bellah himself was fond of quoting in later years as an indication of the character of their relationship: