Reconsidering Anti-Nuclear and Pacifist Thoughts from their Post-War Origins: Raichō Hiratsuka, Masao Maruyama, and Ichirō Moritaki

抄録

This paper aims to reconsider the significance of the intellectual careers, togetherwith some inherent questions left unresolved, of the three thinkers who played leading roles in the formation of anti-nuclear and pacifist thought, by bringing into relief, from multiple perspectives, the intersections of their visions particularly regarding nuclear issues.

Raichō Hiratsuka, known as a pioneering feminist thinker who inaugurated in 1911 Seitō, the first journal by and for women, was already approaching 60 years old in 1945, but she embraced with enthusiasm the new constitution and led women’s peace movements till she died in 1971. During the war, however, her motherhood-based vision was all but swept away by nationalist rhetoric in the name of women as “national beings,” and she remained silent about these stumbling years.

It was Masao Maruyama, Political thinker, who presented a thorough-going analysis of Japanese totalitarianism immediately; he became famous almost overnight by in his 1946 article, “Logic and Psychology of Utra-Nationalism.” Although many evaluations and critiques have been presented regarding his works, there is one problem Maruyama himself confessed as a most serious omission in his thought; he did not engage with the nuclear question, although he was a hibakusha. Besides some psychological reasons, we suggest his pluralistic pragmatism, which worked well in criticizing totalitarianism, as responsible for such failure.

Hiroshima-based philosopher Ichirō Moritaki had to go through a total soulsearching after undergoing the A-bombing, which deprived him of his right eye. Realizing the need to overcome the “civilization of power,” he began advocating the “civilization of beneficence” and became a committed leader of the antinuclear campaign. However, even for him it took three decades to come to announce “the absolute negation of the nuclear” including power generation. Why? He confessed to having been under a spell of the words of “peaceful use.” But eventually he broke free of it as he became convinced of the “no threshold theory for radiation risk.”