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History of Modern Japanese Thought

Pursuing both theoretical excellence and empirical solidity

As part of the Reconciliation Studies Project, we aim to extract “universal values” that can still be referenced today from the specific historical personality of Tatsuo Hayashi. In doing so, we will focus on the following two points.

The first is Hayashi’s editorial skills. In particular, we focus on Hayashi’s efforts to provide some Marxists, who were suppressed by the Communist Party in the pre-WWII period, with pages from “Shiso” even though they had a different ideology from Hayashi’s own. This is because if reconciliation is to be achieved between two opposing sides, the attitude of maintaining a speech environment that tolerates dissent, as seen here, is an essential precondition for such reconciliation. The task here is to consider how Hayashi’s thought was formed and developed from such a perspective.

The second is the conflict between reason and emotion. Hayashi emphasizes the supremacy of reason as a counterpoint to emotion during the war. This is a convincing criticism of the emotional, or irrational, statements of that period. However, if we disregard the circumstances of the times, it is not obvious whether reason and emotion are always in opposition, or whether they exist separately in the first place. It is also a task here to critically reread Hayashi from such a perspective, wondering, for example, whether emotion could be the beginning of rational cognition, or whether emotion could lead reason to a higher level of cognition. Because, as mentioned above, if reconciliation is to be achieved between two opposing sides, it is very likely that emotional friction will occur there, and therefore, how to deal with such emotion is an important issue.

A Study of the Conditions for Establishing an Ideological Arena-Using Tatsuo Hayashi as an Example-