was a Japanese philosopher, historian, and sociologist.
Tsurumi Shunsuke was born in Tokyo in 1922. In 1937, his father sent him to study in the United States, where he enrolled at the
Middlesex School
Middlesex School is a coeducational, non-sectarian, day and boarding independent secondary school for grades 9-12 located in Concord, Massachusetts. It was founded as an all-boys school in 1901 by a Roxbury Latin School alumnus, Frederick Winsor, ...
in
Concord, Massachusetts
Concord () is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. At the 2020 census, the town population was 18,491. The United States Census Bureau considers Concord part of Greater Boston. The town center is near where the conflu ...
. At the age of 16, he applied to and was accepted into
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, where he majored in philosophy, studying under
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". ...
. Tsurumi had excellent grades, but in March 1942 he was arrested and had to complete his degree living in a detention center. In 1942, he succeeded in graduating with honors, but was thereafter deported on a personnel exchange vessel along with his sister Tsurumi Kazuko,
Kiyoko Takeda, and
Maruyama Masao.
In 1946, Tsurumi started the think tank ''Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyūkai'' ("The Science of Thought Research Association") along with seven other people, including three of those who were on board the same deportation vessel with him: Takeda, Maruyama, and his sister Kazuko. In addition, Tsurumi served as editor-in-chief of the affiliated magazine, also named ''Shisō no Kagaku'' ("The Science of Thought").
''Shiso no kagaku'' was unusual among Japanese magazines, in that it accepted essays from anybody with no discrimination as to the author's academic or social background; authors printed within its pages included nurses, teachers, and social workers active in poor working-class areas of Tokyo.
Tsurumi taught at
Kyoto University
, mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture
, established =
, type = National university, Public (National)
, endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 1000000000 (number), billion USD)
, faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff)
, administrative_staff ...
from 1948 until 1951, when he took a leave of absence due to a psychiatric illness. In 1954, he resumed his academic career as a professor at
Tokyo Institute of Technology
is a national research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology, one of first five Designated National University and selected as ...
.
In 1960, Tsurumi became heavily involved in the
Anpo protests against revision of the
U.S.-Japan Security Treaty
The , more commonly known as the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in English and as the or just in Japanese, is a treaty that permits the presence of U.S. military bases on Japanese soil, and commits the two nations to defend each other if one or th ...
(known as "Anpo" in Japanese).
On May 30, he resigned his position at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in protest against the
May 19th Incident, when Prime Minister
Nobusuke Kishi
was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960.
Known for his exploitative rule of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in the 1930s, Kishi was nicknamed the "Monster of the Shō ...
rammed the new Security Treaty through the
National Diet
The is the national legislature of Japan. It is composed of a lower house, called the House of Representatives (Japan), House of Representatives (, ''Shūgiin''), and an upper house, the House of Councillors (Japan), House of Councillors (, ...
with only members of his own party present, after having had opposition lawmakers physically removed by police.
[ Distancing himself from hierarchical leftist groups such as the Socialist and Communist parties and labor unions, Tsurumi sought to take advantage of popular outrage at Kishi's anti-democratic actions to foment a new type of "citizen's movement" (''shimin undō'') that would consist of ordinary citizens, unaffiliated with any preexisting organization, who would "spontaneously" (''jihatsuteki ni'') organize to take political action. To this end, Tsurumi and other intellectuals associated with his "Science of Thought" group helped establish a small protest group they called the "Voiceless Voices Society" (''Koe Naki Koe no Kai''), supposedly consisting of ordinary citizens who had spontaneously come together to protest the Security Treaty.] Although the Voiceless Voices Society played only a small role in the Anpo Protests, it became the model for the much larger Beheiren
Beheiren (ベ平連, short for ベトナムに平和を!市民連合, ''Betonamu ni Heiwa o! Shimin Rengo'', "The Citizen's League for Peace in Vietnam") was a Japanese "New Left" activist group that existed from 1965 to 1974. As a loose coaliti ...
anti-Vietnam War organization that Tsurumi and his associates helped establish and promote in the second half of the 1960s.[
In 1961, Tsurumi took a new position as Professor of Sociology at ]Doshisha University
, mottoeng = Truth shall make you free
, tagline =
, established = Founded 1875,Chartered 1920
, vision =
, type = Private
, affiliation =
, calendar =
, endowment = €1 ...
in Kyoto. However in 1970, he resigned his post in protest of the university agreeing to allow police to be introduced to the campus to quell student protests.
Tsurumi died on July 20, 2015 of pneumonia in Kyoto, Japan
Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the city ...
.
Publications
Also thought as a literature and philosophy historian, he wrote several books and articles:
*''An Experiment in Common Man's Philosophy''
*''Ideology and Literature in Japan'' (1980)
*
*
*
*[
]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tsurumi, Shunsuke
2015 deaths
1922 births
Japanese philosophers
Japanese sociologists
20th-century Japanese historians
Harvard University alumni
Kyoto University faculty
Doshisha University faculty
Mystery Writers of Japan Award winners
Japanese anti-war activists
Japanese expatriates in the United States