 Written during Japan’s war years, Maruyama identified a succession of Japanese Confucian scholars, including Ogyū Sorai, as vanquishers of the Zhu Xi mode of thought. The latter was, in Japan, little more – according to Maruyama – than an expression of spiritual slavery to the ossified philosophy of Song dynasty China, that of Zhu Xi. The dissolution of the Zhu Xi mode of thought credited to Japanese thinkers such as Sorai seemingly echoed the battlefield advances of the imperial Japanese forces in their conquest of large swathes of China and East Asia. Even though Maruyama was ideologically opposed to the war, his narrative hardly transcended the war rhetoric of Japanese nationalism in its ascent over China. Despite the fact that Maruyama later acknowledged errors and misjudgments in his presentation of Japanese Confucianism, his thinking came to be widely deemed as “a starting point” for future studies of the subject. There can be little doubt that as translated by Mikiso Hane and published by Princeton University Press, Maruyama’s Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan prompted many students of Japanese thought to renewed thinking about Confucianism and its importance in Japanese history.