 Exaggerating the extent to which the fortunes of Japanese Confucianism declined in the postwar period, one scholar, Kiri Paramore, in his Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural Study, has suggested that in Japan, Confucianism ended up becoming taboo, a topic shunned by scholars and public intellectuals who would not so much utter the word, “Confucianism,” in their writings. As evidence, Paramore cites the oeuvre of Maruyama Masao, one of the greatest political thinkers of the mid-twentieth century. One of Maruyama’s most widely read works, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Nihon shisōshi kenkyū), had discussed Neo-Confucianism in some detail, albeit in the flawed interpretive framework that Hegel had provided. Thus, Maruyama saw Neo-Confucianism as antithetical to change, and its continuative metaphysics linking the natural and ethical spheres, in need of dissolution.