sentences:  From these beginnings he undertook, especially in the last three decades of his life, an extensive rewriting of the common orthodoxies about Japanese history and Japanese society, which had exercised a powerful hegemony over academics and their national audience since the Meiji period.In this sense, he became one of the great academic deconstructors of the premises and mythology of the nihonjinron.He died of lung cancer on February 27, 2004, aged 76.