Yoshihiko MAENO (1953 - )
Born in Fukoka, Japan, into a family which had deep reverence for balanced humanities between Western and Eastern heritage, he was privileged to begin rather early in his teens, supported especially by his late father, to study systematically wide range of classics, including Japanese, Indian (esp. Buddhistic literature), Chinese (esp. dynasty chronicles), Greek, Latin and modern European literature as well as philosophy and history in both macro traditions. This spontaneous wandering in world classics helped him to build a real backbone for all his later researches on the one hand, but at the same time caused from the very early stage of his career the chronic difficulties and conflicts with educational and research institutions, which are mostly oriented in specialization non-critically.
He holds his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Tokyo University (both in philosophy), a Ph.D degree (Dr. phil.) from Stuttgart University in Germany, under the supervision of Prof.Dr.Heinz Schlaffer. With regard to his thesis, he was allowed to make one year archival research on manuscripts of Aby Warburg through the special courtesy of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes of the University of London, where he was privileged by the personal mentorship of Sir. Prof. Ernst Gombrich concerning his investigation on Warburg's cultural theory. His cum laude doctoral thesis was later published as a monograph; Yoshihiko Maikuma (Maeno), Der Begriff der Kultur bei Warburg, Nietzsche und Burckhardt, Königstein/Ts., Hain Verlag bei Athenäum, 1985, which has been acknowledged in the meantime internationally as a fundamental study to these three thinkers. Having seen many insoluble problems of narrow specialization in university system, however, he abandoned his university career in his early thirties and chose thenceforth to continue his research as a free, private thinker, who understands himself above all as a learner of enlightening 'gaya scienza' in terms of humanistic-philosophical self-knowledge.
He was also active as an artist during the 1990s (watercolour, oil, mainly landscape painting and decorative symbolism) but parenthesizes this 'indispensable pleasure' at the moment to 'concentrate on the systematization of what he has learnt thus far'.
