In the 1950s, after the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, he espoused that model as the Asian alternative to Westernization, which had failed in Japan.

Born in his mother's family house in Hokkaidō, Ishimoda was raised in what is now Ishinomaki city, Miyagi Prefecture, where his father was mayor.

A legend often mentioned by prominent academics to their students has it that, soon after war's end, he returned to what remained of his house, shut himself in for a summer and rewrote the whole work.

According to the afterword by Ishii Susumu appended to a popular reprint of this work however, he secluded himself in a room of his home in October 1944, and, with the curtains drawn, wrote out the whole 700 page manuscript within just one month.

[2] However it cannot be denied that he prompted and quickened the reconstruction of the discipline in postwar world of Japanese historical studies, which at the time was caught up in the chaos and stagnation caused by the collapse of an historicism centered on Japan's Imperial institution.