Political Philosophy in Japan

Goto-Jones provides radical and fresh, telling and brilliant insights on the relevance of Nishida’s ideas for contemporary Japan and political thought more widely. Rana Mitter, University of Oxford Goto-Jones offers a subtle, historically-grounded, and persuasive argument that Nishida’s philosophy was inherently political… This is an intellectually exciting and most welcome study. Andrew Barshay, University of California, Berkeley Nishida Kitarō, originator of the Kyoto School and ‘father of Japanese philosophy’, is usually viewed as an essentially apolitical thinker who underwent a ‘turn’ in the mid-1930s, becoming an ideologue of Japanese imperialism. Political Philosophy in Japan challenges the view that a neat distinction can be drawn between Nishida’s apolitical ‘pre-turn’ writings and the apparently ideological tracts he produced during the war years. In the context of Japanese intellectual traditions, this book suggests that Nishida was a political thinker from the very beginning of his career, and, consequently, his later political works cannot be dismissed as peripheral to his philosophical project. Counterintuitively, however, Christopher S Goto-Jones argues that a consistently political reading of his philosophy reveals a dissenting standpoint, even during the height of the Pacific War. This book argues that the prevailing post-war tendency to dismiss interwar and wartime Japanese culture as fascist or ultra nationalist en total neglects a lively political discourse, which contained some serious and profound political insight and even dissent. By suggesting that Nishida tetsugaku was a voice of dissent during Japan’s Great East Asia War, Goto-Jones presents a case for the rehabilitation of Nishida as a political thinker, and as an example of a Japanese résistance, able to make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates about international politics, globalization and inter-cultural relations. Offering a unique and potentially controversial view of the subject of Nishida and the Kyoto School, Political Philosophy in Japan will be of huge interest to

ii

anyone studying Japanese history, political philosophy and comparative philosophy alike. Christopher S Goto-Jones is Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History at the School of History, University of Nottingham, and Research Associate of the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, University of London.

The Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History Series editor: Rikki Kersten Political Philosophy in Japan Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity Christopher S Goto-Jones

Political Philosophy in Japan Nishida, the Kyoto School and CoProsperity

Christopher S Goto-Jones

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Christopher S Goto-Jones All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-42029-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-68102-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-33567-1 (Print Edition)

For Albert and Douglas, and their many years of unspoken support

Contents

Acknowkdgements

viii

Conventions

x

List of abbreviations

xi

Introduction: political philosophy in Japan and the contradictory location of Nishida tetsugaku

1

1

Theorizing dissent: intellectuals, language and political sleight-ofhand

9

2

The politics of harmony and awakening: Confucianism and Buddhism as political thought in Japan

26

3

The early Nishida and the place of Japanese political philosophy

50

4

(Re)locating the later Nishida: ideology and philosophy in wartime Japan

72

5

Nishida’s shadow: the Kyoto School and the manipulation of nothingness

103

Conclusion: the philosophical site of politics in Japan—Shisō sensō, and the defeat of Nishida tetsugaku?

134

Notes

145

Bibliography

187

Index

205

Acknowledgements

When it comes to support during the process of writing this book, I have suffered from an embarrassment of riches. First and foremost, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Arthur Stockwin for his superhuman patience and scholarly inspiration, and to Andy Hurrell for his careful guidance through various mazes of political theory. Rikki Kersten has read my work more often and more closely than it is fair to expect of anybody, and Rana Mitter has given his time generously. At various stages in the formulation of this project it has benefited from the input of Kasahara Hideo, Karma Nabulsi, Yuen Foong-Khong, Eri Hotta, Ann Waswo, Sue Townsend, Claire Moon and Graham Parkes. I would also like to give special mention to Stephen Large, who has long been an inspiration to me and a great source of support. Various parts of this work have appeared in other forms in a number of journals, including Philosophy East and West, Social Science Japan Journal, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Japan Forum, and I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers in each case for their useful criticisms. I must also thank the editor of Philosophy East and West, Roger Ames, for permission to reprint parts of chapter three. This project, which began as a PhD thesis in Oxford in 1998, has benefited from the financial support of a number of bodies, including the Economic and Social Research Council, the Monbushō, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, The Japan Foundation Endowment Committee and the Daiwa Foundation. My thanks to each of them, without whom this book could certainly not have been written. I am also grateful for periods spent as a research scholar at Keiō University, Tokyo, and as a visiting scholar in the Philosophy Faculty, Cambridge University. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I need to say something about my family. My brother, Richard, has been one of the most scholarly influences in my life and I have never thanked him for it: thank you. My parents have never asked me why I would want to spend so many years reading the impossible prose of an allegedly fascist Japanese philosopher, and I thank them for their faith in my judgement and their boundless support for my efforts. And then there is Nozomi, whose love and passion for life has meant everything to me. I have been continuously amazed by Tiger Goto, her father, who once came running into the

ix

wedding reception of his youngest daughter clutching a tattered paper package that contained a beaten and well-thumbed first edition of the Japanese translation of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Apparently he found it in a crack in the wall of his mushroom farm. I am honoured to share his family name.

Conventions

Japanese names are in the proper order: family name first, followed by given name. Hence: Nishida Kitarō. Translations are my own, except where otherwise stated. Where other translations exist I have sometimes consulted them, but have altered them freely for the purpose of consistency. Some terms and phrases from Nishida’s work have been rendered quite literally, for example, Sekaiteki sekai (world of worlds), rather than trying to put them into more familiar words (e.g. globalized world), because I think that it is helpful to read them as technical terms in Nishida’s philosophical system.

Abbreviations

AS CK CS FYZ KH KKZ LS LW

MKZ NAZ ND NKC NKZ OM SDZ

Aggañña Sutta, in Walshe, 1995 ‘Sekaishitekai tachiba to Nihon’, Chūōkōron, January 1942, pp. 150–92 Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta, in Walshe, 1995 Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshū, 24 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1958–71 Kokutai no hongi, Tokyo: Monbushō, 1937 Kamei Katsuichirō Zenshū, 24 vols, Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971– 75 Bunnō Katō, Yoshirō Tamura, Kōjirō Miyasaka trans., The Threefold Lotus Sūtra, Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Co., 1975–98 Nishida Kitarō, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious World View, David A Dilworth trans., Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1987 Miki Kiyoshi Zenshū, 20 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966– 86 Nishi Amane Zenshū, Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1945 Nishida’s draft of Sekaishinchitsujo no genri, reproduced in NKZ XII Nishitani Keiji Chosakushū, 26 vols, Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1986– 95 Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965– 66 Kawakami Tetsutarō and Takeuchi Yoshimi (eds), Kindai no chōkoku, Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1979 Suzuku Daisetsu Zenshū, 32 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1968–83

xii

SJT

TD THZ TJZ WTZ YYZ ZK

Ryusaku Tsunoda, WM Theodore De Barry and Donald Keene (eds), Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2 vols, New York: Columbia University Press, 1958 Tanabe Juri draft of Sekaishinchitsujo no genri, reproduced in Yatsugi, 1973:366–70 Tanabe Hajime Zenshū, 15 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1963–64 Tosaka Jun Zenshū, 6 vols, Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1966–79 Watsuji Tetsurō Zenshū, 27 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961–92 Yasuda Yojūrō Zenshū, 45 vols, Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1985–89 Nishida Kitarō, Zen no Kenkyū, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1911– 97

Introduction Political philosophy in Japan and the contradictory location of Nishida tetsugaku

All thinkers can be located in a multitude of contexts, often engaged simultaneously in more than one debate. At any one time, there are multiple wars of ideas raging between intellectuals, classes, genders, races, nations, cultures and civilizations. Ideas are not merely the weapons in such battles, they often comprise the theatre of conflict itself; people not only fight about or with ideas but also to appropriate them and to control them from within. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese intellectuals were fighting wars on at least three fronts. The first was the terrible war of imperial conquest and domination. In this war, intellectuals were recruited to provide justifications and rationalizations for Japanese aggression, or they created plans and blueprints for the efficient functioning of the empire. This war utilized ideas as weapons. Within Japan, however, there was a second war—the forgotten civil war—which pitted intellectuals against each other and against the state in a battle for control over the meaning of the ideas that had come to symbolize modern Japan. This war was about the control of ideas. A final theatre of war was the international domain of ideas themselves—this was the war over the meaning of modernity and the de-centring of Euro-American ideas about politics, morality and international relations. In the context of the 1930s–1940s, this international war of ideas was characterized by Japanese (but not only Japanese) assaults on Western cultural imperialism; it was simultaneously a serious demand for the end of the paradoxical parochialism of Western philosophy (Bernasconi 1997).1 Indeed, this international war of ideas is ongoing, and it has been given new energy since the end of the Cold War and the arrival of reinforcements in the form of separatist nationalisms. The end of the twentieth century, like its beginning, has been marked by demands from non-Western nations for their cultures and traditions to be taken seriously, as the equals of the Western traditions which lie at the foundations of existing international institutions, including the nation state itself.2 In this sense, the dimensions of ‘philosophy’ themselves become political boundaries. In this book, I will argue that the ‘father of Japanese philosophy’, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) must be located in each of these wars, if the meaning and significance of his work is to be properly understood. I will argue that Nishida fought in the ‘civil war’ against ultra-nationalist and imperialist interpretations of

2 INTRODUCTION

the state-sanctioned terminology using the tools of his wider philosophical system. However, Nishida’s dissent was ultimately ineffective, and the civil war was won by the totalitarian state, which could manipulate the political discourse through coercion to give the appearance of consensus and homogeneity— fashioning his thoughts into bullets and his pen into a bayonet in the Great East Asia War. The result of Nishida’s failure in the domestic context was that his ideas effectively formed part of Japan’s aggressively imperialist Great East Asia war of ideas, despite the fact that his philosophy opposed it. With the total defeat of Japan, which followed the total war between Japan and the victorious allied powers, came the wholesale condemnation of wartime culture in Japan as complicit in the regime.3 This judgment has been encouraged by innumerable scholars of Japanese history who have noted the absence of obvious, overt dissent.4 Hand in hand with this observation has come the condemnation of philosophy in Japan (as formulated by Japan’s first modern philosophers) and its political philosophy in particular. However, this judgment has confused the theatres of war— Nishida tetsugaku was not defeated alongside Japanese imperialism in September 1945, because it had already been defeated by Japanese imperialism earlier in that decade. This book will suggest that existing accounts of the lack of dissent in wartime Japan have confused failure for absence—failed dissent is still dissent—and they have neglected to consider the need for dissidents to adopt particular strategies of dissent in different sociopolitical contexts, hence scholars have often looked for evidence in the wrong places. Political philosophy in Japan should not be abandoned so easily. The purpose of this re-examination of Nishida’s political thought is to suggest that rather than being buried under the rubble of imperial Japanese history, Nishida tetsugaku should have been liberated (as a kind of résistance) by the allied victory from the oppression of the ultra-nationalist orthodoxy of wartime Japan. Instead, Nishida’s thought, particularly his political thought, has been oppressed under the new weight of post-war historiography. This new oppression occurs in the third theatre—the international war of ideas—and this book seeks to demonstrate that Nishida tetsugaku could (and should) make a powerful and important contribution to current debates about the universality of Western modernity, political philosophy and international institutions. Nishida’s failure in the civil war of ideas against Japanese imperialism has mistakenly led to his exclusion from the international war of ideas because it engendered the confusion that his war was one of Japanese exceptionalism against the peoples of East Asia and the Anglo-American allies. In fact, Nishida’s political philosophy provides a sophisticated and consistent challenge both to the orthodox ultra-nationalist position of the 1930s and 1940s in Japan and to a number of the central concepts in the corpus of Western political thought. Drawing heavily on a Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition but also on currents of thought in European (particularly German) philosophy, Nishida asks whether the political subject—the autonomous self—has been misconceived in mainstream philosophies of politics. He wonders whether the dualism of subject

INTRODUCTION 3

and object, so central to conceptions of political ethics, might obscure more than it reveals about the proper relations between human beings. By extension, he provides a unique resolution of the perennial contradiction between the absolute and the relative in political moralizing. He challenges the concept of the institutional state, arguing that the externalization of political norms that it embodies does violence to the integrity of the individual. Finally, he suggests that the obsession with the problem of agency in political theory is entirely (and arrogantly) misplaced—history is not the servant of man. Hence, this book is not a general survey of political philosophy in Japan, and it is certainly not a book about Japanese political philosophy, whatever that might be: I make no claims about presenting a comprehensive picture of the history of political thought in Japan, and I do not claim that the thinkers or the ideas discussed in these pages are in any way ‘representative’ of a uniquely Japanese approach to political thought.5 What I do claim, however, is that political philosophy was a richly textured landscape even during the early years of the twentieth century. This landscape contained a wide variety of distinct political concepts, each of which was contested within a healthy and lively discourse. The terms and sophistication of this discourse rely on a combination of both Asian intellectual traditions and European philosophical conventions— and the failure to situate the discourse within these dual locations has been one of the reasons why many post-war commentators have failed to notice the fact that political philosophy was a field in wartime Japan, and not merely an ideological monolith. The existing locations of Nishida and the Kyoto School The existing literature of Japanese intellectual history is polarized between two general views of Nishida and the Kyoto School of Philosophy (Kyoto tetsugakuha), which formed around him during his time as professor of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University (1910–28).6 By far the most dominant perspective may be characterized by Peter Dale (1986), who persistently appends the terms ‘ultra-nationalist’ or ‘fascist’ to any mention of Nishida’s work.7 Ben-Ami Shillony suggests that many writers in wartime Japan, flattered by the attention given to them by the state, utilized ‘the pen as a bayonet’, which is presumably a reference to Tōjō’s famous call for ‘thoughts to become bullets and pens bayonets’, and goes on to argue that Nishida and the Kyoto School attempted to legitimize Japanese imperialism in Asia (Shillony 1981/2001:110–12).8 In general surveys of the period Nishida and the Kyoto School have received only cursory attention, as though their participation in the general atmosphere of ultranationalist bullets and bayonets goes without saying. Nonetheless, a number of very high-profile accounts of interwar and wartime Japan have been extremely damning. In the Cambridge History of Japan, for example, Najita and Harootunian assert that Nishida and the Kyoto School provided

4 INTRODUCTION

a thinly disguised justification, in the language of Hegelian metaphysics, for Japanese aggression and continuing imperialism. In prewar Japan, no group helped defend the state more consistently and enthusiastically than did the philosophers of the Kyoto faction, and none came closer than they did to defining the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism.9 (Najita and Harootunian 1988:238–9) In one of the only English language articles directly to address the politics of Nishida Kitarō, Pierre Lavelle (1994) condemns his thought as simply orthodox tennō-centrism. In recent years, however, a second school of thought has begun to develop regarding the political standpoint of Nishida and the Kyoto School. A flashpoint in this new campaign was the publication of Graham Parkes’ essay, ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School’ (1997), in which he argued that the existing scholarship was ‘poor’ and even ‘irresponsible’. In particular, Parkes maintained that not many commentators had actually bothered to read Kyoto School texts, and those who had done so had merely picked out dangerous quotations and used them out of context. We will see that this echoes a plea made by Nishida himself in 1945. Whilst Parkes’ critique is damning of some of the more casual accounts, particularly that of Najita and Harootuninan, it is certainly not the case that all critics of the Kyoto School lack competent scholarship.10 Throughout the 1990s a second group of scholars, mostly in Japan, have attempted to argue that Nishida was in fact a liberal.11 These scholars have become known as the apologists, and they claim to base their judgment more firmly in Nishida’s texts than do his critics. Ueda Shizuteru (1995a:90), for example, argues that Nishida engaged in a ‘tug-of-war over meaning’ with the authorities in imperial Japan, as he attempted to reinform the content of terms such as ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’, which were conventionally employed as justifications of Japanese imperialism, in order to guide Japan towards more moral conduct. In practice, however, Ueda and the apologists are ultimately unconvincing, not only because it is difficult to find ‘liberalism’ anywhere in Nishida’s texts, but also because their arguments are not finally rooted in Nishida’s philosophy but in his diaries and correspondence. Whilst they are right to observe a contradiction between his private condemnation of the regime and his apparent public complicity, this is not in itself enough to conclude that his public writings meant the opposite of what they seem to say. There is a similar kind of leap of faith in this group as there is amongst the critics, albeit in the opposite direction. In other words, there is a certain inconclusiveness in the literature that Arisaka Yōko (1996) has called ‘The Nishida Enigma’. Unfortunately, rather than spurring the academe into action, this enigma has had a detrimental effect on scholarship. Perhaps the most damaging effect has been the reluctance of scholars to engage seriously with Kyoto School political philosophy—for fear of

INTRODUCTION 5

being tarred with the brush of fascism. In effect, this has meant that, to the extent that they have been taken seriously in either Japan or the West, Nishida and the Kyoto School have been rediscovered and repainted as essentially apolitical thinkers centrally concerned with religious philosophy.12 For James Heisig (2001:99), one of the leading students of the Kyoto School today, Nishida’s political ideas are ‘not significant either for the development of his ideas nor for the history of political philosophy as such’. The effect of this stance has been to marginalize Nishida’s politics, as though it were not only untouchable but also irrelevant. Jan Van Bragt (1995:234) concedes a tendency ‘to pass over the political dimension as “just one of those things” that one is vaguely aware of but that somehow distracts from the main point’.13 This has created an artificial divide between the earlier works of Nishida, such as his seminal Zen no kenkyū (1911), which are interpreted as purely theological or metaphysical inquiries, and his later works, such as the infamous Sekai shinchitsujo no genri (1943), which are viewed as spurious aberrations—Heisig (2001:90) likens them to excess baggage which ‘dragged like a weighty anchor’ on Nishida’s wider philosophical journey. The clear motivation behind the construction of such a divide has been to salvage something ‘respectable’ (or ‘harmless’) from the corpus of Japan’s pre-eminent school of philosophy—and the strategy has found support in the parallel postwar treatment of Heidegger and the presentation of his ‘turn’ to fascism.14 To some extent, this depoliticization of Nishida’s work has satisfied both groups of commentators, since it permits the critics to condemn his politics and the apologists to dismiss that condemnation as irrelevant to Nishida’s work, even though it may be historically significant. In this book I seek to re-politicize Nishida’s philosophy and demonstrate that both sides of the existing debate are short changing his philosophical legacy. Rather than being an exclusively religious or metaphysical thinker for much of his life, I contend that his work was explicitly political from the start. However, whilst his political philosophy was highly critical of the state in the 1930s and 1940s, this does not mean that Nishida was a liberal. Indeed, the desire to categorize Nishida as a liberal is one of the crucial shortcomings of the apologist literature—the whole point of Nishida’s political project (and part of his continued value to this day) was to relativize the political conceptualizations of Western philosophy and to demonstrate that other traditions (particularly the Mahāyāna tradition in Japan) could supply concepts of equal worth and utility. Cultural and political pluralism was the order of the day. Nishida would not have thought of himself as a liberal just because he opposed ultra-nationalism—but these were not his only choices, and they were not even choices that made a great deal of sense in his intellectual context. Nishida’s genius was to codify a ‘new’ political standpoint utilizing the resources of Japanese intellectual traditions but in the language of Western philosophy—his one time student, Miki Kiyoshi, would call this stance co-operativism (kyōdōshugi) to distinguish it from liberalism, communism and totalitarianism. Nishida did not give it a name.15

6 INTRODUCTION

Elsewhere, I have called it the ‘Lost Tradition’ of intuitive political philosophy (Jones 2002b). By demonstrating that Nishida’s earliest works can be read as pieces of political philosophy, I hope to effect a properly philosophical reading of the ‘late Nishida’. It will be seen that far from being irrelevant aberrations, these late works demonstrate philosophical consistency with his earlier political thought. There was no substantive ‘turn’ in Nishida’s career—the shift in the late 1930s was merely terminological, as the government censors and the thought police (tokkō) strove to standardize the political discourse. Utilizing the terms of the orthodoxy to represent concepts from his existing political philosophy, Nishida effects dissent from within—this is the civil war of ideas fought on the field of political philosophy in Japan. I also depart from the existing literature in my treatment of the wider Kyoto School. In general, commentators have indicated that thinkers such as Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji criticized Nishida for refusing to develop a political philosophy. Hence, recent efforts to locate sophisticated political thought in the Kyoto School have focussed on Tanabe’s ‘logic of species’ (shu no ronri)16 or Nishitani’s ‘world-view and state-view’ (sekaikan to kokkakan)17 rather than on Nishida himself.18 I suggest that this not only overlooks the important contribution made to political thought by Nishida, but it also misinterprets the nature and importance of his colleagues’ criticisms. It is my contention that the ‘counterfoil of Tanabe’s thought and the creative enlargements of Nishitani’ (Heisig 2001:7), at least in the area of political thought, were of an ideological rather than properly philosophical nature. Rather than adding anything of philosophical substance to Nishida’s political thought, the wider Kyoto School sought to manipulate his thought into a form more consistent with and more useful to the Japanese state in the 1940s. Their criticisms that he was insufficiently political referred to the fact that, as it stood, his work was of no use to Japan—although their manipulations demonstrated that his work was potentially of use. Overall, then, I seek to answer a cluster of questions in this book: was Nishida a political philosopher; did Nishida dissent in wartime Japan; how did he effect that dissent; why did that dissent fail; and of what value is Nishida’s political philosophy to us today? In attempting to answer these questions, I hope to provide some tentative dimensions for the field of political philosophy in Japan. Structure and sources This book is in five main chapters. Chapter 1 sets out my methodology, together with definitions of key concepts such as ‘intellectual’, ‘responsibility’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘ideology’. The Chapter 2 is concerned with the ‘Japanese context’ of political thought. Its purpose is to recognize and explore the fact that ‘philosophy’ in general, and ‘political philosophy’ in particular, only arrived in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. Before that time, thinking about

INTRODUCTION 7

politics in Japan involved partaking in various indigenous methods of theorizing. The chapter considers the Confucian and Buddhist contexts of political thought. I have decided not to include a separate section on Shintō, partly because its role in the intellectual atmosphere of interwar and wartime Japan has already been thoroughly analysed elsewhere,19 and partly because Shintō does not really constitute a systematic method of thought. The influence of Shintō will be considered as and where it becomes important. As far as I am aware, there is no existing study that attempts to locate Nishida’s political ideas within indigenous traditions of thought about politics. Heisig concurs when he laments that ‘very little attention has been given to the Kyoto school by scholars devoted to the classical thought and texts of the east’ (Heisig 2001:260).20 Heisig himself apologizes for neglecting to discuss Buddhism, which he calls a ‘glaring omission’ from his recent book (2001:25). By neglecting the sophisticated bodies of political thought contained in Confucian and Buddhist traditions, scholars have overemphasized the importance of Western philosophy on Nishida tetsugaku, and thus effectively mis-contextualized Nishida as an European thinker in Asia. The Asian or Japanese elements of his thought are thus rendered into a garnishing of ‘oriental spice’ rather than located at the core of his work. A particular victim has been the concept of ‘Co-Prosperity’, which has a sophisticated history in Japan, but which has been presented as an empty, rhetorical monolith by many post-war commentators. I contend that Nishida’s location within domestic traditions of thought about politics helps us to understand the extent to which he conformed to or dissented against the political orthodoxy of the 1930s–1940s, since that orthodoxy was defined predominantly in terms of Japan’s own traditions. It is in this context that labels such as ‘liberal’ seem inappropriate and ahistorical—the Japanese political discourse prior to the late nineteenth century was not concerned with liberalism in any form recognizable today Nonetheless, the discourse does reveal a field of political philosophy with parameters defined by tolerant and intolerant extremes, and Nishida can be located quite firmly on the side of tolerance. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with Nishida’s texts themselves. They demonstrate the relationship between Nishida’s political and ethical ideas and those of the European thinkers by whom he was influenced—particularly Kant— and thus point to his ongoing importance to political philosophy today. As far as I am aware, there has been no previous attempt to study Nishida’s political thought from a comparative perspective.21 Chapter 3 presents the young Nishida as a genuine child of Meiji, educated in the Chinese and Japanese classics but fascinated by Western philosophy His youth was marked by political convictions and even activism. The core of this chapter is an analysis of Nishida’s seminal debut, Zen no kenkyū, in which I locate the origins and substance of his politicomoral philosophy, which is seen to synthesize his Buddhist morality with philosophical vigour. In Chapter 4, I trace the development of Nishida’s early ideas about politics through into his later publications, including the now

8 INTRODUCTION

infamous Sekai shinchitsujo no genri. Through a comparison with the classic text of Japanese ultra-nationalism, Kokutai no hongi, I illustrate the ways in which Nishida’s political concepts were dissenting despite the similarity of the language he was forced to use. Interestingly, his dissent is found in his use of Japanese political ideals rather than notions that he drew from Western philosophy—which is, perhaps, why so many Western commentators have failed to notice it. In Chapter 5, I explore the failure of Nishida’s dissent. Counter-intuitively, it is seen that Nishida was defeated by his own shadow; the wider Kyoto School helped to build the bridge between Nishida’s utopian moral critique of the status quo and the status quo itself. The particular focus is on the two great symposia of the early 1940s, Sekaishiteki tachiba to nihon, and Kindai no chōkoku,22 which saw members of the Kyoto School struggling to make Nishida’s thought confront the political crises of the day. Through their association with ultranationalists such as the Nihon rōmanha (Japan Romantic School) and by attempting to popularize and simplify Nishida’s thought, the wider Kyoto School emerged from Nishida’s shadow and defeated his dissent simultaneously. Finally, in the conclusion, I raise the question of how it was possible for Nishida’s political philosophy to be so easily co-opted by the authorities and so easily perverted by his followers. The answer resides in a combination of factors. In some respects, Nishida’s politics were exploitable because they were expressed in the abstract language of philosophical inquiry. However, it is also the case that Nishida chose poor strategies of dissent—and, at times, his options were blocked because of the totalitarian nature of the society in which he worked. An important question must be whether Nishida could have been aware that his thought would be exploited and, if so, should he have retreated into ‘internal exile’ and remained silent? I will conclude that he was fully aware of these dangers, but that silence was not an option.

1 Theorizing dissent Intellectuals, language and political sleight-of-hand

Sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the ‘scientific’ certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way.1 Philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.2 There is a wide and often difficult literature concerning the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals in modern societies. Great thinkers such as Gramsci (1929–35: chapters 1–2) have attempted to distinguish organic from traditional intellectuals. Said (1994) points to important differences between the representations of amateur and professional intellectuals,3 whilst other thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze announce the death of the ‘representative’ intellectual altogether.4 For Foucault, the intellectual should champion ‘subjugated knowledges’ —the specific intellectual will demystify the universal intellectual. For Said, it is the amateur intellectual that challenges the orthodoxy defended by the professionals. And for Gramsci, the organic intellectuals will grow out of their social class as a vanguard to bring on the revolution. Nonetheless, for some, such as Julien Benda (1927/75), the intellectual is not defined by his/her opposition to orthodoxy per se, but rather by his/her insights into truth itself. The case is far from settled. It is surprising, therefore, that intellectual historians of Japan have, in general, completely ignored this literature.5 This oversight is even more remarkable in the case of scholars of Nishida Kitarō and Kyoto School, where questions of intellectual responsibility and opposition to (or complicity with) the imperial regime form the core of the discourse. In his highly visible treatment of Nishida’s political thought, for example, Pierre Lavelle dismisses the question out of hand. The problem is similar to that of the support given by Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade to political views that would be identified with the extreme right in any liberal democracy. In the case of Nishida, the difficulties are no less, for condemnation of the extreme right and what is

10 THEORIZING DISSENT

expected of intellectuals are about the same in both Japan and the West (emphasis added). (Lavelle 1994:139) Even if we leave aside the evident cultural insensitivities displayed by Lavelle (why should we simply assume that intellectuals in Japan are subject to the same expectations as those in France?),6 the problem remains that it is far from obvious ‘What is expected of intellectuals’ in the West. In an attempt to sidestep the problem, Lavelle employs a common tactic (what Yusa Michiko (1995:295) calls the ‘Heidegger factor’) by tying Nishida’s name to that of Heidegger and thus indicting him by implication, without ever substantiating a connection between the two men. In general, Lavelle seems to embody Oscar Wilde’s lament that intellectuals are held symbolically responsible for the ills of their time.7 However, Quentin Skinner, and others, have taken on Hegel (rather than Wilde) and argued powerfully that great thinkers are not expressions of the consciousness of an age, but are rather singularly unrepresentative of their times, and that is what makes them great (Tully 1988a:12–13). There has been an easy tendency in the literature of Japanese intellectual history to condemn the intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century because Japan was an ultra-nationalist polity at that time, and because there appeared to be no outspoken critics of the regime. Keene (1964, 1978) and others have pointed to the large number of writers who ‘converted’ to or embraced the ultra-nationalist cause. However, surveys of the period tend to overlook the difficulties of expressing dissent in an oppressive, totalitarian polity, and they content themselves with observing that ‘there were few signs of active dissent from government policies among scholars, journalists, and writers’ (Fletcher 1979:42).8 The idea of ‘active dissent’ is problematized by some, such as Tsurumi Shunsuke (1967), who argues that many intellectuals maintained their opposition to the regime whilst being forced to commit tenkō (political apostasy/ conversion), at least superficially.9 This so-called false-tenkō has been roundly condemned in the post-war period by popular thinkers such as Yoshimoto Takaaki (1995) and also Takeyama Michio (1956), who insists that it would have been more responsible for these false-tenkō-sha to have remained silent than to have spoken out in favour of the regime, whether they meant to support it or not. Other commentators, such as the eminent political scientist Maruyama Masao, have suggested that it was the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ that were mostly responsible for perpetuating Japanese ultra-nationalism, and that ‘intellectuals in the proper sense’ enacted ‘passive resistance’ to the regime through their silence and ‘vague antipathy’ (Maruyama 1963/66a:58).10 In none of the literature, however, is there either an attempt to properly theorize the appropriate role and responsibilities of the intellectual in pre-war/ wartime Japan or to grapple with the meaning of ‘dissent’ in this context. Hence, Nishida and the Kyoto School have been condemned to ‘passivity’ at best, or ‘complicity’ at worst, without any sound theoretical or contextual framework.

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The responsibilities of intellectuals (in Japan) The first problem is one of definition: what is an intellectual? At its most basic, the category of ‘intellectual’ is applied sociologically to mean: ‘persons who, occupationally, are involved chiefly in the production of ideas (scholars, artists, reporters, performers in the arts, scientists etc., as well as students in postsecondary institutions, who are apprentices to these occupational roles)’ (Brym 1980:12). Such a definition would be approximately consistent with that of Gramsci, who acknowledges that whilst everyone is an intellectual (insofar as everyone thinks), only a few people serve the function of ‘intellectual in society (Gramsci 1929–35:9). However, for Gramsci, the intellectual serves a particular function, rather than merely filling a particular occupation, and with this function comes a series of responsibilities; the intellectual is an ethical as well as a sociological category. In general, the literature of Japanese intellectual history has adopted the sociological approach—defining intellectuals by their occupation rather than their moral stance. Hence, Maruyama Masao describes two groups of intellectuals in wartime Japan: the pseudo intellectuals and the proper intellectuals, who are differentiated mainly by their level of educational achievement (and consequently by their audiences) (Maruyama 1963/66a:57– 63). Unfortunately, even Maruyama’s bifurcated category is of only limited analytical utility; it fails to tell us anything about the responsibilities of the people who occupy either place in society. Such broad brush-strokes throw all ‘thinkers’ into the same category: Nishida Kitarō, Inoue Tetsujirō, Kita Ikki, Hitler etc., were all ‘intellectuals’ because they were involved in the production or dissemination of ideas. For Berlin, there is an important distinction to be drawn between the intellectual and a member of the intelligentsia. The former category, he contends, was developed in France and England, where it characterized a ‘purveyor like any other purveyor’. The intellectual merely produced intellectual products, in the same way as a blacksmith might produce a blade, and thus ‘his private life, convictions, behaviour were none of the public’s—or the critics’ — business’. The producer could not be held responsible for the use to which his products were put. In contrast, Berlin suggests that in Russia this kind of compartmentalization of the private from the public identities of intellectuals was considered to be ‘a maiming of human beings and a distortion of the truth’ (Berlin 2000a:105). Berlin suggests that, in Russia, the intelligentsia were originally an intelligentsia militans, generated by an oppressive political regime as a force of opposition.11 The dissent of the intelligentsia was, however, different from everyday protest because of its ‘combination of belief in reason and progress with a profound moral concern for society’ (Berlin 2000a:108). If a man was a professor in late nineteenth-century Russia, then the mere fact of his involvement with ideas made him an implacable opponent of the

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regime in which he lived; if it did not, he was, in the eyes of the militant, a traitor, a man who had sold out, a coward or a ninny. (Berlin 2000a:108) The idea that the proper role of the intellectual is to criticize the establishment is common in much of the literature in this field.12 However, as Berlin suggests earlier, reactionary opposition is not good enough for the intellectual. Hence, it is not the case that intellectuals must necessarily be anti-rightist or anti-leftist (or both). Indeed, for Said, ‘nothing disfigures the intellectual’ more than allegiance with some partisan cause: intellectuals are ‘those figures whose public performances can neither be predicted nor compelled into some slogan, orthodox party line, or fixed dogma’ (Said 1994:xi). Following Julien Benda, whose right-of-centre credentials are well known, Said suggests that intellectuals are necessarily universalists—thus, apparently trampling on Foucault’s opposition to ‘universal’ intellectuals. With an obviously post-colonial agenda, Said does not go as far as Benda, for whom genuine intellectuals are ‘clerics’ with special insight into a universal truth (which happens to be defined in a particularly European manner). Rather, Said defines ‘universalism’ in terms of consistency: ‘never solidarity before criticism’ (Said 1994:24). The intellectual should never be an ‘insider’ promoting one class or nation against another: universality means…trying to uphold a single standard of human behaviour when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. Thus if we condemn an unprovoked act of aggression by an enemy we should also be able to do the same when our government invades a weaker party.13 (Said 1994:xii) Said does not suggest that all intellectuals at all times and in all nations will hold the same ethical or political stance,14 rather he maintains that to be regarded as an intellectual one must consistently apply a single standard, whatever that turns out to be. In the end, partially resurrecting Foucault, Said’s intellectual is both specific and universal.15 Said, Benda and Berlin are not the only commentators to have emphasized the importance of retaining one’s independence as an intellectual. For Benda, ‘la trahison des clercs’ consists in the way that intellectuals surrender their moral authority to ‘the organisation of collective passions’, such as nationalism or classinterest.16 Nonetheless, Said acknowledges the existence of a genuine dilemma for intellectuals, who all ‘without exception belong to some sort of national, religious or ethnic community’. Because of this ‘the intellectual is beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty’ (Said 1994:30). At the most basic level, ‘no one is totally self-supporting, not even the greatest of free spirits’, so even the most radical intellectuals must display a minimal loyalty if

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they want to survive (Said 1994:64). There is another level, however, at which the intellectual will be tempted to ‘disfigure himself’, and it is a particular problem for the native intellectual of an oppressed colonial people: ‘loyalty to the group’s fight for survival’ must not be permitted to ‘narcotise’ the intellectual’s critical sense (Said 1994:30). For Said, ‘in no country more than modern Japan has the interplay between the imperatives of the collective and the problem of intellectual alignment been so tragically problematic and vexed’.17 In Chapter 5, we will see that the ‘world-historical standpoint’ (sekaishiteki tachiba) developed by the Kyoto School was an attempt (qua intellectuals) to transcend the question of national loyalties. The solution to this narcosis of loyalty is the isolation or marginalization of the intellectual—what Adorno sees as self-imposed exile: ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’ (Adorno 1951/93:39).18 For Adorno, writing itself is a place to live, and it should (with moral force) replace one’s society. To some extent, sociological studies lend support to Adorno’s position; Brym argues forcefully that there is a correlation between the level of marginalization of a group of intellectuals and the extent of their radicalism (Brym 1980: chapter 2, p. 72).19 Similarly, for Barshay, involvement in the ‘public world’ of imperial Japan placed intellectuals under unsupportable pressures for conformity: ‘for a public man, finding a way not to serve was the more difficult task’ (Barshay 1988:25). Intellectuals can marginalize themselves in a number of ways, perhaps most obviously by being radical. However, if the goal (rather than the method) is critique, then it is facilitated by distance from the establishment and from the institutions that disseminate orthodoxy. For Said this means that ‘the intellectual today ought to be an amateur’ (Said 1994:61), independent of the ‘disfiguring’ influences and incentives of the official reward structures in the civil service, government think-tanks, or even universities, which are the preserves of the ‘professional intellectuals’. Said’s ‘amateurs’ are Barshay’s ‘outsiders’. It is interesting to reflect that the 1920s saw the final entrenchment of ‘professional intellectuals’ in Japan, following the changes in the examination procedures of the civil service implemented after the Meiji ishin.20 Fletcher suggests that this period witnessed the demarcation of ‘civil’ against ‘bureaucratic’ intellectuals, and that this created a conflict between the desire of civil (amateur, or outsider) intellectuals ‘to influence national policies and their distance from centres of political power. Their status as members of a tiny elite of highly educated Japanese made this isolation particularly frustrating’ (Fletcher 1982:4). Fletcher proceeds to document the ways in which a group of intellectuals (including Rōyama Masamichi (1895–1980), Ryū Shintarō (1900– 67) and Miki Kiyoshi (1895–1945), once a student of Nishida in Kyoto), succeeded in making the transition from civil (amateur/outsider) to bureaucratic (professional/insider) intellectuals; and he does so without any suggestion that such a move might itself constitute a betrayal of their responsibilities qua intellectuals—la trahison des clercs. Fletcher justifies this ‘treachery’ by arguing that

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in any society intellectuals who want direct political impact, either as advisers to national leaders or as public officials, must often appeal to those who hold political power and therefore must adapt to the basic policies of a government. To a great extent, these intellectuals risk sacrificing much of their independence of thought in exchange for the chance to affect national policies. (Fletcher 1982:5) Fletcher seems to overlook the notion that within such a ‘sacrifice’ these men resigned their status as intellectuals (in the ethical sense) altogether, because they gave up their vocation—that is, ‘to speak truth to power’ —in return for power itself.21 Power, rather than (or, conceivably, as well as) loyalty, was the narcotic here.22 These ‘intellectuals’, at the core of Prince Konoe’s Shōwa kenkyūkai, personify the scepticism of sociologist C Wright Mills: intellectuals, as middleclass workers, ‘are up for sale; whoever seems respectable enough, strong enough, can probably have them’ (Mills 1951:354). The process of transition from civil to bureaucratic, amateur to professional or from outsider to insider implies an ideological (even a moral) trajectory. Intellectuals are moving from a location distant from the locus of political orthodoxy and towards a site in which that orthodoxy is necessarily at its strongest. It is interesting to reflect at this point that whilst Tanabe Hajime and the second generation of the Kyoto School were striving to establish themselves as ‘insiders’ during the 1930s and early 1940s—vying for positions at prestigious universities and in governmental forums—Nishida himself, already secure in his reputation, was moving in the opposite direction, having retired from his position at Kyoto Imperial University in 1928 and subsequently declining invitations to join government forums so that he could get on with his writing in peace. I would certainly not argue that Nishida was an ‘outsider’ at this time, but his trajectory was definitely inside out when compared with his junior colleagues.23 There is, of course, a tremendous irony lurking in Fletcher’s assertion that intellectuals must sell themselves to political institutions in order to have political impact. As an intellectual historian, one might expect that Fletcher would have more faith in the power of ideas themselves as instruments of political change and opposition—his model suggests that effective intellectual dissent is oxymoronic. In practice, of course, intellectuals do not necessarily face such stark choices between treachery and impotence—in the end, ‘the writer is not allowed to live in his writing’ (Adorno 1951/93:87), and there is no such thing as a perfectly ‘private’ or completely alienated intellectual.24 All intellectuals, to the extent that they produce work, are in the public domain and thus possess influence. The question becomes one of the effectiveness of their work in effecting change, even if they as individuals are alienated from society If we are willing to accept the imperative for intellectuals to be exiles in their own homes, as well as the imperatives for them to exercise criticism before

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solidarity and consistency before partisanship, then the remaining questions revolve around how the intellectual can affect change, voice dissent or represent ‘subjugated knowledges’. In democratic or open polities, intellectuals can exercise their rights to the freedom of speech in public places and attempt to convince others that they are speaking the truth (to power): ‘knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action’ (Said 1994:15). Acts qua intellectual are ‘speechacts’, to borrow the term from John Austin.25 Of course, even in a democracy the intellectual has to make some strategic choices about when, where and how to speak (or perform ‘speech-acts’) in order to maximize his/her impact. No matter how ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘consistent’ or hitherto ‘subjugated’ the intellectual’s ideas may be, they will fail to act as dissent unless they are both persuasive and audible. The intellectual can have dissenting ideas without succeeding in encouraging dissent. In the case of pre-war/wartime Japan, the environment for intellectuals was even more challenging because the government ‘suppressed any overt deviation from the given social or political norms, and this encouraged the intellectuals’ inherent tendencies towards acquiescence [on the one hand] and social alienation [on the other]’ (Arima 1969:2).26 In the absence of a ‘space in which to stand and talk back to authority’ (Said 1994:90), how could Japanese intellectuals ‘use language well’ enough to affect dissent? Language and political sleight-of-hand It is a relatively simple matter to determine whether (and how) a politician or social activist launched an attack on the sociopolitical establishment of a society. Their actions, whilst open to a degree of interpretation, are often clearly recorded in newspapers, correspondence, police records or other historical documents. The question is more complicated when it is applied to intellectuals, particularly to alienated or marginalized intellectuals whose ‘actions’ in society consist mainly in their writing rather than at the barricades. This is exactly the problem we face when trying to understand the political orientation of Nishida Kitarō, who was certainly not a social activist (at least not during the years of the twentieth century), but rather an intellectual whose philosophical system has been implicated as complicit in (and supportive of) the ultra-nationalist regime. A central methodological dilemma, then, is how to judge the political and ideological orientation of thought or ‘speech-acts’ in a particular historical context. Most of the existing literature in Nishida Studies adopts a traditional ‘text only’ approach to Nishida’s work, reading it in isolation from other texts of the period (and in the context of the historical fact of Japanese ultra-nationalism and imperialism, which is an inevitable part of the baggage of the contemporary reader). Such an approach fails to engage seriously with Nishida’s work as a series of ‘speech-acts’ within a contemporaneous ideological and political discourse. In other words, there is a deficit of meaning in such a reading.27 If we

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want to talk about Nishida’s political location in 1930s–1940s Japan, then we must attempt to understand the meaning of his texts in the context of that period and place. Following Wittgenstein, ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ —the linguistic conventions and context of a word’s use determine its meaning (Wittgenstein 1963:20e para 43). What might appear to commentators today as imperialistic jingoism may have been seen as dissenting in 1940s Japan —indeed, Nishida was criticized during the war for being too left-leaning, and after it for being too right-leaning.28 Bourdieu talks about a process of louche (a grammatical term ‘which seems to announce one meaning at first and then ends up meaning something totally different’ (Bourdieu 1988:9)), which, he suggests, twists the attention of contemporary commentators away from a thinker’s use of language and towards a fictitious Language, with an eternal, invariable, and ‘uncontested core of meaning’.29 In other words, when reading intellectual history, we must not forget that there is a ‘surplus of meaning’ caused by the fact that when it is used (and when it is received) language exists in a ‘real world’ of time and space that contributes to its sense. This is not to say that contemporary scholars and commentators should not be free to adopt a ‘text only’ approach. However, they should be aware that they are engaging in a substantially different enterprise. Rather than answering questions about the meaning of particular texts in specific historical and social circumstances, they are mining classical sources in order to use them to support their own positions in the present. Leslie (1970), for example, points out how much of political theory is premised upon exactly this idea: an anachronistic reading of historical texts, or a careful and determined reinterpretation of contemporaneous texts. In particular, she draws attention to the work of Gramsci, which utilizes the language of Machiavelli’s The Prince to describe the appropriate behaviour of the Communist Party, despite the fact that the notions of ‘communism’ and ‘political party’ would have made no sense to Machiavelli himself. In a similar way, feminist writers have harked back to an ahistorical reading of Locke to find the ‘early liberal roots of feminism’, despite the fact that Locke himself would have been unlikely to have recognized the theme in his own work (Butler 1978). In a sense, such scholars are acting as ideologists rather than historians insofar as they are using intellectual history as a storehouse of political terms rather than political concepts; they are themselves performing speech-acts which are not only doing things with language but also to it— whilst neglecting the notion that the same could have been said of the thinkers they study. In the field of Japanese intellectual history, scholars such as Lavelle have adopted this approach, effectively arguing that we can read an imperialist and ultra-nationalist agenda back into the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō.30 A central concern here, by contrast, is what Austin has called the ‘locutionary meaning’ and the ‘illocutionary force’ of Nishida’s work. The locutionary meaning of a text refers to its sense and reference in a particular socio-historical circumstance, whilst the illocutionary force refers to the intended force of the texts in that context—their employment adds cultural (as well as historical) sensitivity

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to our analysis. For Tully, following Skinner and the so-called ‘New Historians’, the locutionary meaning of a text can be mined through an analysis of its ‘linguistic and ideological context’. In practice, this means studying not only the texts in question, but also ‘the collection of texts written or used in the same period, addressed to the same or similar issues and sharing a number of conventions’ (Tully 1988a:9).31 For Skinner, ‘convention’ is a heuristic concept which refers to the linguistic commonplaces that unite a number of texts—for example, shared terminology, shared assumptions or common criteria for testing knowledgeclaims (Skinner 1970). These ‘conventions’ delineate the dominant ideology of a sociopolitical discourse, where ‘an ideology is a language of politics defined by its conventions and employed by a number of writers’ (Tully 1988a:9). Underlying this approach to the integrity of the text is the notion that writing (or speaking) within the context of a society is itself a social action, and, consequently, like all social actions, the ideological or political meaning of a ‘speech-act’ is best understood through an analysis of its relationship with the established conventions of social behaviour. In its most general terms, this approach permits the historian to judge the extent to which authors ‘were accepting and endorsing, or questioning and repudiating, or perhaps even polemically ignoring, the prevailing assumptions and conventions of political debate’ (Tully 1988a:10). The political stance of a text lies in the way in which it ‘manipulates the conventions’ of the established ideology. Of course, it is not only the case that speech-acts exist in a world of speechacts. They also exist within the wider socio-political environment. Hence, it is important to understand the significance of the text’s manipulation of conventions within the context of the concrete political events of the period—in other words, to what was the author responding when he/she performed the speech-act? Was the text a political act or merely a social act with (inadvertent) ideological repercussions? What were the political significances of the manipulations affected in a particular text at that particular time? If we can accept that the political importance of a text might lie in its manipulation of the ideological and linguistic conventions of the period, then we must also consider how an intellectual can produce such manipulations.32 Skinner and his followers suggest that the radical intellectual finds him/herself in a dilemma, trapped between the need to be understood and accepted in the existing social discourse and the desire to revolutionize or manipulate the discourse itself. Tully argues that any attempt to ‘stretch’ ideological conventions requires a justification and this standardly takes the form of grounding the change in the terms of what is already accepted and taken for granted. An ideologist changes one part of an ideology by holding another part fast; by appealing to and so reinforcing convention. (Tully 1988a:14)

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The classic example is the case of Machiavelli, the most radical of political thinkers, who advised the Prince that the radical adoption of violent ways would actually facilitate his achievement of the conventional princely virtues of peaceful and virtuous rule. Skinner makes the point most elegantly: However revolutionary the ideologist concerned may be, he will nevertheless be committed, once he has accepted the need to legitimate his behaviour, to attempting to show that some of the existing range of favourable evaluative-descriptive terms can somehow be applied as apt descriptions of his own apparently untoward actions. Every revolutionary is to this extent obliged to march backwards into battle. (Skinner 1974:112) The phrase ‘evaluative-descriptive term’ is crucial to this approach, since it refers to the intersubjectively normative nature of many political phrases and words. Terms such as ‘democracy’ or ‘rational’, for example, do not merely describe a system of governance or an approach to judging the validity of knowledge claims, rather they also carry a sense of moral approval or positive evaluation. The evaluative significance of evaluative-descriptive terms is intersubjective because it is neither self-evidently obvious nor determined by the individual user, but rather it is formed by the dominant socio-dialogic conventions of the period. The dual nature of evaluative-descriptive terminology presents the intellectual with three possible strategies for the performance of dissenting speech-acts. First, the intellectual can seek to introduce a wholly new set of evaluativedescriptive terms, thus providing a language that positively evaluates the intellectual’s radical agenda and negatively evaluates (or simply ignores) the established conventions. We have already seen, however, how the intellectual is bound to accept at least some of the existing conventions of his/her sociopolitical discourse or else risk rendering him/herself utterly incomprehensible to the audience. Hence, for Skinner, the creation of a wholly new language ‘is obviously an extremely crude device…and it is comparatively rare to find it employed in ideological debate’ (Skinner 1974:114). The second strategy is to attempt to manipulate the evaluative element of existing descriptive terms. In this case, the intellectual seeks to provide a context (in the body of his or her writing) which demonstrates to his ideological or political opponents that he is utilizing orthodox terms in a heterodox evaluative sense; the intellectual attempts to re-evaluate and thus re-characterize society’s conventional terminology. In Nishida’s case, the new ‘context’ provided by his work involved the philosophical space of European and Japanese moral theory. In doing so, the intellectual effectively challenges the moral identity of the society itself. For Skinner, this strategy is most commonly used to challenge the intellectual’s ‘opponents to reconsider the feelings of disapproval or even of mere neutrality’ which they express when confronted with conventionally

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distasteful ideas or actions (Skinner 1974:113–14). However, he concedes that it is possible, if ‘empirically less usual’, for intellectuals to attempt the mirror image of this strategy, and manipulate positively evaluated evaluativedescriptive terms into negative or neutral ones. Skinner cites the example of ‘obsequiously’, which was used approvingly in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century and disapprovingly thereafter. The third strategy, and the most important in the context of Nishida Kitarō’s work, is for the intellectual to challenge the conventional empirical application of existing evaluative-descriptive terms. This strategy represents a linguistic sleight-of-hand, since it does not involve the generation of any new terms, or even the internal manipulation of an existing system of evaluative-descriptive terms, rather it demands that the dissenting intellectual manipulates the relationship between the world of ideas and language and its conventional reference points in the socio-political world of everyday existence. Again, Skinner puts it very clearly: The ideologist’s aim in this case is to insist, with as much plausibility as he can muster, that, in spite of any contrary appearances, a number of favourable evaluative-descriptive terms can in fact be applied as apt descriptions of his own apparently untoward social actions. The point of this strategy is to challenge his ideological opponents to reconsider whether they may not be making an empirical mistake (and may thus be socially insensitive) in failing to see that the ordinary criteria for applying an existing range of favourable evaluative-descriptive terms may be present in the very actions they have been condemning as illegitimate. (Skinner 1974:115) Skinner suggests that, far from being an abstract and difficult strategy to employ, this third strategy ‘probably represents the most widespread and important form of ideological argument’ (Skinner 1974:116). Of course, these strategies are not mutually exclusive, although their interrelations are complex. Nishida seems to have attempted a combination of them. In Ueda Shizuteru’s words: Nishida seemed to be saying: if these [evaluative-descriptive] words are to be used, then let them be used in a clearly defined sense…as they were already on everybody’s lips, he tried to give them an acceptable content.33 (Ueda Shizuteru 1995:91) As we will see, Nishida sought to challenge the conventional application of a positively evaluated sense of kyōeiken (Co-Prosperity Sphere) to the empirical example of the Japanese empire. He also attempted to challenge the evaluation of the term kyōeiken if it was going to be accepted and used to indicate the Japanese empire, and consequently he introduced a new term, tokushuteki sekai

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(particular world), which he argued was morally superior to the conventional understanding of kyōeiken—indeed, tokushuteki sekai was the ideal-type of kyōeiken. One important question for intellectuals must be whether these various strategies can be effectively combined, or whether they actually undermine each other. Discussing Heidegger’s use of language, Löwith, for example, implies that the result might simply be ambiguïté.34 Towards the (in)effectual intellectual A final dilemma for the intellectual who wants to affect dissent through his/her speech-acts is how to make that dissent effective. No matter which strategy he adopts, the intellectual’s dissent will only become a political act of significance (rather than merely a statement of personal conviction) if his linguistic and ideological manipulations eventually become conventionalized, at least to some extent and at least amongst certain groups of people. Indeed, because of the nature of linguistic sleight-of-hand, there is a real danger that the dissent of an ineffective intellectual (no matter how radical his ideas might be) will go unnoticed or, even worse, that it will be misread as merely reinforcing existing conventions. As Foucault has insisted, knowledge is power, and the inability of an intellectual to disseminate his/her ideas or to affect the manipulation of conventions in society at large, effectively renders that intellectual impotent. Indeed, the impotency of an intellectual leaves his/her texts open to the exploitation or appropriation of those with the power to affect the conventionalization of terms—once texts are in the public domain, they are subjected to the same dialogic forces as the orthodox texts which may have been the original target of their dissent. Ineffective dissent may simply be appropriated and re-manipulated into orthodoxy, or squashed flat by the steamroller of the dominant ideology. Nishida was sensitive to these dangers, and, as we will see in Chapter 4, he frequently lamented that his work was misinterpreted, taken out of context, or that it had taken on a life of its own, ‘independent of me, and now it acts on me in return’ (NKZ XIV:270).35 There appear to be five factors that the intellectual should keep in mind when considering strategies to maximize their effectiveness. The first can be drawn out of the earlier discussion of the second strategy of dissent, where the importance of providing a literary context within which the dissenting manipulations will be clear was emphasized. In other words, it is important that the intellectual establishes a dissenting frame of reference whilst engaging in the manipulation of conventions, else the manipulations may be overlooked by his/her opposition. As we will see, in the case of Nishida, the body of his philosophical system provides just such a context, and Nishida repeatedly refers his audience back to his earlier works (such as Zen no kenkyū, 1911) in order to guide their understanding of his manipulation of wartime conventions (NKZ XIV:265). Nishida’s earlier works, and Zen no kenkyū in particular, were written at a time of relative academic freedom in Japan, and whilst Nishida did not depart significantly from

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his political position in these texts (i.e. there was no tenkō), his later works were necessarily written in a language that approximated the state’s imposed orthodoxy. It will be seen later that appeals to the context of his earlier work constituted clear signs that Nishida wanted his audience to understand that his use of the orthodox terminology belied his dissenting meanings. Nishida was engaged in what Ueda has called a ‘tug-of-war over meaning’ (Ueda Shizuteru 1995a:90),36 and he hoped that his audience would deduce his dissent from their knowledge of his wider (often not explicitly political) work. There is an obvious danger with this tactic—not only does it assume that the audience has access to the author’s wider work, but it also assumes that the audience is able to understand the content of this wider work. This is not only the case for the contemporaneous audience, but also for historians looking back on the intellectual history of the interwar period, who may themselves be reluctant to explore the earlier speech-acts of key thinkers from that period. There is a further level of difficulty here, involving the categorization of texts as ‘political texts’ or ‘metaphysical texts’ etc. If we are willing to concede that the wider context of an intellectual’s products might inform our understanding of his/her political stance, then we must also be willing to transcend the specialist boundaries between disciplinary categories and engage with all the texts that may have had political consequence at the time. This effort of scholarship is over and above the more obvious necessity of being sensitive to the differences in the meaning of ‘political text’ in different places and times. Hence, the second factor that should be considered by the would-be effective intellectual: the context of one’s speech-acts should be made as accessible and clear as possible. The third and fourth factors lie outside the direct control of the intellectual, at least to a certain extent. The third is the resonance of the intellectual’s dissident ideas with other existing schools of thought,37 even with the orthodoxy from which he/she is dissenting. One possible technique to increase such resonance is to adopt as much of the terminology of other schools (or the dominant discourse itself) as possible. Clearly, the technique of ‘manipulating conventions’ is just such a device. It is the strategy of the ‘backward marching revolutionary’. However, as we have seen, this is an approach with dangers of its own. In the case of Nishida, the situation seems rather complex, and it is tied to his identity as a ‘proper intellectual’. In the context of early-twentieth-century Japan, Nishida was at least a partial intellectual exile, insofar as he was involved in the production of philosophy in a recognizably modern (and European) sense. To some extent, Nishida’s vocation limited the resonance of his language with other schools of thought in Japan, and particularly with the dominant discourse of cultural nationalism in the late 1930s– 1940s. Whilst this ‘exile’ would be approved of by Said as genuinely intellectual, it also represents a crisis for Nishida’s effectiveness qua intellectual. In particular, Nishida located his audience predominantly in what Maruyama Masao has called the ‘Iwanami culture’, whilst the masses were part of a wider

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and more populist ‘Kōdansha culture’ (Maruyama 1963/66b:63).38 Even in the wartime period, when Nishida made deliberate attempts to widen his audience by employing more everyday, orthodox terms, his publications still fell under the ambit of ‘Iwanami’, and his ‘context’ (the body of his work) remained fairly impenetrable to many. There are clear issues of accessibility as well as resonance. The fourth factor is concerned with the ability of the intellectual to control the dissemination of his speech-acts. As Said observes, the intellectual does not climb a mountain or pulpit and declaim from the heights… Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change. (Said 1994:75) We have already seen that this choice is not a simple one—the intellectual must ensure accessibility and resonance for the chosen audience. However, this choice is also not always a free one, particularly for the isolated or amateur intellectual. There are a number of sociological studies which link ‘the degree to which intellectuals control the coercive, material and normative resources necessary to engage in conflict’ with the effectiveness of the intellectual’s dissent (Brym 1980:28). In general, intellectuals have little influence over the most powerful forces of social control, such as the police or military. In the case of Nishida and the Kyoto School, however, the intellectuals did have some access to influential personnel in government circles (such as Prince Konoe) and to a number of figures in the Navy. However, the Army, where most political power lay, remained largely beyond their reach. Brym also points out that the state tends to have a monopoly over the employment opportunities of intellectuals, hence frustrating their attempts to disseminate their dissent to students and removing their ‘space in which to stand and talk back to authority’. In the context of the USSR, Brym observes that ‘the state has regularly taken jobs away from intellectual dissidents’ (Brym 1980:28–9). This was also the case in pre-war and wartime Japan, where events such as the Kyoto University (Takikawa), or Minobe Incidents sounded severe warnings to dissenting intellectuals. The Japanese state was particularly oppressive when it came to communist thought, and a number of thinkers, including Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun were hounded and finally imprisoned for their dissent. Nishida himself, who was not affiliated with any educational institutions after 1928, was watched very closely by the ‘thought police’ (tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu, or tokkō), and was apparently only saved from arrest by his connections with the Navy.39 The closeness with which an intellectual sails to governmental disapproval or sanction is, of course, fundamentally related to his/her status as an intellectual who ‘speaks the truth to

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power’, which sets up a tension between the imperative to pursue the authentic path of the intellectual and the practical need for one’s dissent to be effective. A final area where the intellectual may have little control is the communications network itself. If the state, or anyone else, has final power of censorship over the published output of an intellectual, that obviously makes it more difficult for the intellectual to express his/her dissent in a public forum, and thus harder for his/her dissent to be effective. In the case of Nishida, as we will see, a critical text in his explicitly political output was severely censured and even rewritten by the authorities, in order to make it resonate more closely with the orthodoxy of the period.40 As we have seen, the skill of the intellectual in such cases, if he/she really wants to attempt dissent, is to slip the dissent under the eyes of the censor by manipulating the established conventions. In Barshay’s apt phrase: ‘some way of say “no” while saying “yes” had to be worked out’ (1988:32). The final factor that an intellectual should consider when devising a strategy of dissent concerns the nature of the speech-act itself. This not only refers to the mode of expression (i.e. whether the intellectual will adopt a literary, philosophical or ideological stance) but also the model of expression. The difference between an ideological mode and a philosophical mode has real consequences, not only in terms of accessibility for the audience. For Freeden (1996/98), for example, ideologies and political philosophies are quite distinct, though not mutually exclusive, forms of political thought. To borrow Heidegger’s term, the two occupy different ‘sites’, the former in idéologique/ politique and the latter in philosophique.41 With these differing locations come different rules and objectives. The ideologist, in the site of politique, is explicitly concerned with the creation of politics, whilst the philosopher is occupied with the study of politics.42 Freeden suggests that ideologies are tied to power and to particular social groupings (1996/98:22–3), which implies that ideologists place solidarity before criticism and thus risk ‘disfiguring’ themselves as intellectuals. Methodologically, ideologies are less exacting than political philosophies, which emphasise demonstration rather than assertion and rationality rather than emotion.43 In sum, ideologies mix rational and emotive debate freely. They will be more hasty in ending discussion if rational persuasion proves inconclusive. They will be less thorough in pursuing the detailed implications of their arguments. After all, ideologies have to deliver conceptual social maps and political decisions, and they have to do so in language accessible to the masses as well as the intellectuals, to amateur as well as professional thinkers. This free mix of reason and emotion is intolerable to many philosophers, who do not regard emotive reasons for an argument as good ones. Put plainly, for them a non-reflective argument is not an argument. (Freeden 1996/98:30)

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Hence, whilst the ideologist might have some advantages over the philosopher when it comes to their effectiveness in society, the trade-off constitutes a serious intellectual compromise. Indeed, if we were to use the definition of intellectual discussed earlier, the ideologist would correspond to the ‘professional’ intellectual, or the ‘pseudo’ intellectual, disfigured by their partisanship and accommodation. It is arguable, therefore, that thinkers such as Miki Kiyoshi took the step out of philosophy and into ideology when they committed tenkō and joined Prince Konoe’s Shōwa kenkyūkai. Nishida, on the other hand, never made such a step. Of course, this is not to say that philosophical texts or speech-acts are devoid of political or ideological significance—as we have seen, all speechacts warrant what Bourdieu has called a lecture double (or double reading), insofar as the philosophique becomes politique once it enters the public domain (Bourdieu 1988:10). Barshay puts it well when he says: ‘it would be a gross error to see in the flowering of philosophy (as in the work of Nishida Kitarō) a mere substitute for, or conscious abdication of, political responsibility’ (1988:67). However, ideological or political significance per se does not contradict the identity of the philosopher. The perennial task of philosophers is to examine whatever seems insusceptible to the methods of the sciences or everyday observation, for example, categories, concepts, models, ways of thinking or acting, and particularly ways in which they clash with one another, with a view to constructing other, less internally contradictory and (though this can never be fully attained) less pervertible metaphors, images, symbols and systems of categories. (Berlin 2000b:34) In the language of Said, the philosopher’s quest for consistency engages him/her in ‘speaking truth’, and, as an intellectual, the philosopher is morally obliged to speak that ‘truth to power’. However, this sense of the pursuit of a ‘truth’ (even the kind of constructed truth posited by Said, Foucault and others) can lead to a number of dangers. Leaving aside the obvious dangers associated with an ideological appropriation of a conception of truth (e.g. the divinity of the Japanese emperor), Berlin warns that the true or ‘perfect universe is not merely unattainable but inconceivable, and everything done to bring it about is founded on an enormous intellectual fallacy’ (Berlin 2000c:23). In other words, a philosophy which holds pretensions to truth-claims risks the establishment of a dangerous nexus when it enters the public discourse. Perhaps the most extreme example of this model of expression, is utopianism. There is a wide and sophisticated literature concerned with the philosophy of utopias, and there is neither the space nor the need to explore it in depth here.44 The utopian model was very popular in the intellectual discourse in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and it thus provides part of the context of the newly internationalized intellectuals in Japan during

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that period.45 Indeed, theorists of utopia suggest that the ‘perfect society’ arises as a model in political philosophy during times of great upheaval or social change (Choay 2000:348) —periods which Durkheim might describe as experiencing anomie. The early twentieth century was clearly such a time in Japan. The tradition of writing about utopias began with Thomas More in 1516, when he first published the classic text, Utopia. Since that time, utopian models have become accepted philosophical devices of social criticism. Indeed, for Stroup (1998), utopias have contributed to the creation of a ‘culture of criticism’, particularly in French philosophy. The technique of criticism is comparative: when set against the perfect ‘model space’ or ‘model society’ of a utopian construction, the extant society necessarily falls short (Choay 2000:348). In this way, the utopia acts not only as critique but also as aspiration, or as a ‘meditation on ideals and possibilities’ (Stillman 2001:15). The mirror image is the dystopia, which is effectively a meditation on the evils that might befall society it is carries on as it is. The problem of utopias as philosophical models is not so much as that identified by EH Carr (via Bacon): ‘philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars which give little light because they are so high’.46 Carr famously lamented the rise of utopian thought during the ‘Twenty Years’ Crisis’ of the interwar period, because he thought it distracted statesmen from the real business of power politics. As Berlin has said, ‘philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization’. However, the dilemma from the point of view of the philosopher-intellectual is the question of whether their utopia is ‘pervertible’ or able to be ‘manipulated’ by other actors in the socio-political discourse. This issue speaks directly to the question of the control of evaluative-descriptive terms. We will see that, in Nishida’s case, a utopian philosophical model47 designed as a moral critique of the empirical state in Japan during the war period was relatively easily perverted into a glorification of the status quo. Nishida’s attempts to perform speech-acts as a genuine philosopher-intellectual, speaking truth to power, were finally frustrated by the ineffectualness of the strategies he chose or was forced to choose. Nishida’s ineffectiveness does not condemn him to charges of complicity or even (to reuse Maruyama’s term) ‘vague antipathy’, and his persistent speechacts should not be seen as merely ‘passive resistance’, because they constituted actions in a meaningfully social sense. When confronted with the criticism of many post-war commentators, such as Takeyama Michio, who have argued that it would have been better to have said nothing than to have risked even appearing complicit, the ‘genuine intellectual’ must respond, with Umberto Eco, ‘sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the “scientific” certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way’.

2 The politics of harmony and awakening Confucianism and Buddhism as political thought in Japan

Politics before ‘philosophy’ in Japan The term ‘philosophy’ (tetsugaku) was coined by Nishi Amane (1829–97) in 1874, with the express purpose of distinguishing this new foreign import from Confucianism and Buddhism.1 Nishi, famous as the first Japanese to give lectures on Western philosophy in Japan, was a leading figure in the importation of Western Learning, and was one of the first Japanese intellectuals to be sent to Europe to learn more about its culture (1862 and 1865). It is to Nishi that historians usually trace the assertion that before the nineteenth century there was no philosophy in Japan: ‘in our country there is nothing that deserves to be called philosophy; China too does not equal the West in this regard’ (NAZ:181/Havens 1970:108–9). To some extent, this is itself a political issue. Nishi defined tetsugaku in contradistinction to the intellectual heritage of China and Japan (i.e. Confucianism and Buddhism) quite deliberately, in order to demarcate a new field of knowledge being imported from abroad. Something very similar had been done in Japan when Buddhism arrived in the sixth century: a new term (Shintō) was coined to label the beliefs indigenous to Japan prior to the arrival of Buddhism.2 To some extent, the label served to protect a native constellation of ideas from free flowing mutation by the new intellectual culture.3 Strongly influenced by the practical and scientific flavour of the currents of Western thought flooding into Japan in the late nineteenth century, Nishi asserted that philosophy was the ‘science of sciences…the chief of all sciences’ (NAZ: 146). Havens suggests that for Nishi, philosophy meant a rational, practical approach to knowledge, using inductive logic to investigate phenomena. Since he entirely excluded metaphysics and speculative thought from his description, Nishi’s conception of philosophy was a limited one that was more relevant to practical epistemology than to the formal study of the basic principles of reality.4 (Havens 1970:109)

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Nishi’s definition of philosophy would prove very influential for a whole generation of Japanese thinkers, who would learn to (mis)characterize Western philosophy as entirely rational and materialistic. Indeed, one of the great contributions of Nishida Kitarō in the early twentieth century would be to demonstrate to the Japanese that a systematic and vital philosophy could be constructed on quite different (and more familiar) foundations. Hence, Nishi was dismissive of Confucianism qua philosophy because it was a belief structure rather than a system of logic designed to integrate other fields of knowledge. Confucius may have imparted some wisdom concerning how we should live, but this wisdom was not philosophical. Similarly, for Nishi, Buddhism was at best a kind of theology, and it contained little of properly philosophical value. Neither of Japan’s great intellectual or spiritual traditions fitted Nishi’s conception of philosophy (although he did acknowledge them as sources of ethical and political thought). However, by the time Nishida started publishing (1911),5 the status of Confucianism and Buddhism as philosophies had been largely recovered. A facilitating factor might have been the authoritative volumes by the eminent professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, Inoue Tetsujirō, whose series of texts on Confucian schools in Japan suggested that those schools held the potential for philosophy even if they did not actually constitute philosophy themselves.6 Certainly there is a strong case for taking Confucianism seriously as part of the context of the political philosophy of Nishida and the Kyoto School. The question of Buddhism as political philosophy is rather thornier. The idea that Buddhism contains properly philosophical insights may be relatively uncontroversial today, even in the West, but the notion that an ostensibly religious system could provide the grounds for politics is anathema to the contemporary literature of political philosophy. Appeals to religious conceptions of truth tend to be disregarded as irrational, propagandist, primitive or even dangerous. Whilst the origins of this rationalist scepticism can be clearly traced in the political and intellectual history of Europe, to adopt such a ‘rationalist’ perspective when viewing the political thought of non-European traditions risks not only cultural insensitivity but also methodological weakness; dismissing religious thought effectively disregards the notion that particular spatialtemporal locations exhibit their own unique linguistic and ideological contexts. In the case of early-twentieth-century Japan, religious thought in general (and Buddhist thought in particular) not only comprised a significant tradition of political thought in its own right, but it also constituted a highly visible part of the social-discourse of the period. When it comes to the question of Nishida and the Kyoto School, many commentators have noted the importance of Buddhist (especially Zen) influences on their thought.7 However, the post-war history of Kyoto School Studies has tended to emphasize the school’s religious thought in isolation from the political climate of the wartime period, effectively establishing a break between the religious and the political texts of Nishida and his colleagues. The implicit agenda

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in such an approach has been to salvage something ‘respectable’ from Kyoto School Philosophy and to exorcise the demons of alleged ultra-nationalist complicity by suggesting that the school’s religious thought had nothing to do with the school’s politics; religion and politics occupy separate sites. As James Heisig (2001:90) has put it, Nishida’s ‘turn to political philosophy…dragged like a weighty anchor’ on his broader philosophical journey.8 Missing from the existing literature is the idea that interest Buddhism was simultaneously an interest in politics at the turn of the twentieth century in Japan. For example, whilst most accounts draw attention to the special place in Nishida’s life occupied by his High School teacher, Hōjō Tokiyoshi, who guided Nishida throughout his early career, no mention is made of the fact that Hōjō was passionately involved in Zen practice at Engaku-ji in Kamakura, and that his teacher there was Imakita Kōsen (1816–92).9 As the first new abbot of Engaku-ji after the Meiji ishin, Imakita was instrumental in the development of a decidedly political circle of followers. Janine Anderson Sawada (1998:122) notes that ‘government employees became regular participants in the lay program at Engaku-ji’. Imakita published a series of essays on political themes, such as the moral limitations on the power of state law over the sangha (Buddhist brotherhood).10 Imakita was succeeded at Engaku-ji by Shaku Sōen (1860–1919), famed as Rinzai Zen’s representative at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religion in Chicago. Many commentators locate Shaku Sōen at the root of what would later be called ‘Imperial Way Zen’, especially after his patriotic zeal during the RussoJapanese War (1904–05).11 Sōen was very influential over his novice Suzuki Daisetsu (Nishida’s lifelong friend), particularly during the years around the turn of the century, and the young Suzuki himself was something of a political figure.12 The particular reputation and atmosphere of Engaku-ji makes it interesting that Nishida would chose to study there during his time in Tokyo. In the context of Watanabe Kaigyoku’s contemporaneous call for ‘comprehensive Buddhist studies’ in Japan,13 Nishida’s interest in Shin Buddhism and other schools should not be neglected.14 Many of the most politically visible Buddhist thinkers of the Meiji period were Shin Buddhists, including two of the most eminent Buddhist philosophers of the Meiji period, Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) and Kiyozawa Manchi (1863–1903), both of whom entered Tokyo Imperial University to study philosophy in the same year (1881). They were co-founders of the university’s Philosophy Society, together with Katō Hiroyuki, Nishi Amane and Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), who would later become the eminent professor of philosophy at the prestigious university. Although there is little evidence to connect Nishida to Inoue Enryō or Manshi directly,15 there is an important sense in which the two men were his immediate predecessors. Inoue and Manshi were the first of a new generation of Buddhist scholars who maintained that Buddhism could and should be seen as a system of thought capable of taking its place along side the Western ideas they studied as ‘philosophy’. Indeed, they were the first to make a serious attempt to re-write

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Buddhist insights into the language of modern philosophy (particularly Hegelian philosophy). Inoue has also been credited with coining the term kokusuishugi (national essence-ism), whilst discussing the particular characteristics of ‘Asian’ and ‘Japanese’ philosophy in the Seikyōsha (Political Teachings Society).16 In other words, I contend that it is not possible to substantiate the existence of a clear-cut break between the sites of religion, politics and philosophy in Nishida’s work, or in the discourse of his time. Traditions of Buddhist and Confucian thought contain linguistic conventions and concepts readily employed by Nishida and the Kyoto School qua political philosophy, and the tendency to categorize these concepts as ‘religious’ by post-war commentators has caused their political significance to be overlooked. Nishida himself was explicit about his location in a syncretic space. As perhaps the last generation of Japanese students to receive an education in classical Japanese and Chinese as well as in European languages, the political thought of Nishida and the Kyoto School should properly be located in the context of Buddhist, Confucian and European philosophical conventions simultaneously. Valuing harmony If we can accept the possibility that Nishida and his contemporaries may have been partaking in a political discourse that encompassed Confucian and Buddhist traditions as well as European philosophical conventions, then we need to understand (however vaguely) the kind of themes that would resonate with these traditions. The study of the history of philosophy in the West requires the demarcation of intellectual themes and the selection of historical conversation partners, and this should be no different with the history of political thought in Japan. Although there is no space here for a detailed history of this kind, it is important that we at least isolate some of the conversations which have defined political discourse in Japanese history—such conversations will provide part of the context for political philosophy in modern Japan. The survey that follows is vaguely chronological and certainly not comprehensive. Its goal is narrower than a general philosophical or intellectual history, and it focuses on ethico-political aspects of thought—so I offer my apologies to scholars of Buddhism and Confucianism in advance for any violence I may do to some of the thinkers in question. Much of Western political philosophy partakes in conversations initiated by the Greeks. Likewise it is helpful to consider Japanese political thought in the context of some of its earliest formulations. In particular, many of the themes and debates that would dominate the political landscape in Japan until the twentieth century were initiated as early as the seventh century (AD 604), when Prince Shōtoku is said to have promulgated his famous Seventeen Article Constitution.17 For our purposes here, it is interesting to note that this document demonstrates a synthesis of Confucian and Buddhist socio-political ideas, complicated by the occasional infusion of Shintō mythology.18 Indeed, as a

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historical figure, Shōtoku was both a patron of Confucianism and Buddhism (which had only recently entered Japan from Paekche in the middle of the sixth century),19 and he was also responsible for installing the Imperial family as the hereditary head of a hierarchical social order in Yamato (the precursor of modern Japan). It is certainly the case that Shōtoku’s early constitution provides important parts of the textual and conceptual context for modern documents such as the ‘Charter Oath’ (Seitaisho, 1868), the ‘Meiji Constitution’ (Dai-Nihon Teikoku Kempō, 1889), the ‘Imperial Rescript on Education’ (Kyōiku chokugo, 1890) and even the infamous ‘Cardinal Principles of the National Polity’ (Kokutai no hongi, 1937). These documents in turn established the dominant linguistic and ideological conventions of the imperial state wherein Nishida and the Kyoto School functioned. Perhaps the most striking political themes to emerge from this early constitution revolve around the notion of wa (harmony). The first article of the constitution is probably one of the most quoted lines in the literature of Japanese cultural history: ‘Harmony is to be valued, and an avoidance of wanton opposition is to be honoured’ (SJT 1:48). Far from being a simple and uncontested concept, even in 604, as maintained by some of the most vulgar cultural essentialists in modern times,20 ‘harmony’ emerges from this document as a sophisticated and problematic (if underdetermined) political concept. In particular, the text does not successfully resolve the questions of whether harmony can be enforced on the people of Japan or whether it actually indicates a principle of tolerance;21 the text is ambiguous about whether harmony is a value particular to Japan or of universal applicability; the text is unclear about the relationship between the (particular) Japanese emperor and the (universal) Mandate of Heaven; and finally it is rather vague when it comes to specifying how harmony should be achieved in practice. Each of these issues will spark debates that will rage for centuries in Japan—and they are clearly thematically linked to the concept of ‘Co-Prosperity’. One of the issues most relevant to the political concerns of imperial Japan is captured by Article 7 of Shōtoku’s text: ‘Let everyman have his own charge, and let not the spheres of duty be confused.’22 This article—which refers to conditions in which people will be co-prosperous—is importantly ambiguous. Does this clause suggest that every individual must be permitted to chose his/her own role in society, free from the interference of others, or does it suggest that man’s place in society is predetermined for him, and that nobody should attempt to alter it? Rather frustratingly, it seems that both interpretations can draw support from elsewhere in the document. The latter is supported by Article 3, which states in the Confucian language of ‘designations’ that ‘The lord is Heaven, the vassal is Earth’. It goes on to describe the horrible consequences that will befall society if the Earth attempted to rise above its station, and it encourages ‘inferiors’ to fulfil their charges by obeying ‘superiors’. The clear historical intent of these clauses was to suggest an identity between the emerging Japanese imperial family and ‘Heaven’, thus underlying the idea

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that the status and function of individuals is somehow predetermined by nature. The Imperial line (and Prince Shōtoku in particular) was simply born to rule, the lords were born to serve him, and the peasants to serve them. Conveniently enough, the Shintō myths, which were beginning to circulate around Japan (although would not be set down on paper until 712, in Kojiki), were expressed in terms of the same imagery—the Emperor was presented as literally a descendent of heaven. This conflation of Shintō and Confucian imagery would become a continuous source of tension in Japanese political life, providing an indigenous context for the authoritarian position of documents such as Kokutai no hongi. As we will see, a theoretical landmark along this road to modern Japan was Aizawa Seishisai and the Mito School in late Tokugawa. Article 10 of the constitution, on the other hand, paints the more relative side of the picture. It does not directly state that the abilities and status of an individual are not predetermined by nature, but it does state categorically that we are in no position to understand or judge the worth of any other individuals. It is a classic call for moral and cultural tolerance, which appears to show some influence from Buddhism.23 Shōtoku, well versed in the Lotus Sūtra, seems to accept the existence of an absolute reality but simultaneously denies man the ability to comprehend it: Let us cease from wrath, and refrain from angry looks. Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong. We are not unquestionably sages, nor are they unquestionably fools. Both of us are simply ordinary men. How can any one lay down a rule to distinguish right from wrong? (Article 10) It is hard to understand the political intent of this relativistic strand in Shōtoku’s thinking in the context of the seventh century, even if its intellectual context is relatively clear. However, it is also hard to deny that Articles 3 and 10 establish a political spectrum ranging from simple, monarchical authoritarianism on the one hand (what Nishida would later call ‘divine heteronomous-’ or ‘authoritytheory’), to a more permissive pluralism on the other (where Nishida would later locate the ‘good’). Whilst it may be tempting to label this a ‘right to left’ spectrum, such labels would be ahistorical and culturally insensitive. It is enough at this point merely to note the existence of an indigenous political spectrum informed by Confucian and Buddhist principles. Valuing awakening Following Shōtoku, the most sophisticated contributions to political thought came from the growing community of Buddhist scholars in Japan—at least until the seventeenth century. In general, Buddhism has been responsible for the

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philosophical depth of the political site in Japan—it has asked questions about the foundations of moral and ethical conduct and about the integrity of the individual in society. Overall, its position has also been largely anti-institutional, and one of its most enduring legacies has been to blend conceptions of political law, moral good and substantive reality into a single discourse. Hence, Buddhism’s influence on the political spectrum in Japanese history will be very important to the way that Nishida and the Kyoto School think about the meaning of ‘politics’ in the twentieth century. The influence of Buddhism on Japanese politics was particularly strong throughout the Nara period (710–94). Indeed, escaping from the power of Nara Buddhist temples was partly why Emperor Kanmu moved the capital away from Nara to Heian-kyō (via Nagaoka) in 794. However, some of the Nara sects left indelible marks on Buddhist philosophy in Japan—particularly the Hossō and Sanron sects. Sanron Buddhism set an early epistemological tone to Buddhist thinking—positing a distinction between things as they really are and things based in conceptual discrimination: ‘Every concept is said to be ultimately ‘empty’ (kū) and useful only by convention as a practical device’ (Kasulis 1999: 149). This kind of distinction, which echoed classical Mahāyāna demarcations between samvrtisatya (conventional knowledge) and paramārthasatya (absolute knowledge), contained the implicit differentiation between true (Buddhist) law or buppō, and conventional (secular) law or sehō/ōbō. The tension between these conceptions of law and political order would set the tone for political discussion by Japanese Buddhists for centuries. It was in the Heian period (794–1185), however, that Buddhism really began to take on a characteristically ‘Japanese’ form. In general, the period was characterized by a move away from dependency on commentaries (sāstras) and towards direct engagement with the sūtra themselves, particularly with the Lotus Sūtra.24 To some extent, this step represented a growing self-confidence amongst Japanese Buddhists and within the Japanese court—Buddhism could be made their own, without the need for persistent deference to Chinese interpretations. Indeed, this new ‘Japan-centricism’ was well reflected in the increased currency of syncretic Buddhism (kenmitsu bukkyō), which maintained that native Japanese deities (kami) were manifestations (gongen) of the Buddha or Bodhisattvas.25 As we will see, this would have serious consequences for the political function and responsibilities of the Japanese imperial family and their relationship with universal value, since they suddenly became subject to buppō even if they were the originators of ōbō. In this context, we might better understand the insistence of Watsuji Tetsurō in the early twentieth century that the emperor was an ‘intermediate god’ (tochū no kami) not an absolute one (kyūkyoku no kami) (WTZ XIV:308). When Saichō (767–822) returned from his studies at the T’ien-t’ai monastery in China, he brought back with him the teachings that would become the Tendai School in Japan. Tendai Buddhism places emphasis on the teachings of the Lotus Sūtra, including the doctrine of honji-suijaku (original thing—trace

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manifestation). In the context of the Lotus, this idea is expressed when the Mahāyāna school is proclaimed to be superior to all other schools26 and the Lotus superior to all other sūtra, but all other schools are acknowledged as being authentic and legitimate, being expedient means (hōben) designed to help people of different dispositions to reach enlightenment. By extension, the idea became applicable to cultural and political forms: the Japanese kami were honji-suijaku— manifesting the absolute truth in a form perfectly suited to the Japanese people. Universal truth could have diverse particular (historically determined) forms, which were a type of ‘contradictory unity’. Even Saichō’s rival, Kūkai (774–835), who was the first to bring esoteric Shingon Buddhism to Japan, agreed with this fundamental (non)distinction between the universal absolute and the particular form of the conventional. In his seminal work, jūjū shinron, Kūkai went so far as to suggest that mankind’s collective advance towards enlightenment could be served not only by the teachings of Buddhism but also by the observance of non-Buddhist doctrines, since even these were likely to be honji-suijaku.27 This permissive location in the political discourse is later occupied by Nishida in the 1930s, when he talks about the nature of progress in the context of differing civilizations: in keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai (1934), for example, Nishida describes how every civilization manifests something of the absolute in its ‘unique features’, and he suggests that progress towards the universal is found in the synthesis of these particular features. Later on, as we will see, he will call this conception of the contradictorily non-dual plural world, sekaiteki sekai (a world of worlds). There is clearly an ethical dilemma in this apparent pluralism—if all political and cultural forms may be considered to be honji-suijaku then we are left without any criteria to differentiate between good and bad regimes or actions. This tradition of thought is allied to that given the title hongaku shisō (original enlightenment thought), because it suggests that all people are simultaneously rooted in the absolute and acting in the deluded world of convention. The danger of antinomianism in hongaku shisō was recognized as early as the twelfth century, when Hōchibō Shōshin argued that this kind of thinking implied that salvation could be reached without effort or practice.28 This critique surfaced again in the post-war period in the form of hihan bukkyō (Critical Buddhism), which went so far as to claim that the hongaku shisō tradition, so central to Japanese Buddhism, was not only dangerous but also not really Buddhist at all.29 Saichō’s Tendai had a second foundational teaching, which complemented honji-suijaku, and which would become no less controversial in political terms: ichinen sanzen (one thought, three thousand worlds). This expression was held to capture the contradictory relationship of non-duality between the conventional and absolute worlds: although every conventional thought was delusionary, it was simultaneously a manifestation of absolute truth. Every particular thought was simultaneously universal: one thought, three thousand worlds. In a very different intellectual context, an associated expression, hakkō ichiu (the world under one

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roof),30 would become a catchphrase for the Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1940s. Insofar as ichinen sanzen described the universality of the particular and hakkō ichiu described the universal that united myriad particularities, the two expressions were flip sides of the same coin. Nishida Kitarō himself uses the phrase hakkō ichiu in his highly controversial sekai shinchitsujo no genri (1943), but rather than buying into the ideological content of the phrase in wartime Japan, we will see that Nishida is very careful to tie it back to this early Tendai formulation via his own concept of the sekaiteki sekai (world of worlds).31 With the collapse of the Heian order came a new generation of Buddhist thinkers—the founders of ‘modern’ Japanese Buddhism: Hōnen (1133–1212), Shinran (1173–1262) and Nichiren (1222–82). Following the Gempei war (1180– 85), Japan was split between a courtly-capital in Heian-kyō and the new warrior government of Minamoto Yoritomo (1147–99) in Kamakura. The period was wracked by military conflict, death and suffering, as well as by natural disasters of everykind: earthquakes, famines and droughts. Many thinkers thought that the world was experiencing the onset of mappō—the period of degeneration referred to in the Lotus Sūtra as that in which people could no longer follow the Way of the Sages to enlightenment. In terms of political thought, this period saw Buddhist thinkers start to challenge the responsibilities of Japan’s leaders and thus the political problems of hongaku shisō were cut into sharp relief. In a highly controversial essay, shugo kokka ron, for example, Nichiren went so far as to suggest that a number of rulers had fallen into hell because they had ignored the suffering of their people (and thus brought about mappō).32 In his most famous work, risshō ankoku ron (1260), Nichiren called on the political and religious authorities to abandon their support for heretical Buddhist sects—claiming that only the strict observance of the Lotus Sūtra could save the nation from certain doom.33 Nichiren was following a long tradition when he argued that the Lotus Sūtra was a chingo kokka kyō (nation-protecting sūtra), but his innovation was to suggest that far from being the device of the nation, the Lotus was its ultimate master. Whereas previous esoteric Buddhist masters, such as Kūkai, had been enlisted by the state to utilize the power of Buddha to protect the nation (and the person of the ruler), Nichiren cautioned that such practices effectively inverted the proper order of the universe: Buddha’s law (buppō) not national law (ōbō) was superior—they were not unconditionally the same. Nichiren’s ideas had some radical political implications. Not least, they suggested that a nation’s ruler was not sacrosanct in and of himself, and that the power of Buddhism was not his tool to wield. Rather, ‘the legitimacy of a particular regime or power structure depends solely on whether it can realize this goal for which it is intended, namely, the establishment of the peace of the nation’ (Satō 1999:313). The government was (supposed to be) the tool of the Buddha, rather than vice versa. In the context of the late thirteenth century, when Japan was riddled with strife, suffering and bloodshed, Nichiren’s ideas were very

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unpopular with the authorities, who promptly banished him to Sado Island in 1271.34 For Nichiren, there was a universal standard against which particular actions (and political forms) should be judged. But what was crucial was that he had exploded the apparently simple, unconditional non-dualism of secular and Buddhist law (buppō-ōbō sōi ron) that previous syncretic Buddhists had sought to justify in the particular case of Japan (arguing that the emperor was a manifestation of the Buddha). For Nichiren the issue is simple—buppō is primary and ōbō is only legimate to the extent that it accords with buppō. The two are only identical under certain conditions, and the people (at least, enlightened people like him) are able to judge this identity for themselves. In this way, Nichiren effectively defined a new dimension to the landscape of political thought in Japan, problematizing the relationship between religion (the universal) and the state (the particular). His attempt to understand ‘national issues from a religious standpoint’ opened up a new political spectrum echoed in the 1940s by Nishida Kitarō, who professed to view the nation in terms of a ‘religious worldview’ (shūkyōteki sekaikan).35 Like Nichiren, Nishida is careful to draw a distinction between the legal and moral codes generated within nations and those of an absolute or universal nature—the two are only identical under specific conditions. Whilst ‘each nation is a world that contains the selfexpression of the absolute within itself… I do not say that the nation is itself the absolute. The nation is the fountainhead of morality [social truth], but not of religion [absolute truth]’ (LW:122). Like Nichiren, then, Nishida seems to invoke conditionals, even whilst advocating a kind of hongaku shisō.36 In this context, it is hard to locate either of these thinkers on the ‘nationalist’ side of the political space (despite numerous attempts to do so).37 When it comes to understanding Nishida’s political philosophy, the reader would do well to keep this type of conditional in mind. Nichiren’s great contemporary, Shinran, would disagree with him on one very important point of politics. Shinran did not believe that anyone could claim to be in possession of absolute, universal knowledge—indeed, he insisted that all human knowledge was entirely conventional and contingent.38 Furthermore, there was no way that the human mind could make the leap from one sort of knowledge to the other. Hence, it was hard for the people to challenge the practices of the ruler, since they were just as likely to be wrong about what should be done. As we have seen, this kind of relativism was very useful in the context of Shōtoku’s constitution, since it permitted a more permissive interpretation of Confucian designations. However, Shinran goes further, seeming to both embrace the idea of universal ethics and to rebuke their possibility in the real world. Shinran’s contribution to the political marketplace in Japan seems to define a kind of anarchism, stretching way off the ‘permissive’ end of Shōtoku’s political spectrum. It is not the case, however, that Shinran abandons all hope of gaining access to the good—he merely thinks that people have to abandon themselves in order to

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reach it. He indicates that there are pivotal moments of kenshō (clarity) in which individuals are lost to themselves and spontaneously aware of absolute truth. For Shinran, this absolute truth is represented by the compassion of Amida Buddha, and such moments of clarity are triggered by complete despair concerning the impotence of self-power (jikiri) accompanied by a simultaneous faith (shinjin) in the Other-power (takiri) of Amida. During this moment of perfect faith and clarity, the individual becomes enveloped by takiri and acts spontaneously (jinen) in accord with it. In an important sense, these actions are not by the individual at all, but merely through him/her. Shinran’s position here is entirely consistent with that sustained in the most explicitly political of the Buddhist sūtras, the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta, where it is made clear that leaders are held to act well only when they do not act at all— that is, when they rule spontaneously in accord with Buddha’s law rather than according to their own ideas about right and wrong.39 In other words, ‘consciously trying to help others by figuring out the true ideology or true praxis is only another obstruction’ (Kasulis 2001:36). For Shinran, this kind of good governance is only possible when a leader legislates from the standpoint of desperate faith and selflessness: the working of takiri ‘not only takes the person of shinjin to the Pure Land, but also in its expansive response to suffering, compassion returns that person to the world of suffering beings and in that way the person is a vehicle for Amida’s compassionate agency’ (Kasulis 2001:34). In that moment of faith, even the distinction between self and Amida is collapsed into non-duality. Whilst Nishida avoids direct references to Amida or compassion in his more political works, he seems to ally himself with Shinran’s location in the indigenous political spectrum. He appears to locate moral behaviour in that moment of ‘turnabout’ (honshin ikkai) when the self is abandoned and action is returned into the everyday world through the spontaneous re-action to the absolute that grounds it:40 However great it may be, human wisdom is human wisdom, human virtue human virtue… Yet when a person, once undergoing a complete turnabout, abandons this wisdom and this virtue, he or she can attain new wisdom, take on new virtue, and enter into new life… Every person, no matter who he is, must return to the original body of his naked self; he must once let go from the cliff’s ledge and come back to life after perishing. (NKZ I:407–08, Hirota, trans. 1995:242–3) There is a form of moral conditional here, which suggests that people can only act morally when they abandon their concerns for themselves—since to abandon the self is to gain access to the ‘Pure Land’ of the true and the good. In political terms, this kind of conditional is played out in the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta where it describes how the king subdues foreign lands with his ‘fourfold army’. The army never once resorts to the use of force, and the king never once orders

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the advance of his army according to his own plan. Instead, the king spins the ‘wheel-treasure’ of the Buddhist law and then takes his army in the direction towards which it points. When it turned to the east, those who opposed him in the eastern region came and said: ‘Come, Your Majesty, welcome! We are yours, Your Majesty. Rule us, Your Majesty’ And the King said: ‘Do not take life. Do not take what is not given. Do not commit sexual misconduct. Do not tell lies. Do not drink strong drink. Be moderate in eating.’41 And those who had opposed him in the eastern region became his subjects. (CS:397–8) There are a number of important aspects to this utopian passage. The first is that the king does not exercise personal choice when deciding where to take his armies—rather the decision is made by itself, apart from self-interest. The second is that the king never takes what is not given to him—the subjects of foreign lands give themselves freely to his rule because they spontaneously realize its meritorious nature. The third point is that the armies never fight, they simply exist as testaments to the grandeur of the Wheel-turning King. In fact, when it comes to actual combat the Buddhist canon is ambiguous, and it is certainly not the case that the Buddha ever ‘advised his contemporary kings to disband their armies and beat their swords into ploughshares’ (Gokhale 1969: 734). There are certainly records of Buddhist kings resorting to war in the name of the Buddha—Yang Chien (who unified China in AD 589) said that his soldiers should ‘regard the weapons of war as having become like the offerings of incense and flowers presented to the Buddha’ (Wright 1959:67), and Shaku Sōen famously called on the Imperial Japanese Army to seek ‘the subjugation of evils hostile to civilization, peace and enlightenment’ during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.42 Hence, Buddhist political thought opens up a spectrum of views about imperial expansion. On the one hand there is a simple justification of expansion ‘in the name of the Buddha’. But, on the other hand, the justification of war is importantly conditional: war must not be the result of personal ambition, and it must not be directed against those unwilling to embrace the rule of the victors. Again, conditionals of this kind will form an important (and unrecognized) part of the context of Nishida’s conception of Japan’s Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere: Above all, if anyone inside the sphere is dis-satisfied, then it is not a coprosperity sphere. If the sphere were based on a selfish decision [by one state] and the others were coerced into it, that would violate everyone’s freewill, and that would not be a co-prosperity sphere… If it were a true coprosperity sphere [hontō no kyōeiken], Japan would be asked [by the

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others] to create it. If that is not the case, we cannot talk of a crusade [seisen]. (NKZ XII:471) The politics of self-cultivation and hierarchy Confucianism and Buddhism continued to interweave in the political and ideological fabric of Japanese society throughout the centuries. Indeed, the start of ‘modern’ Japan was marked by another constitution drawn up by a Confucian scholar, Hayashi Ranzan (Dōshun, 1583–1657).43 Dōshun was tutor to the Shōgun from 1608, after Tokugawa Ieyasu had adopted Confucianism as his official ideology, following his final unification of Japan into a single administrative unit after many years of bloody internal wars. Together with other measures, such as the controversial policy of sakoku (isolationism), the official adoption of Confucianism was designed to promote social stability. Dōshun’s Confucianism was really Sung Confucianism (or Neo-Confucianism, as it is now sometimes known), which was characterized by a dual emphasis on self-cultivation and respect for hierarchy. Sung Confucianism had become increasingly popular in Japan throughout the period of the Warring States (1338– 1568) partly because it seemed to fit the needs of the emerging samurai class. Because of its emphasis on self-cultivation (and its somewhat affirmative approach to death), this warrior class was also a hotbed of interest in Zen Buddhism. A continuous process of cross-fertilization had produced some interesting consequences in terms of political thought. Neo-Confucianism came to accept that ‘righteous action’ (gi) was the inevitable extension of inner virtue. This virtue’s potential, which was found in everyone, could be realized through disciplined introspection (kei) (Najita 1998:xv). In political terms, this meant that harmony (which ‘is to be valued’) was the result of the fulfilment of one’s natural role in society (through intense self-discipline). One’s ‘natural’ role in society was defined by one’s existing place in the social order (into which one was ‘naturally’ born) —the social order itself having been designed by the Shōgun (who held the Mandate of Heaven), whose word was law.44 In Confucian terms, acceptance of the Shōgun’s divine mandate was premised upon the fact that Tokugawa Ieyasu had unified Japan and ended decades of warfare, thus delivering the people from strife. For many, however, the mandate was justifiable in Shintō terms, since the Shōgun ruled ostensibly in the name of the (divine) emperor. Hence, the conflation of Shintō and Confucian pantheons again acts to justify a rigid authoritarian regime. In this orthodox model, the purpose of self-cultivation was not to realize a more profound truth about the self or to transform one’s circumstances, but rather was to encourage the people to perfect their ‘fit’ with their existing roles and to find contentment in their existing place in society. In its early years, the Tokugawa Shōgunate appears to have thought that Buddhism (and Zen Buddhism in particular) would bolster this view of self-cultivation and thus help to maintain

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a static and stable social order. Indeed, everyone was obliged to affiliate with a Buddhist temple in 1613. Dōgen (1200–53) and the Sōtō Zen sect that he established, has been one of the favourite targets of the Critical Buddhists in the post-war, who have argued that (particularly in his early work)45 he provides the individual with no means of differentiating between good and evil and no justifications to resist the status quo. The official support for Zen in the early Tokugawa period appears to corroborate this idea. Like his eminent contemporaries Nichiren and Shinran, Dōgen embraced hongaku shisō, but he adopted a much more critical posture towards it, challenging the apparently contradictory non-dualism that it implied between conventional and absolute realities. In his legendary formulation, Dōgen began his enquiries with a now obvious ‘doubt’: if all beings are inherently enlightened, why is it that all historical Buddhas have maintained the importance of correct practice?46 This is clearly a direct problematization of the link between hongaku shisō and antinomianism. Dōgen attempted to answer this doubt by challenging the meaning of religious practice; it is not that religious practice produces enlightenment, rather practice manifests enlightenment.47 In fact, it was this neat reversal in the function of religious practice (and thus good behaviour) that causes the ethical dilemma for Dōgen. He argued that if individuals were inherently enlightened then they could realize this awakening in any action, so long as it was performed with the correct attitude. Dōgen called this gyōbutsuigi (living Buddhism), or shushō-ittō (unity of practice and realization). The correct attitude was characterized (in terms of meditation practice) as shikan taza (just sitting): true meditation should be performed without any sense of intention or desire to achieve enlightenment. Practitioners should be ‘just sitting’ without any sense of the presence of their self. Shikan taza comes to mean thoughtlessness, or thoughtless emersion in one’s role, and it suggests the same moment of unity with the absolute as expressed by Shinran in his moment of ‘turnabout’ (honshin ikkai) —the self just falls away and one is left only with the eternal and absolute Buddha nature. At this moment, all of one’s conduct is spontaneous and good. The Zen of Dōgen became very popular in the Kamakura period because it closely matched the needs of the time, where Shinran and Nichiren merely reflected the sense of crisis. In particular, Dōgen’s radical denial of selfhood and his repeated assertions that the ultimate goal of practice was the death of the practitioner (i.e. the eradication of self) appealed to the new warrior lords and the samurai. Moreover, the notion that enlightenment could be attained through any action (if it were performed in utter selflessness) suggested that even the warrior arts could become forms of meditation and vehicles of the Buddha. This is the beginning of bushidō. Training as a soldier no longer meant personal damnation. In 1333, the Ashikaga Shōgunate adopted Zen as its official religion. Five hundred and fifty years later (1879), Emperor Meiji gave Dōgen the

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posthumous titie of Jōyō Daishi, to reflect his continuing importance in the new Japanese Empire. It is relatively clear, then, why the early Tokugawa authorities would embrace Zen as a way of encouraging people not to question the rigid system of Confucian designations that had been imposed on them: it taught that the people could find salvation and enlightenment in any role; social good and conformity appeared coterminous. That said, just as Dōgen appeared to offer no reason to dissent, his logic also offers no reason to conform—each individual must judge for him/herself whether the institutional demands placed on them are ‘good’ or not—does the political system really enable the people to engage in proper selfcultivation? And the question of how an individual was able to judge this good would not go away. If good action was found in the de-personalized source of our existence, prior to ourselves, how could we hope to recognize it? For the Tokugawa period Zen thinker Bankei Yōtaku (1622–93), who located the true self at the point where the subject-object distinction finally collapsed, arguing that ‘the singular unborn mind is the master of all beings’ (Bankei 1941: 133), the good was as easily recognizable as heat or danger. Just as the human being naturally and spontaneously moves away from a flame, so the individual will perform the ‘good’ without thought once he/she realizes the unborn mind (Bankei 1941:25). Bankei became very popular in wartime Japan—his collected works were republished in 1941 by the prestigious house of Iwanami,48 and his language is clearly evident in the work of Nishida and the Kyoto School.49 However, Bankei does not really address the political issue, which appears to lie in the unusual nature of the conditional in this view of morality: the good is only comprehensible to those who have realized enlightenment. Genuine morality seems to come post-salvation. A crucial political question must be to what extent is this state of ‘post-salvation’ falsifiable within society? For the Buddhist critic Shidō Munan (1603–76), ‘enlightenment is the Buddha’s greatest enemy’ (Minamoto 1999:303), because ‘a person may reach enlightenment of a sort, achieve a state of indifference (muki) that puts one beyond [conventional] considerations of good and evil, but if that person still has a smidgen of selfconsciousness, he may succumb to a pride that leads him to protect a self-centred lifestyle’ (Minamoto 1999:303–4). Imperfect enlightenment could produce moral and political anarchy—and it was easily open to exploitation.50 In other words, the influence of Zen Buddhism on the Confucian political discourse was not simple— it added a field of disagreements and debates by itself. It was not the case, however, that the complicated Sung Confucian-Zen partnership was the only school of thought in Tokugawa Japan, even if it was the official and dominant one. Debate took place in the theoretical spaces of Confucianism and Buddhism themselves, with various intellectuals vying for control of the evaluative-descriptive conventions in use. Two of the most influential Confucian scholars of this period were Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who founded the kogakuha (Ancient Learning School), and Nakae Tōju (1608–48), who founded the Ōyōmei gakuha, which drew on the teachings of Wang Yang-

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Ming (jp. Ōyōmei 1492–1592). Both of these schools were subversive of the static social order, and they introduced some interesting debates into the political discourse. In terms already familiar to Buddhists, Nakae Tōju challenged the rationalism of Sung Confucianism, arguing that intuition or moral sense (which were innate in people) was more important than intellect—implying that one did not have to be a scholar (or go to one of the state academies) to be a good man. Nakae also emphasized the moral unity of knowledge and action: doing good (and meaning to do good) is always better than just thinking about it (or doing it accidentally). Unsurprisingly, this implicit disregard for social status in the evaluation of moral worth, coupled with a criticism of aristocratic indolence, was deeply unpopular with the ruling elite. Nakae’s famous student, Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91), would actually be arrested in 1687 for voicing a non-orthodox, Neo-Confucian proposal for political reform. It is interesting to reflect, then, that Nishida Kitarō’s preferred Confucian scholarship was the Idealist Confucianism of Wang Yang-Ming and Nakae. Nishida’s brand of anti-rationalism would have been readily familiar to these medieval thinkers. We see in Zen no kenkyū, for example, references to the idea that ‘ignorant people’ are often ‘better than those people who have knowledge’ (ZK:164). Nishida even cites Wang Yang-Ming directly when he discusses the importance of the unity of will and action in moral conduct (ZK:132). Hence, it is not only important to realize that Nishida and his colleagues did not have to rely solely on anti-enlightenment thinkers from Europe for their anti-rationalism, but it is also important to appreciate that this kind of stance has a radical, even dissenting, pedigree in Japanese intellectual history, and in the history of Japanese Confucianism in particular. Rather than attacking the necessity of scholarship in the Confucian classics, Ogyū Sorai was damning about the way in which those texts were being read in the Tokugawa period. He argued that Sung Confucianism was overly static and that it had neglected the importance of history. In particular, he railed against the affluent conservatives in Japan who suggested that reverence for custom and tradition was more important than the well-being of society. Indeed, he even went so far as to imply that such an attitude actually forfeited the Mandate of Heaven.51 Sorai’s contribution to the political discourse of Japanese Confucianism was to broaden the relativistic tendencies in Shōtoku’s early constitution—not only did he argue that an individual’s virtue varied in accordance with his/her natural character, but he also suggested that the character of society as a whole shifted through time. An important corollary was that the best system of governance would not stay the same for all time—it was not a universal, natural truth. Indeed, such systems were constructed by people and, as such, could/should be reconstructed when they became detrimental to the people that they were supposed to enrich.52 Sensitivity to this historical flow was one of the most important (and timeless) elements of a king’s benevolence (jin), and the people

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should be able to rely on their king to alter the shape of society to fit their new needs. For Sorai, the static social order of Pax Tokugawa had failed to adapt to the changing needs of the people (although it may have been an appropriate system for Japan at the start of the seventeenth century) —the people of Japan were suffering because of the political system, rather than being nourished by it: ‘it is only when human virtues cannot be nourished and consummated that there is any deviation from the Way’.53 As we will see, in the early years of the twentieth century, Nishida and some of the members of the Kyoto School (especially Nishitani Keiji) would take up this critique and argue against the attempts by the state to re-impose an anachronistic political culture on the present Japan (particularly with reference to the Imperial Rescript on Education).54 For many romantics and conservatives in the 1930s and 1940s Japan could and should solve its crisis of modernity by re-embracing or simply maintaining the ways of the ancients—for Nishida and the Kyoto School, this was a moral error.55 Like Sorai, however, the Kyoto School would cling to the idea that some kind of underlying truth remained constant through time, but they insisted that the political forms required to achieve it evolved constantly. It is important to realize, however, that Sorai was certainly no advocate of modern individualism or liberalism. The systems required for the establishment of social harmony might be historically and even culturally contingent, but harmony (which ‘is to be valued’) is not identical with equality, and there is precious little room for social mobility. Sorai ascribed to the state the moral obligation to provide conditions conducive to self-cultivation (and the obligation to be sensitive to the evolution of these conditions), but he is clear that the nature of an individual (and thus the form of virtue that they should cultivate) is determined by his/her position in the social order. Indeed, he likens the people to various tools used by a carpenter—arguing that the carpenter relies on these tools in order to do his work.56 The chisel should be the best chisel it can be, but it should not try to be a hammer. Likewise, the carpenter should only use the chisel as a chisel, and not compromise its dignity by trying to use it as a hammer.57 This is the so-called principle of ‘designations’ —for Sorai it describes a hierarchical path to social Co-Prosperity. Significantly then, Sorai does not explore the full potential of Shōtoku’s political spectrum, and he effectively subordinates the individual to the state, arguing that because individuals exhibit particular virtues (and must seek to cultivate them) they are reliant on the support of society around them: ‘retainers, farmers, artisans, and merchants mutually support each other; they would not survive otherwise’.58 In other words, ‘the Way of human existence…never refers to a single individual but invariably to a myriad of individuals living together in some coherent manner’.59 For Sorai, people are simply not able to reach selfperfection on their own—Co-Prosperity transcends individual needs.

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As we will see, Nishida explores much more of Shōtoku’s spectrum, and even moves outside it. Not only is he more permissive in his pluralism than Sorai, stretching that element of Shōtoku to its limits by arguing that individuals create their own natures in a dialectical relationship with their societies, but he is also more serious about the integrity of the individual itself. That is, echoing Dōgen, the individual is able to engage in creative self-cultivation in any role and the product may eventually be liberation from the pressures of society rather than utter submersion in it. Of course, this opens Nishida to a string of other political critiques, not least those which we have already seen from the Critical Buddhists. However, for the moment, it is enough to realize that Nishida’s position here is at least partly in a well-established political discourse. The Shintō problem If we can locate Sorai in the centre of Shōtoku’s political spectrum (perhaps even ‘centre-left’), which was actually a dissenting position in the context of the Tokugawa orthodoxy, then the work of late Tokugawa thinkers such as Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863) certainly occupied a position on the ‘right’.60 One of the crucial differences in historical context between Sorai and Aizawa is that the latter had to confront the collapse of sakoku (as well as internal disorder) and the arrival of Western powers in Japan. Indeed, the Mito domain was one of the first to come into direct contact with Europeans, when British sailors arrived in 1824. Aizawa’s classic text, Shinron (New Proposals, 1825), appeared in the next year in direct response to that incident.61 Hence, unlike many Tokugawa thinkers, Aizawa and the Mito School were forced to consider questions of international relations explicitly in their political theory In fact, Shinron would retain a very high profile in Japan until the end of the Second World War, and it was acclaimed as one of the finest essays on militant patriotism —the late Mito School would be credited with the elaboration of the concept of kokutai (national polity).62 Although Aizawa was influenced by the work of Sorai, he was much more interested in the place of the imperial family in Japanese political culture and, in many ways, his conception of kokutai served to blend the Confucian Way of Heaven with reverence for the imperial line, as found in Shintō myth and ideology. With Shōtoku, we have already seen how this might symbolize a shift towards authoritarian politics in the context of the site of political thought in Japan. In effect, Aizawa performed the critical intellectual fudge that would form the basis of many Shintō-Confucian texts over the next hundred years or so. Arguing a simple syllogism, Aizawa asserted that: the imperial line was eternal and unending; the only universal and eternal law was the Way of Heaven; hence, the imperial family manifested the Way of Heaven. Confucian theory and Shintō mythology were unified to produce a vision of an unchanging natural order with the Japanese emperor as its beginning and end. This kind of position was

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certainly encompassed by the theoretical field established in Shōtoku’s constitution, but Aizawa bolsters this location with unprecedented force, effectively defining the parameters of the political ‘right’.63 Problems of international relations The position of Aizawa and the Mito School was ambiguous in a number of important ways. Perhaps most pressingly in the context of a newly internationalized nation, the school was unclear about how to resolve the contradictions between the universal (Mandate of Heaven) and the particular (emperor of Japan). If the emperor really embodied universal values, how should he relate to other nations and their political systems? The situation parallels that of ancient China, which operated its international relations within the terms of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ worldview, whereby all other nations were related to China as vassals to the benevolent emperor. It also parallels the situation in early Japanese history, when Shōtoku first tried to unite the various clans into a single, hierarchical political unit.64 A crucial question that determines the character of the site of thinking about international relations in modern Japan concerns the use of the domestic analogy: to what extent can pseudo-Confucian principles of ‘designation’ be applied to the international arena? Before the influx of Western philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century, but after the effective collapse of Japan’s international isolationism, this question was central to political thought. Just as we have seen in the case of domestic political models, so it was also the case that thinking about international relations occupied an indigenous intellectual spectrum, characterized by debates and disagreements. The principle of designations could be applied in various ways to the international system, each defining a different type of Co-Prosperity. On the one hand, with the infusion of Shintō mythology, it could be used to justify a radically hierarchical regional and international order, modelled on the centre-periphery relations of ancient China. Each nation beyond the boundaries of Japan would have a particular designation and character, but each would be related to Japan as subject to ruler. Indeed, the tendency for Japanese political discourse to move in that direction was suggested early on by the way Yoshida Shōin interpreted the Mito School and by the rapid movement to denigrate China’s claim to the status of ‘Middle Kingdom’.65 The rise of Neo-Shintō in the late Tokugawa and Meiji periods has been well documented elsewhere,66 what is important here is the logical necessity, inherent in Shōin’s thought, not only of overthrowing the Shōgun but also of denigrating and ultimately subordinating China. The importance of the label ‘Middle Kingdom’ should not be overlooked in this regard. Indeed, the ideographs used to write Chūkoku (China) literally mean ‘Middle Kingdom’. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, and particularly after Japan started to modernize in European terms ‘shina emerged as a word that signified China as a troubled place mired in its past, in contrast to Japan, a modern Asian nation’ (Tanaka

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1995:4).67 Although commentators such as Tanaka (1995) and Enoki (1983) recognize that this shift in vocabulary signified a shift in the way China was regarded by Japan, since a term of respect (even reverence) had been replaced by a term of denigration,68 the philosophical necessity and significance of the shift is rarely appreciated: if the Japanese Emperor were to be accepted as the embodiment of Heaven on Earth, then to call China the Middle Kingdom was tantamount to blasphemy. The centrality of Japan in a Confucian-Shintō worldview required (at least) the symbolic subordination of China.69 However, following the more permissive and pluralistic interpretation of ‘designations’, it is also possible to see how a model of tolerance and diversity could emerge at the other end of the political spectrum. We have already seen, for example, how the honji-suijaku theory of the Lotus Sūtra (via Saichō and Kūkai) might lead to an equal respect for all particular manifestations of the absolute in the world—no matter what their character or cultural form. When the Kyoto School started to debate the necessity for a ‘world historical standpoint’ in the late 1930s and 1940s, one of their most important innovations was the recognition that world history had no fixed ‘centre’. Indeed, Kōyama Iwao even refers to the inability of Europe to sustain itself as a ‘Middle Kingdom’ (chūka) in the modern, internationalized world (CK:156) —just as China was no longer the Middle Kingdom, and Japan should not be made into one (contrary to the assertions of the Shintōists). Following this line of thought, the designations of nations can be seen as a way of embracing diversity and encouraging a permissively co-prosperous system —just as the Idealist Confucianism of Wang Yang-Ming sought to embrace the diversity of individuals within a society, exploding the dogmatic acceptance of a natural hierarchy. With the admixture of the language of ‘national missions’, drawn from the German Romantic tradition, Nishida himself would later argue that: Every people is historically formative, but…in accordance with the various tendencies of world historical development, a particular people may become formative, and another people may become passive [material— shitsuryō].70 (NKZ XII:404) I consider the world of the present-day to be in an age of global selfawakening [sekaiteki jikaku]. If each nation can self-awaken to its own world mission, then we will be able to construct a single world-historical world [sekaishiteki sekai], that is, a world-of-worlds [sekaiteki sekai].71 (NKZ XII:427) Interestingly, Nishida and the Kyoto School would explicitly adopt this nineteenth century ‘domestic analogy’ method for thinking about international

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affairs, arguing that nations were simply a larger scale of individual personalities and thus subject to the same rules. The site of political thought in early-twentieth-century Japan Most of the debates that have characterized the history of political thought in Japan continue through the final years of the nineteenth and into the early years of the twentieth centuries. Of course, the terms employed in these debates were altered by new developments in the intellectual context. In particular, thinkers in Japan were increasingly exposed to Western ‘philosophy’, especially following the Meiji ishin and the subsequent Charter Oath (Setaisho, 1868), which called on scholars to seek knowledge throughout the world in order to strengthen Japan (Article 5). Given the imperialist nature of the Meiji ishin, it should come as no surprise to learn that the direction of the political orthodoxy was very much towards a Confucian-Shintō Renaissance. Indeed, in the early part of this period, some Japanese groups even turned against the influence of Buddhism on Japanese society and they destroyed many Buddhist temples during the brief haibutsu kishaku (extermination of Buddhism). Hence, the influence of Confucian doctrine, now subordinated to the Shintō pantheon along the lines set out by Aizawa, was evident in both the Meiji Constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education, which effectively established the dominant linguistic and ideological conventions of the imperial state. The work of philosophers such as Inoue Tetsujirō, the first Japanese professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, would be instrumental in the construction of a philosophical justification of the synthesis of the Confucian Way of Heaven with the Shintō Imperial Way. Indeed, as we have already seen, Inoue was very influential in the process of promoting the acceptance of Confucianism as the authentic source of Japanese philosophy, particularly in the field of politics. In some ways, as the professor in Tokyo, Inoue was Nishida’s opposite number. Kyoto was certainly not the political hotbed of Tokyo, and political pressures on Inoue would have been much greater than those on Nishida. Nonetheless, Inoue seemed to warm to the task of attempting to philosophize a Shintō-Confucian synthesis in a way far more explicit than any of the Kyoto School thinkers. In 1891 he published an official commentary on the Imperial Rescript, Chokugo engi (The Meaning of the Imperial Rescript), in which he finally collapsed the distinction between religion and politics, rendering a fairly literal, authoritarian interpretation of phrases such as: ‘Our Imperial Throne is coeval with heaven and earth.’ From about 1925/26 (the end of the Taishō period), Inoue published a series of monographs which explicitly attempted to conflate the Way of Heaven with the Imperial Way (kōdō),72 culminating in 1939 with his contribution to the hierarchical conceptualization of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Tōyō bunka to Shina no shōrai (East Asian Culture and the Future of

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China). Inoue’s synthesis followed quite closely along the lines already immanent in the work of earlier synthesizers such as Aizawa and Yoshida Shōin, and even in the absolutist interpretation of Shōtoku’s seventh century constitution. Whilst Inoue might be considered as continuing some of the themes developed on the more authoritarian side of an indigenous spectrum of political thought, other contemporaneous thinkers would be quick to dispute him—ensuring the continuation of a wider field of political discourse in familiar terms. In particular, thinkers such as Kiyozawa Manchi (1863–1903) and Inoue Enryō (1859–1919) would work very hard to demonstrate that Buddhism (rather than Confucianism) provided a better indigenous resource with which to converse with Western philosophy and with which Japan should model its relations with the outside world. Nishida would be much more influenced by these men than by Inoue Tetsujirō (who was, in many ways, a competitor) —indeed, much of Inoue Enryō’s work on Hegel and FH Ostwald would be paraphrased into Nishida’s own work, especially regarding the socio-political significance of Ostwald’s idea of ‘energetism’ and its convergence with a Buddhist influenced conception of reality.73 Certainly, by the time Nishida started to publish, Inoue and Manshi had largely recovered the respectability of Buddhism in the intellectual discourse, thus reopening some of the more permissive regions of the indigenous political site. A new position in Japanese political discourse was opened up by Ōnishi Hajime (1864–1900), who is often referred to as the greatest philosopher that Japan never had, since he died so young (at 35), legendarily because of the angst of intellectual life in Japan during the Meiji period.74 He was one of the few Japanese Christians to gain widespread respect as a philosopher in Japan, and he was critical of both the Confucian stance of Inoue Tetsujirō and the Buddhist informed ideas of Inoue Enryō.75 In a critical but scholarly rebuff of Inoue Tetsujirō’s commentary on the Imperial Rescript, Ônishi drew on Kant to argue that Inoue had failed to draw a distinction between ethics (rinri), which was the quest for universal codes of conduct, unknowable to man since they are located in Kant’s noumenal realm, and morality (tokkō), which was a specific formulation of rules governing conduct in particular societies.76 For Ōnishi, Confucianism and the Imperial Way were at best examples of morality in this narrow sense. At least partly thanks to Ōnishi, Kant and Neo-Kantianism would form an important part of the Kyoto School’s political context. Of course, other threads of social and political thought came into Japan during this period. Thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Katō Hiroyuki (1836– 1916), strongly influenced by Herbert Spencer and ideas of social Darwinism, would call for the expulsion of Confucianism from Japanese society, calling Confucian traditions and Shintō beliefs idealistic relics of a barbaric past that should be abandoned in favour of individualism, lest Japan be destroyed in the international fight for the survival of the fittest: the strong eat the weak (jakuniku kyōshoku).77 Fukuzawa was severely critical of the Imperial Rescript, having

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already dropped a bombshell on the Confucian tradition in the first line of his bestseller, Gakumon no susume (The Advancement of Learning, 1872), when he exploded ‘designations’: ‘Heaven makes no man above any other and no man below any other.’ After Fukuzawa, and at least partly because of him, positivism continued to be the dominant influence from European philosophy until the early years of the twentieth century, when philosophy began to establish itself in Japan as a distinct and professionalized academic discipline. A watershed was the rise of pragmatism which accompanied the translation of texts by Dewey and James into Japanese.78 By the Taishō period, however, the Japanese intelligentsia had discovered a tradition of European thought that seemed to resonate more closely with its own indigenous traditions (particularly its Buddhist traditions): the intuitivist thought of Bergson and the Neo-Kantians (especially the Marburg and Heidelberg Schools), and the dialectics of Hegel. These threads of thought would be hugely influential in the weave of the Kyoto School, members of which would spend considerable amounts of time in Marburg, Heidelberg and Freiburg with Husserl, Rickert and Heidegger. The turn towards more metaphysical philosophy reflected not only a general broadening of the philosophical corpus available to Japanese thinkers, but also a gradual realization that philosophy did not have to be explicitly tied to political practice: What made neo-Kantianism the leading philosophy of the Taishō times was the fact that, until then, Anglo-American thought, from Mill to Dewey, was too much involved in politico-social problems, to the exclusion of critical epistemology and metaphysical questions. For academic philosophers, epistemology and metaphysics were becoming important. Early Meiji thinkers, pressed as they were by political problems, thought that every philosopher like Mill was supposed to write on governmental policies or on human rights. (Piovesana 1963/97:77) It is important to realize that Nishida Kitarō was forming his early ideas about the meaning and purpose of philosophy during this push for junsui tetsugaku (pure philosophy), and that, therefore, his models for Western political thought were metaphysicians like Kant rather than utilitarians like Mill. This clearly reinforced an indigenous Buddhist tradition of discussing the epistemological and ethical dimensions of the political. The bias towards an understanding of politics as moral philosophy rather than as concrete political practice is clear from Nishida’s first full length book, Zen no kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good), which appeared in 1911. In sum, then, it is clear that political thought in Japan had a long and sophisticated history before Nishida, and that his work must be understood at least partly in the context of that history. The history is not one of a political

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space defined by the ‘left-right’ continuum that historians tend to read back into the history of political thought in Europe. Rather, it is characterized by the continuous cross-fertilization of Confucian and Buddhist ideas about good conduct, ideal relations and ethical governance. This dialogue does in fact establish a multidimensional site for political ideas, stretching from a crude authoritarianism at one end, often characterized by a Neo-Confucian-Shintō syncretism, to a permissive and relativistic pluralism at the other, often defined by the reinterpretation of Confucianisn in Buddhist terms. When it comes to understanding the politics of the Kyoto School, it will be important to reflect, for example, that Nishida and the authors of a document like Kokutai no hongi actually occupy positions at opposite sides of this indigenous space.

3 The early Nishida and the place of Japanese political philosophy

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.1 (Matthew 10:16) For many commentators, the publication of Zen no kenkyū (1911) represents the beginning of Japanese philosophy. Its pages contain the first attempt to formulate the Japanese intellectual tradition into the language of Western philosophy. For Heisig, the importance of this work, and of the Kyoto School more generally, is not located in its ‘Japaneseness’ but rather in the fact that the school ‘positioned themselves in a place as unfamiliar to the eastern mind as it is to the western’ (Heisig 2001:260).2 This contradictory location presents a series of dilemmas to the scholar. In particular, there has been a tendency to read the Kyoto School as though they were ‘Western’ philosophers with the simple admixture of some ‘Asian spice’. However, such an approach does not do justice to the intellectual heritage of the school. In this regard, Heisig laments that ‘very little attention has been given to the Kyoto School by scholars devoted to the classical thought and texts of the east’ (Heisig 2001:260). Even Japanese scholars have been remiss in this regard. In the last chapter, I attempted to provide something of this context, however briefly. In this chapter it will be seen that Nishida Kitarō was selfconsciously engaged in a discourse with both the Japanese tradition and with currents of European thought—and it would be impossible to identify his location without a grounding in each. In particular, a reading of Nishida’s first book, Zen no kenkyū, will be seen to be politicized by its ‘Japanese’ context in a way that a traditionally ‘European’ reading would miss. The political space here is alien to the European context. To some extent, this explains why the early Nishida has always been seen as an apolitical thinker. The politics of Zen no kenkyū The idea that Nishida’s wartime writings represent his only political texts is lent great strength by the fact that his contemporaries (including other members of the Kyoto School) criticized his earlier writings for being insufficiently

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social.3 Nishida is said to have made a deliberate ‘turn’ in the early years of the 1930s, at least partly in response to these criticisms.4 Prima facie the ‘turn’ seems substantive—there was a definite shift in Nishida’s output towards essays with explicitly political titles.5 However, a question should be raised about whether there was any real shift in the content or concerns of Nishida’s thought, or whether the importance of the change was mainly in his manipulation of linguistic conventions. It is undeniably the case that the late Nishida utilized the vocabulary of political thought in a manner rather divorced from his pre-turn writings. Nonetheless, some commentators have seen the genesis of all Nishida’s thought in his earliest writings6 and Nishida himself would frequently refer his audience back to his first work, Zen no kenkyū (1911), for a more complete explanation of his standpoint.7 Viglielmo (1971:509) suggests that there was no real ‘turn’ in Nishida’s thought, but that ‘there is only the ever more luxuriant flowering of the buds that emerged in Zen no kenkyū. Quite often the terms change, but the substance does not’.8 If we are to concede the possibility that Nishida’s ‘turn’ in the 1930s was more cosmetic than substantial, then we must also consider the possibility that his earlier writings (and Zen no kenkyū in particular) contained at least the seeds of a political philosophy. Because these early writings pre-date the advent of fascist politics in Japan, and certainly Nishida’s involvement in state politics, they are liberated to some extent from the contextual embarrassment of his later writings. Hence, Zen no kenkyū provides a special opportunity to discover the political thought of Nishida before the dark clouds of ultra-nationalism cast their shadow over the social discourse. It will be seen that a close reading of Nishida’s first publication not only provides a fresh and innovative philosophy of politics in its own right (speaking in the recognisable conventions of ‘philosophy’), but that it also provides a politically significant context for his philosophically weaker and ideologically suspect wartime writings. The Nishida of Zen no kenkyū, 1870–1911 It has become a commonplace in the defence of Nishida against charges of his complicity in the ultra-nationalist cause to state that he was quite disinterested in politics. In his diaries, we see very little mention of domestic or international political events; Nishida writes mainly about his experiences of Zen training, about his problems finding employment, and about his evident emotional angst.9 Knauth notes that there is a visible shift towards political commentary in Nishida’s diaries (presumably reflecting increased political involvement) after his retirement from Kyoto Imperial University in 1928 (Knauth 1965:347). The general story painted by the revisionist literature is that Nishida was dragged into the political arena against his natural tendencies—his hand forced by the domestic and international happenings of the 1930s. Evidence does exists which suggests that this was how Nishida himself felt: after the invasion of China in 1937, for example, Nishida wrote to Kōsaka Masaaki that he had not previously

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had the time or inclination to consider the ‘essence of the state’ (kokka no honshitsu) but that events had led him to see its importance (NKZ XVIII:608–9).10 Such an approach to Nishida’s biography is supported in the secondary literature by an overwhelming focus on the religious content of his early work, especially Zen no kenkyū. Some highly visible commentaries almost go so far as to suggest that Zen no kenkyū could be read as a philosophical inquiry into Zen Buddhism (rather than into zen (the good)).11 Abe Masao, in his enlightened introduction to the second English-language translation of An Inquiry into the Good, makes not a single mention of politics. To some extent this bias reflects the fact that the Kyoto School was introduced to Western academe through the field of comparative religions12—its political copy-book was already blotted by the public dismissal of prominent members (such as Kōyama Iwao (1905–93) and Nishitani Keiji) from their teaching positions after the war.13 Having died a few months before the end of the war, Nishida (and his apologists) can at least be thankful that he was not subject to the kyōshoku tsuihō (academic purges). Painting Nishida as the naïve, unworldly philosopher may seem plausible and convenient, but ignoring the political aspects of Nishida’s thought (and personality) is certainly not an adequate defence of his apparent complicity in the official politics of the 1940s. The fact is that Nishida was actively involved in political activities in his youth, that he maintained a strong commitment to certain political ideals throughout his life, and that (drawing on his Buddhist heritage) he conceived of little distinction between religion and politics in his philosophical system. The time has come to take Nishida seriously as a political thinker. Nishida’s politics before 1911 The Nishida biographer is lucky that Nishida kept a diary (at least intermittently) from 1897 to 1945.14 Despite the absence of some entries and some notable gaps, the 48 volumes provide an interesting portrait of the man and his thought. The picture is indeed one of a young philosopher completely (and almost exclusively) obsessed by his work, family and Zen practice. However, Nishida was already twenty-seven years of age when he made his first diary entry, just embarking on (and obsessing over) his academic career. His formative school years, his time at Tokyo University, and more than half the politically tumultuous Meiji period (1868–1912) are completely absent. It should not really be surprising that an intelligent young man, sharing classes with people of exceptional ability and perceptiveness, living in a time of exciting socio-political change should become interested in politics.15 Thankfully, despite the absence of a diary from this early period, biographers have discovered a number of useful resources—such as correspondence between Nishida and his eminent middle-school classmate, Yamamoto Chōsui.16 What is striking about the Nishida from this period is his passionate attachment to Meiji liberalism and his interest in progressive thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi

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(1834–1901).17 A brief account of a couple of significant incidents may prove enlightening. Along with his classmates at the Ishikawa Senmongakkō, Nishida was thrilled by the political changes which appeared to be taking place in the late 1880s. A group of students, including Nishida, celebrated the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in February 1889 by photographing themselves making a pledge to defend liberty and freedom.18 However, Nishida (perhaps following the example of Yamamoto) quickly became disillusioned by the new political regime. He lamented the increasing influence of the Satsuma-Chōshū (Satchō) clique, which he thought was endangering the seeds of liberalism in the new constitution. The contradiction between political ideals and political practice seemed stark. Like Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nishida was appalled by the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, believing that the conservative Confucian values enshrined therein would be obstacles preventing ‘Japanese society from achieving selfindependence’ (Koizumi 2001:794). The Imperial Rescript made such a lasting impression on Nishida that even in 1942, in the midst of war and domestic repression, he could recall the changes which took place in his friendly, family-like (kazokuteki) school when it was converted into the Shikō (Fourth Higher School) in 1890.19 Nishida recalls that he had followed Yamamoto when he quit the school in protest shortly after the change. Nishida thought that he would get a better education through independent, home study than in the militaristic (budanteki) atmosphere of the new school. Flexibility and freedom in education were the most important factors. As we will see, these were beliefs that would stay with Nishida throughout his later career as a university professor. In the end, Nishida paid a painful price for his political convictions—by leaving Shikō before graduation, Nishida condemned himself to the lowly position of special student when he entered Tokyo Imperial University (Tōdai), a status reserved for students of questionable academic quality. However, to some extent, the poor treatment Nishida received at Tōdai as a young undergraduate served to underline his commitment to self-independence in the academic realm —he was forced to educate himself.20 At the same time, his personal and academic isolation made him withdraw further and further from the social and political happenings of the time. Nishida became increasingly interested in Zen, and he spent some time training at the Engaku-ji in Kamakura, where his school friend Suzuki Daisetsu was studying. Hence, by the time he had graduated from Tōdai and started his diary in 1897, Nishida’s interest in politics had been transformed from an active, social involvement into a more passive, intellectual pursuit: his social-acts had become speech-acts. In the parlance of Zen Buddhism: Nishida had turned his light around. However, his political ideals can be seen (almost unaltered since his departure from Shikō) throughout the course of his diary.21 In this context, Nishida’s increasing interest in religion (particularly Zen) during and after his time at Tōdai can also be seen to reflect his commitment to the political ideals of

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individual self-independence. It should be remembered that Buddhism (particularly Zen and particularly the Engagku-ji) had a distinctly political pedigree at the turn of the century. In his reminiscences of his teacher, Nishitani Keiji suggests that Nishida was attracted to Zen because of the courage it gave him to be an individual even in the face of adversity. Later in his career Nishdia would seek to ‘inspire an independent spirit in his students so that they might go their own ways and not be fettered to their teacher’s ideas’ (Nishitani 1991:24). It is in this context that we should view the politics of Nishida’s earliest works, especially Zen no kenkyū, which so successfully and influentially achieved a synthesis of ethical, political and religious thought. It is not necessary at this stage to go so far as to claim that Nishida’s youthful enthusiasm for Meiji liberalism (at least in the educational sphere) should re-inform our understanding of his later wartime nationalism, but it is certainly clear that reading such a rightwing agenda back into his earlier works would be both unjust and unscholarly. Zen no kenkyū should be read as the intellectual product of a developing philosopher who had replaced his youthful zeal for political protest with a new enthusiasm for the value of ideas and ideals in their own right. This stance is clearly reflected in the manuscript itself. Structuring Zen no kenkyū Both the structure and the content of Zen no kenkyū suggests that ethics and politics were two of Nishida’s central concerns. The text is in thirty-two chapters, divided into four sections: Pure Experience (junsui keiken); Reality (jitsuzai); The Good (Zen); and Religion (shūkyō). Although most commentators have focussed on the first and second parts of the book,22 since these set out the foundations of Nishida’s metaphysical system and introduce key concepts such as pure experience (junsui keiken) itself, the structure of the book suggests that these areas were not the primary goal of the inquiry. Whilst Nishida himself did acknowledge that the second section, ‘Reality’, was ‘the core of the book’, he goes on to explain that the third (and longest) section (after which the book was named), ‘The Good’, represented the development of the basic ideas from section two into a self-sufficient ethic (ZK:3–4). In fact, Nishida wrote sections two and three first, only adding one and four afterwards—his introduction suggesting that readers skip the first section and proceed directly into two and three (ZK:3). The first chapter of section two is revealingly entitled, ‘The Start-Point of the Research’, and the first line draws an instant connection between the role of philosophy and practical issues of social conduct: ‘Philosophical worldviews and views of one’s life are closely related to the practical demands of morality and religion, which assert the ways that humans must behave and where they must find peace of mind’ (ZK:59). It is clear from the outset that Nishida is aware that philosophy (and his philosophy in particular) has political meaning; any attempt to develop rules for moral conduct has implications for political inquiry.23 In the

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first lines of section three of Zen no kenkyū, Nishida explicitly states: ‘I will now consider such practical problems as what we humans should do, what sort of thing is good, or on what should human action be based. I believe that the various phenomena of humanity’s practical nature can be subsumed within the category of conduct [kōi]’ (ZK:127). In other words, in a manner that we have seen is characteristic of the Mahāyāna tradition, Nishida begins his inquiry by subsuming abstract divisions (such as politics, morality and religion) into contradictory unities (in this case, ‘conduct’). For Nishida, conduct (or willed action) is at once a political, moral and absolute act. With this in mind, the third section, the ‘independent ethic’, can be read as Nishida’s first political text—and the earlier sections of Zen no kenkyū can be seen as preparing the ground for Nishida’s political ethics. Pure experience and personality The first two sections of Zen no kenkyū set out Nishida’s concept of pure experience and its relationship with absolute reality. There is no space here for a detailed discussion, but, at its most basic, pure experience refers to one’s experience of the undivided reality which lies at the base of everything. It is prior to abstract thought and even to the ego.24 Indeed, pure experience gives rise to our perception of self, rather than vice versa. ‘It is not that there is an individual and this gives rise to experience, rather there is experience and then the individual—experience is more fundamental than distinctions between individuals’ (ZK:4). The individual ego is in no way fundamental, but is rather an abstraction—it is a contradictory self-identity, existing simultaneously as a particular form and as the undivided absolute reality.25 This is clearly a philosophical expression of the Mahāyāna doctrine: hongaku shisō. Accordingly, all everyday things are self-contradictions, since there are no real (or absolute) distinctions even between apparent particularisms. To realize one’s true self or personality (jinkaku) is to experience the undivided ground prior to the deliberation of conscious/rational thought—true self, absolute reality (and, as we will see, the good) are all located in this site of pure experience. In Zen Buddhist influenced language, Nishida refers to this genuine self-knowledge as a moment of ‘existential realization’ (taitoku) (ZK:181). Personality is thus a multilayered (jūsō) location (basho) for Nishida. At its most superficial (or abstract) it corresponds with the ego—that is, it is a psychologism defined by the negation of the everyday Other. At its most profound it corresponds with absolute unified reality—that is, it is defined by absolute self-negation. Later on, Nishida would call this the location of ‘absolute nothingness’ (zettai mu), as realized in pure experience. This ‘nothingness’ is a different order of negation from that experienced in everyday terms—echoing Mahāyānist conceptions of the negation in sūnyatā.26 Conceivably, there are an infinite number of intermediate locations between the individual ego and the absolute, defined by differing levels of negation—one such location will turn out

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to be the nation. Crucially, each of these levels of unity through contradiction are simultaneously the self. The true self is an ‘absolute unity of contradictions’ — not merely the negation of the everyday Other, but an absolute self-negation. Nishida calls the ‘insight into this single reality’ chiteki chokkan (intellectual intuition), and he suggests that ‘it is an extremely ordinary phenomenon’, occurring in every disciplined action (jukuren seru kōdō) (ZK:54). It is like an everyday kenshō. Clearly, such a view of the self has profound implications for political ethics. In particular, the coincidence of personality and reality acts to collapse the distinction between internal and external actions. Hence, the key unit of moral behaviour is seen as ‘conduct’ (kōi), which is defined as ‘willedaction’ (yūiteki dōsa). The non-duality of the self and the absolute also has implications for our understanding of the process of history. Whilst for Kant history should be the story of man’s gradual (if spasmodic) perfection (since nature would not have given us potentials that could not be fulfilled), for Nishida, following the Mahāyāna tradition, man is already perfect—he has simply forgotten his true nature.27 To some extent, this leads to a counter-intuitive relative de-emphasizing of the nation in Nishida; whilst Kant suggests that man will never attain perfection in his life time but only in the species,28 Nishida is clear that we are individually able to realize our true natures spontaneously at any time (in the right socio-political conditions). Somewhat like Bergson, Nishida’s conception of the self makes politics into a ‘machine à faire des dieux’ (Bergson 1932:338). It is a radical kind of individualism. Nishida seems fully aware of the problems associated with attempting to develop a moral political system from these ostensibly Zen Buddhist (hongaku shisō) foundations—in which neither good nor evil appears to have ‘the slightest superiority or inferiority’ in any ultimate sense (ZK:148).29 Because he takes the self seriously as a multilayered location, Nishida dedicates four chapters of Zen no kenkyū to an analysis of existing philosophies of social and political ethics (in Europe) in an attempt to model a concrete ethic for everyday life and absolute satisfaction simultaneously. For Nishida, questions of ethics (‘what is good conduct and what is bad conduct’) ‘are the most important problems we face’, if we are to accept his view of the self (ZK:150). Effectively, Nishida is attempting to resolve the hongaku shisō dilemma of antinomianism through a reading of European moral and political philosophy. Zen no kenkyū as political criticism Nishida divides the existing (mainly European) corpus of moral and political philosophy into three broad categories—intuitive (chokkakusetsu), heteronomous (taritsuteki ronri gakusetsu) and autonomous theories (jiritsuteki ronri gakusetsu) —and he provides a critique of each. Finally, his own conception of political ethics, rooted in the Japanese tradition, is presented as the best solution.

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Intuitive ethics Perhaps surprisingly, given the penchant of scholars to group Nishida with Bergson as an ‘intuitive’ thinker, intuitive theories are dismissed quickly. For Nishida, an intuitive theory of ethics is one which claims that ‘the moral laws by which we should judge our conduct have no other reason [than this intuition]’ (ZK:151). Nishida is willing to admit that some moral principles do seem selfevident (drawing on his Confucian heritage, he cites loyalty and filial piety), but he notes that such principles often contradict each other in specific circumstances, and that people often disagree about which principles should take priority (ZK:152–3). Such inconsistencies demonstrate to Nishida that (at least on the level of the everyday ego) intuition cannot provide knowledge of universal morality. In today’s society, intuitive theories of morality amount to little more than indulgent hedonism (at best) or anarchy (at worst). At this stage Nishida chooses not to pursue the idea that the pure experience of an ‘existentially realized’ (or enlightened) personality is functionally identical to perfectly intuitive morality Such a standpoint would suggest that before intuitive ethics can become moral, mankind must become enlightened, or at least that moments of genuine morality must coincide with moments of kenshō. In Nishida’s terms: ‘intellectual intuition’ opens the door for truly moral action, which is the unity of true insight and spontaneous action (or ‘action intuition’ (kōiteki chokkan) to use the term favoured by Nishida in his later works). There are some clear resonances here with the ethical dilemma of Shinran, who suggested that genuinely moral action was essentially a post-faith condition— man glimpses enlightenment and then executes a ‘turnabout’ (honshin ikkai) back into everyday life.30 For Nishida, however, it was not a question of faith but of pure experience—he formulated his ‘turnabout’ in terms of empiricism rather than religion or even intuition in the conventional sense.31 Heteronomous theories In his discussion of heteronomous ethics, Nishida explicitly takes on the political philosophy of Hobbes and (via Hsun-tsu) Confucius.32 Nishida’s treatment of this issue is particularly salient when one considers his school-time experiences, his response to the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, and his later attitude to the militarization of Japanese society along with the publication of Kokutai no hongi in 1937. For Nishida, heteronomous theories derive morality ‘in accordance with that which has greatest power over us…good and evil seem to be determined by the commands of the authority figure’ (ZK:156). This was self-evidently true for Hobbes, who argued that citizens of a state are obliged to conform to all laws of their monarch’s making (even if these laws seemed to insult their dignity) simply because being subject to law was better than being subjected to anarchy. Any law, even bad law, was better than no law. Morality was determined by the will of the

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monarch and was created in a particular form by the social contract. For Nishida, this was a type of ‘authority theory’ (kenryokusetsu or ken’isetsu). One consequence of heteronomous theories is a focus on the moral energy (moralische energie) of the state, since each nation becomes a moral entity with an independent moral code. In the international state of nature, there is no moral arbiter which can mediate the various moral claims of different nations—hence the international state of nature is a state of war. Heteronomous theories produce radical moral relativism (often with pretensions of universalism), but no universal code of conduct. Hence, for Nishida, heteronomous theories amount to little more than intuitive theories—neither can provide universal ethics on the level of everyday experience. Whilst intuitive theories indulge the individual, heteronomous theories indulge the nation.33 Nishida points out that there are two kinds of heteronomous theories: monarchical (kunkenteki kenryoku setsu) and divine (shinkenteki kenryoku setsu). Whilst the two do not really differ in principle or function, Nishida seems (idealistically) willing to acknowledge that divine rule might be more able to produce universally ‘moral’ laws than monarchical rule—or, at least, that the idea of divine rule helps us to take the idea of universal right more seriously. His immediate purpose seems to be to make a distinction between the Confucian Mandate of Heaven and Hobbes’ Leviathan. However, looking back from the standpoint of the 1940s, one can perceive the beginnings of the idealism which drew Nishida’s work towards Shintō propaganda.34 Nevertheless, even if he concedes that the laws of conduct generated in a (divine) heteronomous system could be objectively moral (at least in principle), Nishida still rejects the idea that the social system itself would be moral. It will be recalled that conduct, for Nishida, was defined in terms of the will, not exclusively in terms of action. Hence, being coerced by external forces (the legal apparatus of a state) into performing ‘the good’ does not constitute moral conduct at all. Unlike Rousseau, Nishida does not believe that people can be forced to be free.35 Only actions which are the completion of moral intention can be considered truly moral. Heteronomous morality is actually an obstacle to genuine morality, since it prevents the individual from acting in a genuinely self-willed moral manner: in heteronomous theories/societies, people obey the law because they fear the consequences of not doing so—fear, not morality, becomes the internal aspect of good social conduct.36 There is a close resonance here with the anti-institutionalism of the Mahāyāna tradition. This ethical stance was clearly in evidence in Nishida’s thinking as early as 1890, when he abandoned Shikō and criticized the new government because of its shift away from its fledgling liberal tendencies towards a more authoritarian stance (on a Confucian model). Nishida lamented the loss of educational freedom (i.e. the freedom to pursue one’s studies in a self-willed manner) as it became replaced by a strict and compulsory system. For Nishida, all the merits of education disappeared when his will to learn was no longer relevant to his education. He chose to leave the school system and educate himself. Throughout

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his career, Nishida would remain a passionate defender of this kind of academic liberty.37 His motto, like that of Kant’s enlightenment, appears to have been ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!’ (Kant 1784b:54).38 In broader terms, Nishida believed that heteronomous/social morality was the polar opposite of true knowledge, because it rewarded most those who were least enlightened. Anyone who behaves in a certain way because of a genuine selfrealization runs the risk of being condemned as immoral (or criminal) if he/she contravenes social laws—this is, of course, the perennial dilemma of the antisocial Zen master. ‘It would seem, then, that humans must shrug off the restrictions of [heteronomous] morality as quickly as possible, if we are to progress and develop’ (ZK:159). In these terms, one might have expected that Nishida would have become a fierce critic of the military government of the 1930s and 1940s, which manifested a strictly heteronomous regime based on ‘authority theory’, as elucidated in the Kokutai no hongi. It is interesting to reflect here, however, that the Buddha’s solution to such a disjunction between secular and absolute law was to instruct the sangha to withdraw from society and to be ‘islands unto themselves’ outside the social contract—thus preserving some pockets of genuine good in the nation. As Edward Said has said, the isolated intellectual ‘speaks truth to power’. The only time that violent rebellion seemed to be sanctioned by the Buddha was when the sangha itself was threatened.39 In keeping with the traditions of Japanese Buddhism, Nishida appears to be lamenting the divide between ōbō (imperial/secular law) and buppō (Buddhist/ absolute law) in heteronomous systems. In particular, he describes what he perceives as the tendency in Western philosophy to privilege social conventions and social morality over genuinely good behaviour. His critique shares some common ground with Rousseau, who also sees morality as the product of society and the good as originally asocial.40 However, unlike Rousseau and more like Rennyo, Nishida does not see morality as part of man’s perfectibility but as part of his decline— social morality and the sanctions accompanying it disincentivize the everyday man from forming (or valuing) the intention to be good.41 ‘Authority theory’ reduces the meaning of morality to ‘blind subservience’ (mōmokuteki fukujū, ZK:158) —which is not really morality at all. Autonomous theories: 1—rationalism The final group of ethical theories discussed by Nishida are autonomous theories. He outlines two main subdivisions: rational and hedonic. According to rational theory, right and wrong (in morality) are identical with truth and falsehood in knowledge. Nishida identifies this view with Socrates. Unlike intuitive theory, rational theory makes its claim to being universal by basing its foundations upon ostensibly objective reasoning about the nature of the world rather than upon subjective feelings. Because all people are capable of being rational, freedom and morality exist in the perfection of the rationality of each

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individual. Here Nishida appears to take Hegel and Kant as the models for the rational theory However, Nishida is not convinced by rational ethics. ‘If it were the case that abstract logic were the chief motivation of the will, then we would have to say that those who are best at reasoning [suiri, lit. guessing] are the best people. However, nobody can deny that the opposite is often the case: ignorant people are sometimes better than those with knowledge’ (ZK:164).42 Nishida’s critique of rational theory goes much further than the obvious allusion to Zen and Daoist sages. In the first place, Nishida suggests that although rational theory helps us to take the idea of universal morals more seriously (because it is couched in the ‘value-free’ language of logic), such theory cannot offer any positive wisdom about the content of that morality. On the one hand, rational theory simply mistakes must for should—rational laws are about compulsion not obligation in the moral sense. The application of reason to morality involves a critical epistemological fudge. Rationality may be able to explain why we must stay in contact with the ground—but that does not make flying immoral, only impossible. Furthermore, (like heteronomous theories) rational theory does not provide a model of morality at all, because the incentive for action is not premised in ethical insight but in the rational calculation of outcomes: in an ideally rational world, nobody would do anything that they couldn’t—which is quite different from the ideally moral world where everything everyone does is the good. More fundamentally, Nishida is simply sceptical about the ability of rationality to teach us the truth about the world. For Nishida rational thought is hypothetical or abstract.43 It is a creation of the consciousness designed to help the individual to live in the everyday world. Hence it is quite incapable of making insights into or making sense of true reality, which lies prior to conscious activity in the realm of pure experience. Rationality may be universal in an abstract sense, but it is certainly not fundamental. Indeed, Nishida is even sceptical that rationality is a universal system, and he ties it quite firmly to the development of European societies.44 Hence, whilst like Hegel Nishida identified ‘the good’ with the selfactualization of the human spirit, and freedom with the pursuit of this selfactualization, unlike Hegel, because Nishida did not believe in the objectivity of reason, Nishida did not hold that ‘Freedom is actual, therefore, only in a rational society whose institutions can be felt and known as rational by individuals who are “with themselves” in those institutions’ (Hegel 1821:xii).45 For Nishida, as for the Buddha in the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta, rationality is part of the problem of politics, not part of its solution.46 Autonomous theories: 2—hedonism The hedonic theories of Epicurus and Bentham are dismissed almost out of hand by Nishida, since they seem to combine the faults of all the previous models.

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Nishida admits that hedonism (unlike rationalism) does not confuse can for ought, and thus provides a valuative reason to engage in one act rather than another, but he finds it (like intuitive theory) rather arbitrary. Because it is impossible to construct an accurate standard of pleasure (upon which there could be universal agreement), there is no consistent solution to the problem of what to do when people’s pleasures conflict. Bentham’s political solution (utilitarianism), which states that the action bringing pleasure to the highest number of individuals should be considered more moral, is rejected by Nishida.47 Like heteronomous theories, utilitarianism seems to impose the arbitrary standards of an authority figure on the assessment of the pleasures of the people. Somewhat like Rousseau, then, Nishida foresees no necessary coincidence between majority opinion and the genuine general will. Furthermore, as we might expect from a man deeply engaged in Zen training, Nishida is simply unconvinced that humans should act only out of a desire for personal pleasure. He does not seem to doubt that there is a kind of ‘false altruism’ in which individuals engage for their own happiness, but this does not mean that ‘true altruism’ is non-existent. Indeed, to regard pleasure (kairaku) as the objective of human life contradicts our experience of that life: ‘we can never be satisfied by pleasure. On the contrary, people who take mere pleasure as their goal are an affront to human nature’ (ZK:175). Even more profoundly, the concept of the self which lies at the base of Epicurus and Bentham’s philosophy is quite alien to Nishida’s system. For him they are obsessing over the demands of the individual ego and thus actually prescribing a social order that hinders individuals from realizing their absolute personality. One crucial philosophical delusion which is fostered by hedonic theory is that morality exists in the results of one’s actions—any behaviour giving rise to pleasure is good. For Nishida, of course, such a crisp distinction between the motivation, actualization and implications of conduct was completely misconceived—conduct is willed action, and its value exists within itself. From his discussion of the main currents in moral philosophy (as he saw them), it is clear that Nishida recognizes three major problems in the discourse. First, none of the existing theories seemed to provide a genuinely universal base for moral conduct, free from arbitrary impositions. Second, existing theories failed to properly understand the idea that conduct is willed action—that is, that motivation must be consistent with (or unified with) action. Finally, Nishida points to a profound problem in the existing corpus: the misconception that the self is located in the abstract realm of thought rather than simultaneously in the fundamental space of pure experience. In Chapters 4 and 5, Nishida attempts to provide solutions to these problems within the framework of his own philosophy.

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Unity of personality and satisfaction (manzoku) as the good Given his encompassing view of the self, it should be no surprise that Nishida’s ethic is also an autonomous theory. However, because Nishida’s conception of the self is not limited to individual personalities, the distinction between autonomous and heteronomous theories is rather hazy To some extent, it is a false distinction. For Nishida everything exists within the self—which is identical with saying that everything (including the self) is without the self. Nonetheless, Nishida introduces us to his ethic via a discussion of another autonomous theory —energetism (katsudōsetsu). Energetism (or activity theory) acknowledges that the nature of the will is crucial to our understanding of moral conduct. Nishida cites Plato and Aristotle as advocates of the idea that the will is the fundamental unifying activity of consciousness and that ‘when such unification is brought to completion—in other words, when ideals are realized—we feel satisfaction… Hence, it is said that the good is the realization of our internal demands, i.e. our ideals—it is the development and completion of the will’ (ZK:177–8).48 Nishida is careful to draw a distinction between the ‘satisfaction’ (manzoku), which lies at the root of energetism, and the ‘pleasure’ (kairaku), which is the base of hedonism. Satisfaction is not the same as pleasure, since it is located in completion rather than in abstraction; although satisfaction is internal to the self, it is not arbitrary in the same way as pleasure. Satisfaction is concerned with truth not happiness—one can be satisfied even whilst suffering. Aristotle uses the term entelechie to describe the beauty of an entity which has completed itself, true to its own nature (or to describe the latent power of an entity to do so). For Nishida, this idea of beauty approaches the good: ‘The highest good is for our spirit to cultivate it various abilities, and for it to achieve a harmonious development’ (ZK:180). However, for Nishida the good transcends Aristotle’s idea of beauty because it is ultimately divorced from particular manifestations. Nishida’s ‘self’ is finally universal rather than (or, more properly, as well as) particular. In the end, ‘the concept of the good coincides with the concept of reality’ (ZK:181). This is perhaps the most explicit formulation of hongaku shisō in Japanese philosophy. If the good is considered to be the unification of self with true reality, then the laws of morality are ultimately included in the laws of reality—‘The idea that existence and value are separate results from an act of abstraction that separates objects of knowing from objects of feeling. In fact, in terms of concrete reality, both of these are originally unified’ (ZK:181). In order to pre-empt criticisms that he is lapsing back into a rational theory, Nishida is careful to point out that whilst rational theories give us the correct idea (that truth and good are identical), the kinds of insights that they give us into truth remain hypothetical (kateiteki) or abstract (chūshūteki), and ‘abstract knowledge and the good certainly do not coincide’ (ZK:181).

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Hence, Nishida develops a form of transcendental energetism, which he suggests is consistent with both Plato’s stance (that the good is the foundation of reality) and with the Upanishads of India (in which, as in the Mahāyāna tradition, the good is the realization of reality). The model seems to encompass solutions to the three problems of universalism, unity of will and action, and contradictory selfhood. The good is ultimately located in the realization of the unity of self and reality, but functionally it exists in conduct which moves in that direction. At this stage in his inquiry, however, Nishida is not yet clear about what would constitute good conduct in the world of everyday life; Nishida’s ethic seems to lack a concrete politic. Unlike energetism, which is entirely focussed on the self, political ethics must encompass conduct towards others. Like Bentham before him, Nishida makes the leap from one to the other by attempting to derive a standard by which competing ‘demands of consciousness’ may be judged. In keeping with his emphasis on unity (and again following Plato and Aristotle), Nishida explains that ‘a particular demand starts to become good only when it is related to the whole…the good is first and foremost a coordinated harmony [icchi chūwa] or mean between various activities’ (ZK:184).49 The crucial question is how the mean can be comprehended. For Plato the mean cannot signify a quantitative order because consciousness is a single unified system, not a collection of sequential events. Hence, it is the systematic activity of ideas that is essential to mean/harmony—for Plato this system of ideas is reason itself. For the good to be done, reason must control our emotions and desires— living in accord with reason is the good. In The Republic, Plato makes the leap from the organization of human consciousness to the organization of political society— a state which governs its citizens in accordance with reason manifests the highest political good.50 Whilst Nishida agrees with Plato’s diagnosis of the need to deduce a systematic activity of ideas, he parts company with the Greeks because (as we have seen) he does not believe that the unifying system could be reason. Clearly this will have serious repercussions not only for the content of morality but also, by extension, for the shape of good politics.51 Nishida argues that reason cannot be the unifying or systematizing power behind consciousness because reason is a product of consciousness, and is in no way prior to it. Plato’s reason, and even Kant’s pure reason, are intellectual abstractions which provide only a ‘formal relationship’ (keishikiteki kankei, ZK:187) with no content whatsoever. Because the harmonizing principle is prior to reason, it cannot be analyzed with reason—like art or music, it ‘must be realized intuitively in oneself. If we term this unifying power the personality of each individual, then the good is the maintenance and development of the individual, which is this unifying power’ (ZK:187). We have already seen how ‘personality’ has a special meaning for Nishida; it is not the result of ‘the various highly subjective hopes that are at the centre of each person’s superficial consciousness. These hopes may express

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something of the individual’s personality, but the true personality is shown when a person kills off these hopes and forgets his or her self’ (ZK:187–8). In other words, the reality which is revealed to us by pure experience, prior to the activity of our intellect or reason, should be our guide to moral conduct. In order to understand it, we must experience it by moving beyond our attachments to subjectivity and reason. There is a clear Zen influence here: to know the true reality of the self and the good means to have an existential realization. Good conduct is that which unifies the abstract individual with the internal demands of the absolute self. It occurs at Shinran’s moment of ‘turnabout’, in Dōgen’s ‘falling away of self’, and in Nishida’s ‘action intuition’. One concrete act that can never be moral is deceit or insincerity—since to deceive others is to reinforce the contradiction between self and truth (both for deceiver and deceived). For Nishida, rather idealistically, the imperative of sincerity should act as a check on the behaviour of those who seek to recklessly abandon the standards of society in the name of a greater truth.52 There are some clear parallels here with rules of the Buddhist sangha, explored above in Chapter 2, where the most serious of crimes is held to be lying about one’s level of spiritual attainment. For the sangha, there are other crimes that infringe upon either another’s or one’s own ability to attain realization: these are murder, stealing etc. Somewhat like Kant, Nishida appears to be suggesting that there is a moral imperative not to interfere with the freedom of others—ultimately the good lies in the unification (harmonization or negation) of all opposites.53 Claiming to follow the form if not the content of Plato’s argument in The Republic, Nishida makes the leap from individual consciousness to political society as a simple shift in scale (or contradictory location) (ZK:186). Good conduct does not only involve the individual self, but also other people in society (since it is the unity of will with action, and action has consequences for others). Nonetheless, because the chief satisfaction of individuals is found in their selfactualization and because that actualization is the absolute good, the responsibilities of the state are largely limited to protecting individual freedoms. As we have come to expect, Nishida is careful to draw a distinction between the liberties guaranteed by rational societies and those provided by his ideal moral society. Health, happiness and even knowledge are to be valued, but they should not take precedence over satisfaction. In other words, the state does not exist to mediate or guarantee the self-interested desires of its individual citizens, rather it should seek to provide a social environment which supports individuals in their quest for self-actualization.54 Because conduct is goal-oriented by the will, citizens must be free to chose (and realize) their own goals rather than forced to follow the dominant political ideology. In crude terms, this means that everybody should be valued for their unique skills and abilities rather than forced to develop the abilities prescribed by an authority as important—nobody can determine what talents are necessary for somebody else to achieve self-satisfaction, this determination is made in the consciousness itself.55 ‘Absolutely good conduct is

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that which takes as its goal the actualisation of personality. In other words, it must be conduct that moves towards the unity of consciousness’ (ZK:190).56 At a time when Confucian values in Japan were becoming synonymous with nationalist conservatism, the Neo-Shintō-Confucian syncretism, and heteronomous moralism, especially after the 1890 Rescript, Nishida appears to be voicing his dissent by evoking the traditional discourse surrounding Confucian pluralism, which we have seen revolving around Article 7 of Prince Shōtoku’s early constitution: ‘Let everyman have his own charge, and let not the spheres of duty be confused.’ This may be an early example of Nishida’s ‘backward marching’ approach to political criticism—re-informing the debate over Confucian values with the more tolerant and individualist aspects of its own tradition. In political terms, Nishida is advocating a radical individualism (although for him the genuine ‘individual’ is an absolute self-contradiction). He differentiates between his individualism and conventional individualism by claiming that the latter is really a form of egoism, and thus completely at odds with the idea of community.57 In Nishida’s terms, individualism and communalism are quite complementary, since the latter extends and encompasses the former: ‘when individuals in the same society show their natural talents (tenbun) and each act [on them] sufficiently, then society starts to progress’ (ZK:196). In a manner of speaking, Nishida is following the Confucian tradition and formulating society as a human analogy: society is most healthy and most satisfied when its constituent parts are also healthy and complete.58 Like the individual, society is a selfcontradictory identity; it exists in the space between the individual and the absolute. A fundamental political aspect of the good exists in the fact that, for Nishida, the idea of society is already subsumed into the concept of self—it is simply a larger scale of unity.59 However, Nishida’s radical individualism does not simply amount to anarchy. The integrity of society is saved by the fact that he takes the nation seriously as a personality in its own right. Not only does it constitute a personality in the sense that it is a self-contradictory identity, Nishida also suggests a nation can be considered as ‘constituting one living entity’ (ZK:197). He draws on biological arguments that humans pass on their cells to their descendents to argue that the cellular makeup of a nation remains relatively constant (assuming a stable population).60 Furthermore, whenever human beings forge a communal way of life, their individual consciousnesses are necessarily unified into a kind of social consciousness [shakaiteki ishiki]… However, the development of our own social consciousness is not restricted to small groups like the family. Rather, our spiritual and material lives can be developed in the context of various social groupings. Following the family, it is the nation [kokka] that should be considered as the expression of a single personality, which unifies the entirety of our conscious activity.61

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(ZK:197, 200) In everyday terms, the personality of a nation is expressed through its language, manners, culture, religions, and laws—each of which is unique to that particular location. Each nation is a particular manifestation of the underlying universal ground, echoing the idea of honji-suijaku (original thing—trace manifestation) found in the Lotus Sūtra. Hence the nation and the individual exist in a dialectical relationship of mutual contradiction, affirmation and development. Clearly, there is potential danger in such an organic view of the state and the reification of national cultures. The fascist regimes in Europe were constructed along just such lines (although they found their intellectual roots in antiEnlightenment thinkers such as Herder and Hamann), and, despite its context in a different tradition, Nishida’s work would be called into the service of the Imperial Japanese state in the 1940s, by political leaders with little interest in philosophical contexts. Nishida did not appear unaware of the dangers and in Zen no kenkyū he expresses his understanding of international relations in the language of moral philosophy, as Kant had done, and without the vocabulary of kokutai (national polity) and kyōeiken (Co-Prosperity Sphere), which would later be introduced. Zen no kenkyū and international relations Nishida is very explicit that ‘the nation is not the final goal of humanity’, but rather it is something that is necessary for the fulfilment of humankind’s mission (shimei) (ZK:201). As we are aware by now, humanity’s mission is the realization of its personality, which will ultimately embrace all differences and contradictions. Because the nation is a personality in its own right, it is subject to the same moral laws as individuals. This means that it has obligations to other nations, just as citizens have obligations to each other. The goal of Nishida’s nation is not, therefore, the accumulation of material power to ward off (or threaten) other nations, as was the case for Hobbes. The material property of a country and its citizens are not (should not be) the historic concern of the nation. Neither is its purpose to protect the individualist liberties of its citizens, as advocated by Rousseau. Rather the purpose of the nation is to extend the expression of our personality to greater levels of unity. The nation is just a temporary stage between the individual and the absolute.62 Hence its function is to take the next step towards genuine reality: The nation [kokka] is the greatest expression of unified communal consciousness today, but the expression of our personality cannot stop here; it demands something still greater. In other words [it demands] the unity of a ‘human-society’ [jinruiteki shakai], grouping together all of humanity.63 (ZK:201)

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Later on, Nishida would use the term ‘particular world’ (tokushuteki sekai) to label the next level of social union (NKZ XII:434) which would include a regional grouping of nations. In the 1940s, the term Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere (daitōa kyōeiken) would come to be used interchangeably with ‘particular world’.64 Although the step between Nishida’s ethical formulation of transnational unities and militarist empires seems logical to us in hindsight, it is far from obvious that it should have been clear to Nishida in 1911, when nobody could have predicted the wars to come. Indeed, Nishida’s language resonates very closely with that of the Confucian pluralist discourse when he attempts to retain the universal whilst embracing the particular: ‘Genuine globalism [sekaishugi] does not mean that each nation will cease to be. It means that each nation [kokka] becomes increasingly stable, displays its own respective characteristics, and contributes to the history of the world’ (ZK:201). Such an argument is quite consistent with his clear views about morality in domestic politics—where the primary obligation of the state and each citizen is to respect the essential individuality of every citizen. The health of the nation depends upon the satisfaction of its citizens—so the health of a transnational grouping depends upon the health of its constituent nations. International politics should be about cultural synthesis and the expression of communal (ultimately universal) consciousness, not about conquest and war. The Japanese Empire of the 1940s, premised upon the enforcement of a (divine) heteronomous political system, is clearly in violation of Nishida’s political ethics, as they are expressed in Zen no kenkyū. Nishida did not believe that people could be forced to be free or good—like the king of the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta, Nishida seems to believe that a just conquest has to rest upon the willing consent of the vanquished—seeing the ‘wheel-treasure’ of the righteous king, foreign peoples will invite him to rule them: ‘if it were a true co-prosperity sphere, others would ask Japan to create it for them’ (NKZ XII:473). Such idealism is not unique to Nishida. In the European tradition, Immanuel Kant pointed out that whilst the international system may not be characterized by continuous warfare, it is always in a condition of war and that states are obliged (in a moral rather than a political sense) to transcend this condition. He states that even though neither of the two states is done any injustice by the other in this condition, it is nevertheless in the highest degree unjust in itself, for it implies that neither wishes to experience anything better. Adjacent states are thus bound to abandon such a condition. (Kant 1797:165) Of course, the condition cannot be abandoned through the use of warfare and invasion (Kant’s obligation here is moral rather than political), yet the only hope for its abandonment is the establishment of a transnational grouping of nations that Kant calls a foedus pacificum (peace federation). In his famous essay

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Perpetual Peace, Kant suggests that an ‘enlightened nation’ will provide the focal point of such a federation and that other nations will join it on their own initiatives as they too become enlightened, ‘and the whole will gradually spread further and further by a series of alliances of this kind’ (Kant 1795:104). It is only by maintaining a free association that the federation maintains its moral stature. Again, it should be noted here that ‘enlightenment’ is conceptualized rather differently by Kant and Nishida, and the similarity has been somewhat overstated by the enforced use of a common language to express their ideas. For Nishida, national enlightenment refers to the self-realization of a nation’s contradictory self-identity as the derivative location between the individual and the absolute. For Kant, enlightened states ‘already have a lawful internal constitution, and have thus outgrown the coercive right of others to subject them to a wider legal constitution in accordance with their conception of right’ (Kant 1795:104). However, there is a very significant point of commonality between Nishida and Kant which should not be neglected: both suggest that a genuinely moral transnational grouping (Kant’s peace federation and Nishida’s particular world) can only come into existence after (or, at least, simultaneously with) the intellectual or spiritual transformation of the individual states. Nations can (should) only form greater unities when they no longer seek to do so for their own private interests. There is clearly a problem of agency in this worldview: nations can only legitimately combine together when the decision to do so is not the result of selfinterested calculation. Like Nishida, Kant suggests that history should not be a phenomenon of revolution, but…of the evolution of a constitution governed by natural right. Such a constitution cannot itself be achieved by furious struggles—for civil and foreign wars will destroy whatever statutory order has hitherto prevailed—but it does lead us to strive for a constitution which would be incapable of bellicosity.65 (Kant 1798:184) In passages like this one, Kant sets up a contradiction for human agency that would be readily familiar to Nishida. On the one hand, he suggests that mankind must ‘strive’ to better itself, but on the other he suggests that man is incapable of knowing what to strive for and that consequently to strive for it is simultaneously to do it violence. To fudge the ‘enlightenment’ issue once more, this seems identical to Dōgen’s call for shikan taza (just-sitting), in which the good is realized of itself precisely because of a lack of agency. The suffering caused by conflict is a moral lesson teaching people to strive for better ways to guarantee peace, but also a caution that man is (yet) incapable of comprehending how to do so.66 For Kant, the best that we can hope for is ‘an approximation to the idea’ of perpetual peace. The more reasonable and rational mankind becomes, the better

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this approximation will be, but essentially ‘nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of’ (Kant 1784a:46). For Kant, the problem is that mankind is not yet perfectly rational: ‘If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment’ (Kant 1784b:58). However, Kant has faith that history is a process of fulfilling potentials, and that consequently man will become progressively (even if not smoothly) more rational until he fulfils his potential for perfect reason. The individual cannot attain this perfection; it will be found only in the species. For Nishida, on the other hand, following in the Buddhist tradition, the warped wood of which man is made is rationality itself. Enlightenment consists in the step beyond (or prior to) rationality not in its perfection67—the progressive step is back into the pure experience of absolute reality which lies prior to all discriminations, including the discriminations of species and ego; revolutionaries really must march backwards. For both Kant and Nishida, then, there is an important (and neglected) conditional in their political thought, similar to the conditional that we saw in the resolution of the ethical dilemma in hongaku shisō: the expansion of the nation into a transnational grouping is only legitimate when nations reach a state of enlightenment.68 The evidence that such a state has been reached will be the fact that other nations will join the group of their own volition—any attempt at coercion demonstrates the immorality of the grouping. To some extent, this conditional is disguised by the language used to express it, especially in translation. I formulate a sentence that both Kant and Nishida would approve of: only enlightened states can form genuine transnational groupings. It is easy to see how such sentences could be used by political figures to imply that, say, Imperial Japan or Great Britain was enlightened because it had an empire. However, such an interpretation fudges the conditional by deliberating misreading the moral content of ‘can’. In the context of the wider thought of either Kant or Nishida, such sentences have a rather different meaning: only if/ when (…tara) states are enlightened will they become able to form legitimate transnational groupings. That is, the Japanese Empire is immoral if Japan (or Korea, or China…) is not an enlightened state. From Nishida’s concerns about the problems of heteronomous political ethics, we can judge that Imperial Japan (with its state controlled Neo-Shintō-Confucian ideology) was not an enlightened state. Hence, the Japanese Empire was not a genuine or moral particular world. Utopianism or naïveté—the early Nishida and the role of philosophy Given the apparent ease with which his political philosophy can be co-opted to serve opposing political agendas, it is important to understand whether Nishida was consciously utopian in his thinking, or whether he was simply politically naïve. As we have seen, the conventional apologist perspective is to argue that Nishida was unaware of the realities of politics and that consequently his (early)

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work was produced without a sense of its political significance. However, we have also seen that the early Nishida was self-consciously engaged in political activities. It is difficult to marry these two observations. There is plenty of evidence in Zen no kenkyū to suggest that Nishida was consciously adopting a utopianist approach to political philosophy influenced both by his German philosophical muse, Immanuel Kant, and by the Mahāyāna traditions in Japan. Towards the end of the book, for example, Nishida reflects on the feasibility of his political vision, and he suggests that the good will not easily be actualized in this ‘age of armed peace [busōteki heiwa no jidai]’ (ZK: 201). As we have seen, Kant was also sceptical about the feasibility of achieving his vision of perpetual peace in the current age of imperfect reason and in the condition of war. Kant’s republic was intended to be an ideal towards which mankind could aspire (without striving). It was a utopia: Perpetual peace is above all and in the first place a moral duty and hope, a matter of “unscientific” moral action and belief’ (Cavallar 2001:248). For Kant, it was the ideal of the republic and the ideal of the peace federation that was of value in the present: ‘True enthusiasm is always directed exclusively towards the ideal, particularly towards that which is purely moral (such as the concept of right), and it cannot be coupled with selfishness’ (Kant 1798:183).69 Both Kant and Nishida utilized this conception of utopia as the ‘model space’ (of no-place) or ‘model society’ which should act as a critique of extant societies.70 Both Kant and Nishida were aware of the difficulties that lay in wait for the politician who rashly dispensed with realpolitik and embraced utopian idealism. Consequently, both men sketched out a place for philosophers in the proper functioning of a political system: ‘The maxims of the philosophers on the conditions under which public peace is possible shall be consulted by states which are armed for war’ (Kant 1795:115).71 The important role of philosophers was premised upon the idea (or ideal) that they were involved in the formulation of the absolute political ideals towards which everyday politics should strive— these ideals are universal, selfless and non-partisan: ‘the class of philosophers is by nature incapable of forming seditious factions or clubs, they cannot incur suspicion of disseminating propaganda’ (Kant 1795:115). Nishida did not have to read Kant to find such a position (although he did), since, as we have seen, the Japanese tradition resonates very closely with these ideas: Confucian sages advised rulers, but did not rule themselves; in the Theravāda CakkavattiSīhanāda Sutta the fall from grace is initiated when the king ceases to consult the sages on matters of policy; and, in the Mahāyāna Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha himself calls on his followers to avoid direct entanglements with governance. From these perspectives, philosophers are properly concerned with comprehending political utopia not with the everyday business of politics. Clearly it is not the case that everyone will read philosophy in this idealistically pure manner, and there must be some interaction between philosophical utopias and political reality: ‘the noumenal republic and its

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empirical schemes or imperfect realizations are distinct from each other, but related’ (Cavallar 2001:235). The moral crisis arises when this relationship is not sufficiently problematized and the particular state is mistaken for, constructed as (or simply assumed to be) the ideal— as in the unconditional reading of hongaku shisō. This is the ideological manipulation of the conventions of the utopia, performed by the dominant discourse to appropriate dissenting voices. It is not only Kant72 and Nishida who have been victim to such tendencies—to some extent, the radical statism of Hegel is also a product of the manipulation of his evaluative-descriptive scheme by challenging the application of his (ideally) ‘rational state’ to empirical cases: Hegel does not doubt that the empirical State can be imperfect, that everything is not always for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that positive law can be irrational, and that real States can be left behind in the wake of history. This does not alter the simple fact that nothing of any value can be said before one knows whereof one speaks, that one cannot judge States before knowing what the State is. (Weil 1998:27) Of course, we have already seen how EH Carr lamented the dangers associated with utopian thinking during the Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 in Europe: ‘philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars which give little light because they are so high’ (Carr 1939/95).73 What Carr suggests is that there is no necessary opposition between utopianism and mere naïveté; utopian thinking, even self-consciously political utopian thinking, is politically naïve because its efficacy rests upon its ideal reception in the political discourse of the real world. The fact that utopian visions can be exploited is ignored in the vision itself. Nishida himself became increasingly aware of this problem as the 1930s drew on, and I contend that his later political writings were his attempts to re-appropriate the evaluativedescriptive conventions of his utopian vision as critique. In a speech in 1937, Nishida is explicit about the challenges he faces: ‘I make something, but, although it is something created by me, it separates from me, becomes independent, and acts upon me in return. Although I make it, it becomes a public thing—in other words, it becomes a historical thing’ (NKZ XIV:270). By the end of his career, as we have already noted, Nishida laments that the real content of his work ‘has not yet been given the slightest consideration’ (LW:125) by the authorities who ‘just take [his] words out of context and use them as ammunition for their own attacks’ (trans. Heisig 2001:89). By his own admission then, Nishida’s dissent was ineffective because he failed to control the public context and meaning of his work—the conventions of which were, in fact, explicitly manipulated by the oppressive wartime regime.

4 (Re)locating the later Nishida Ideology and philosophy in wartime Japan

Sekaiteki sekai or hakkō ichiu, it’s all the same to me. There is a certain irony involved in demarcating two chapters according to Nishida’s biography, especially since I contend that such demarcations are misjudged, at least in terms of the content of Nishida’s political thought. However, whilst it is maintained here that Nishida’s later work is consistent with his earlier output, it is undeniable that he affected a shift in his political vocabulary during the 1930s, reflecting the shift in the wider social discourse. It is also undeniable that Nishida’s political profile shifted with the national and international events of wartime period in Japan. In particular, Nishida’s political work was pulled into the public arena. Hence, the chronological division of Nishida’s life reflects a shifting agenda of inquiry as much as a shift in the agenda of Nishida himself. Whilst Chapter 3 was concerned with extricating the neglected moral and political thought of his early career, this chapter will explore the later Nishida’s neglected philosophical consistency with his earlier work. Nishida’s politics in Kyoto Nishida’s time as professor at Kyoto Imperial University (1911–28) was relatively quiet, at least in terms of his political involvement. Many commentators have seen this as evidence of his lack of interest in politics. It is certainly true that his diaries and correspondence reflect a man engrossed in his work and his family, scarcely concerned with the world of politics and international happenings.1 It is worth reflecting, however, that this period in Nishida’s life coincided with the beginning of his career as a professional philosopher. In this regard, it is interesting that one of the only ‘political incidents’ reported by Nishida during this period was the educational reform that followed the First World War. The reforms were designed to centralize control over curricula at schools and universities, and, as we might expect from his earlier reaction to the Imperial Rescript on Education, Nishida was openly critical of this move.2

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As might be expected from a newly appointed professor, Nishida’s main concerns during this period were academic. There are lists of books that interested him at this time. Kant and Bergson remained important, as did Zen texts such as those by Dōgen, the Jūgyū zu (Ten Oxherding Pictures) and the Hekiganroku (The Blue Cliff Records) collection of kōans, as well as neoConfucian texts such as Yasui Sokken’s Rongo shūsetsu (Collected Commentaries on the Analects). But Nishida was increasingly interested in the Neo-Kantians, such as Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband, who was interested in developing a Kantian perspective on the philosophy of history. At that time, Windelband was at Heidelberg with Heinrich Rickert, with whom Nishida was in engaged in occasional correspondence. It was at this time that Nishida’s correspondence with Edmund Husserl also began, and he developed an interest in phenomenology. Conceivably it was through Husserl that Nishida first learnt of the young Martin Heidegger, who was a junior lecturer under Husserl in Marburg from 1923–28.3 One Neo-Kantian name that appears repeatedly in Nishida’s diaries is that of Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who was part of Hermann Gohen’s Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism before the First World War. In 1910, Cassirer published one of his most important works, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Substance and Function, 1910), in which he discussed man’s ability to symbolize and structure his experiences using language, myth and science. Crucially, Cassirer suggested that the symbolic structure of man’s experiences was culturally constructed—even science was a cultural construction designed to provide coherence to the experiences of (European) man. Cassirer developed these ideas in his seminal work, Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vol., 1923–29). Nishida’s interest in cultural pluralism during this period of his life is also reflected in the amount of anthropological literature he consumed, which included Bronislaw Malinowski, whose epochal Argonauts of the Western Pacific appeared in 1922, and Sir James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough had effectively established anthropology when it was first published in 1890.4 During this period, Nishida was also reading Marx (Das Kapital), Weber (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) and Hegel (Rechtsphilosophie). Hence, it would be difficult to sustain the idea that Nishida’s apparent withdrawal from political practice during his time as professor at Kyōdai was accompanied by a loss of interest in the philosophies of history, culture and politics. It was only in his last years as a professor at the Kyoto Imperial University that political events again started to intrude on Nishida’s life. For example, in 1925 the infamous Peace Preservation Law (chian ijihō) was enacted (amended in 1928), targeted explicitly at the suppression of communists. Any action or expression that advocated the abolition of private property or fundamentally challenged the kokutai was outlawed.5 Contrary to the common assertions of scholars such as Peter Dale, who have tried to paint Kyoto University as ‘a theoretical hotbed of nationalism’ in the interwar period (Dale 1986:191), Kyōdai

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was hit harder than most universities by the new law because it was a centre of intellectual dissent and student activism.6 Following the execution of the radical Marxist activist Kōtoku Shūsui (1871– 1911) with eleven of his co-conspirators for allegedly planning to assassinate the emperor (the so-called taigyaku jiken or Great Treason Incident), the mantel of Marxist leadership in Japan eventually fell to Kawakami Hajime (1879– 1946), the Marxist economist and philosopher at Kyoto Imperial University, who had been a student of Nishida’s at Yamaguchi Higher School.7 Following the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the Japanese Rice Riots of 1918 a genuine student movement began to develop, particularly in Kyoto, where the eminent professor was busily translating Das Kapital into Japanese.8 Kyoto was thus a natural target for the new laws.9 Already, in the mid-late 1920s, Taishō democracy was beginning to come under siege from the nationalists. Yamada Munemutsu locates the genesis of the struggle between liberal politics and nationalist conservatism in the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, where Minobe Tatsukichi’s (1873–1948) liberal ‘Emperor Organ Theory’ confronted the ‘Direct Imperial Rule’ perspectives of Hozumi Yatsuka (1860–1912) and Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929) (Yamada 1970/75). Nishida retired from his position in Kyoto shortly before the Peace Preservation Law was reinforced and over 300 communist party members were arrested in 1929. The government and especially the Ministry of Education began to implement even stricter regulations controlling the content of education and removing the civil rights of those suspected of dissident thought.10 Following the Manchuria Incident in the summer of 1931, Japan was officially on war-footing for the next fifteen years. Consequences were immediate and the next few years witnessed the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai (15 May 1932), the establishment of the Superior Special Police Force11 (aka the Thought Police, on 29 June 1932), followed by the establishment of the Research Centre for National Spiritual Culture (kokumin seishin bunka kenkyūjo),12 and the removal of Takikawa Yukitoki (1891–1962) from his post at Kyoto University, in the so-called Takikawa Incident (or Kyoto University Incident) of 1933. The period 1932–33 saw a shift in the political agenda, in which thought crimes (shisō hanzai) were broadened beyond the confines of Marxism to include liberalism. The Centre for National Spiritual Culture was established to combat Marxist ideology and to provide resources for scholars to research into the National Spiritual Culture (kokumin seishin bunka) with the explicit purpose of defending it against the communist threat. The Takikawa Incident, however, saw the professor of law dismissed on the grounds that his thought was too liberal.13 Indeed, the Ministry of Education was so serious about the charges that the minister, Hatoyama Ichirō, was willing to risk the resignation of the entire Faculty of Laws and Letters at Kyōdai, whose members had threatened to resign unless Takikawa was reinstated.

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The support offered to Takikawa at Kyoto University says a lot about the atmosphere of that university in the mid-1930s. Nishida himself, who was retired by this time, was a little ambivalent about the appropriate response of the university—perhaps naïve about the precedent being set, he felt that the academic freedom of the entire faculty should not be compromised for the sake of one man, Takikawa.14 However, Nishida was far from ambivalent in his response to the establishment of the Centre for National Spiritual Culture, which seemed to him to compromise the very essence of academic freedom. His language evokes his earlier angst over the Imperial Rescript on Education: What the Ministry of Education is passing off in the name of ‘spiritual culture’ is not right. From now on, so long as my strength does not fail me, I intend to write as much as I can. I want to gather bright young students around me and engage them in debate and discussion, to train them how to think. In this way I will be satisfied that I have done my part if I can accomplish something on the intellectual and academic level.15 (NKZ XVIII:465) Perhaps the most important incident of the mid-1930s, however, was the socalled Minobe Incident of 1935. Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) was a constituional law professor at Tokyo Imperial University.16 His Emperor Organ Theory (tennō kikan setsu) had been very influential during the period of Taishō democracy. When he published his enormously successful book Kempō kōwa in 1912, at the height of public support for liberalism, he became the most widely read constitutional scholar in Japan. The book was used as a standard text in nearly every university in the country. In 1932, his fame was so great that he was appointed to the House of Peers by merit. On 18 February 1935, after some machinations by Minoda Muneki (the same man who had been behind the charges against Takikawa in Kyoto), Baron Kikuchi Takeo demanded that the Okada government ban Minobe’s books because they represented the ‘traitorous thought of an academic rebel’ (Bix 2000:287). On 4 March, Prime Minister Okada announced that ‘no one supports the emperor organ theory’ (Bix 2000: 288). Whilst Bix and Large dispute the extent to which Emperor Hirohito supported Minobe’s ideas,17 it is relatively clear that Nishida sympathized with his plight. He notes in his diary: ‘I feel sorry for Minobe Tatsukichi—in the future it will become such that we cannot research into public law or, particularly, into things like genuine national history [shin no kokushi]’ (NKZ XVIII:524).18 Although there were certainly some party-political machinations behind the shocking downfall of Minobe,19 this incident serves to illustrate a profound shift in the intellectual and political atmosphere of early Shōwa Japan, especially since the Manchuria Incident of 1931. The influence of right-wing—particularly military—elites was growing, and there was already the genesis of a Shōwa Restoration movement, that would eventually lead to the 26 February 1936

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Incident. According to Bix, ‘behind these attacks [on Minobe] lay the ideological desire to discredit not a particular interpretation of the Meiji constitution but all constitutional interpretations, whether Minobe’s or his opponents,’ that differentiated the emperor from the state’ (Bix 2000:289). Indeed, on 15 October, the government issued a formal statement that any theory that ‘holds that subject of sovereignty is not the Emperor but the state and that the Emperor is an organ of the state—such as the so-called organ theory—must be strictly eradicated, for they run counter to our divine national polity’ (Large 1992:65). Clearly, the treatment of Minobe and the content of the subsequent governmental announcements (combined with existing legislation under the Peace Preservation Law) drew parameters around the permitted political discourse—effectively enforcing the linguistic and ideological conventions of the orthodoxy. It suddenly became impossible to argue that the emperor was politically derivative in any way To the extent that dissent was still permissible (or possible), it had to occupy a space between these parameters. This is the immediate context in which we must place the texts that many commentators have seen as Nishida’s first political treatises. An immediate and obvious problem for intellectuals in the autumn of 1935 was how to dissent from within the limits of acceptable political inquiry For Nishida, I suggest that this political space was philosophy itself—the philosophical manipulation of conventions. Before the Minobe Incident, the core debate over the political system was framed by the two dominant schools originating in the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial Unversity. On one side there were Hozumi Yatsuka and Uesugi Shinkichi, who advocated direct imperial rule. On the other side was Minobe, who, drawing on German constitutional ideas, argued that the emperor was an organ of the state, albeit the most important organ, like the brain. In between were thinkers such as Shimizu Tōru (1868–1947) who publicly distanced himself from both of the main viewpoints and argued that sovereignty existed simultaneously in the emperor and in the state.20 The two were ‘assimilated into each other—becoming not two but one’ (Suzuki 1975:263; Bix 2000:78). For Hozumi and Uesugi, the emperor was prior to the state. For Minobe, the state was prior to the emperor, even if it could not function without him. And for Shimizu, there was no priority because the emperor and the state constituted a single entity—the kokutai. Following the Minobe Incident, the extent of the space for discourse between Uesugi and the vague position of Shimizu was unclear, hence the Ministry of Education established a Committee for the Renewal of Education and Scholarship (Kyōgaku sasshin hyōgikai) with the express purpose of ‘clarifying the national polity’. Nishida and two of his junior colleagues, Tanabe Hajime and Watsuji Tetsurō, were asked to join this committee, which met for the first time on 5 December 1935. Nishida appears to have been reluctant to become a member of what he disparagingly called the Ministry’s Educational Reform Thing (Monbushō no kyōgaku sasshin toiu mono) —he lamented that his opinions and those of the Ministry were the opposite of each other (NKZ XVIII:547–8).21

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In a subsequent letter to Watsuji, on 1 December, just four days before the first meeting, Nishida suggests that he may not even turn up because his contribution there would simply be ignored (NKZ 18:551).22 In the end, he did attend the first meeting but then played no further part in the committee. His feelings about the kind of nationalism currently being debated in such committees and in society more widely are clear only a month or so later, when he wrote a message to Harada. In it he laments the short-sightedness of official nationalism, which was little more than egoistic romanticism: I hope that our country’s future does not lose its impartiality [chūsei] because of the influence of those people who have become the leaders of our nation… I think nationalists in our country must deeply consider the fact that today nationalism is simultaneously globalism [sekaishugi]. It is not that they can merely think about their own country independently, rather we must think in a broader, global way. It is not that we can just return to the past.23 (NKZ XVIII:553) Watsuji Tetsurō remained an active member of the committee, and he was at least partly responsible for the infamous Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of the National Polity) that was published as a result of its labours by the Ministry of Education in March of 1937. Kokutai no hongi occupies a special place in the literature of Japanese imperialism and ultra-nationalism because it represents the official orthodoxy, produced explicitly to ‘clarify the national polity’ in the wake of the Minobe Incident. It established the conventions for the political discourse until 1945. A number of commentators, such as Pierre Lavelle (1994), have suggested that a comparison between Kokutai no hongi and Nishida’s wartime writings reveal the extent to which he was complicit in the authoritarian regime. However, such an interpretation of Nishida’s later work would be difficult to marry with his biographical details (particularly with his reluctance to participate in the authorship of Kokutai no hongi iself) not to mention his earlier philosophy, and a detailed comparison (below) will reveal that Nishida’s later works should be read as moral critiques of Kokutai no hongi, rather than as philosophical elaborations on it—a coincidence of terminology is not the same as a coincidence of meaning. As he said in his letter to Watsuji just before his first (and last) committee meeting: ‘I am getting old, and the best thing I can do for the country now is not to waste any time [with this committee] and to complete my own work’ (NKZ XVIII:551).24 In this context, it should be remembered that Buddha told his sangha to be ‘islands unto themselves’, especially in times of political strife.25 Yet Nishida was not able to cut himself off from the political world completely. Events were already moving too quickly. Building on the momentum generated by the Minobe Incident, a group of right-wing officers staged a coup d’etat in the centre of Tokyo, seeking to (re)establish direct imperial rule—the

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so-called 26 February 1936 Incident. Prime Minister Okada narrowly escaped an attempt on his life, but the Lord Privy Seal and the Finance Minister were assassinated as was a senior military figure, Watanabe Jōtarō, who was suspected of being sympathetic to Minobe (Shillony 1973:135–7). One of the intellectual leaders of the revolutionary movement, Kita Ikki, believed that the coup would encourage the emperor to suspend the constitution and to take direct control of the nation. By providing his backing to the ‘Shōwa Restoration’, Hirohito would instantly make the revolution legitimate because the emperor was prior to the state.26 In a ‘tragic irony’ the Shōwa Emperor refused to sanction the so-called Shōwa Restoration (Shillony 1973:172), and he expressed disgust about the rebels’ disregard for the constitutional order. Implicitly, Hirohito was entering the debate about the relationship between himself and the state, and he was suggesting that the state was prior to the imperial family, rather than vice versa. Nishida was similarly disapproving, suggesting that certain factions of the military were leading the nation to disaster, hiding behind patriotic-sounding phrases such as ‘absolute reverence for the emperor’ (NKZ XVIII:561, 562–3).27 The year 1937 saw Nishida drawn even further into the political world when a group of his former students from Gakushūin rose to political prominence:28 Konoe Fumimaro became Prime Minister (for the first time) in June, later in the year Kido Kōichi became Education Minister, and Harada Kumao became increasingly involved in the machinations of Saionji Kinmochi, the last of the genrō. Nishida records regular meetings with Konoe in his diary; he visited Kido a number of times and was invited by him to become a counsellor to the Ministry;29 and Harada was partner to a prolific correspondence. Kokutai no hongi had already been published in March, and August of 1937 witnessed the onset of full-scale war against China. It is interesting to reflect that Nishida appears to have responded quickly to these events, which pleased neither Konoe nor himself, by giving two public lectures in Nagano. The lectures, Rekishiteki shintai, are particularly interesting, not only because he calls for people to respect a plurality of historical species (rekishiteki shu) in the world, including China, but also because he uses these lectures to point his audience back to his earliest work, Zen no kenkyū, as the origins of his moral philosophy (NKZ XIV:265).30 Given the nature of Nishida’s publications up until this point, Harada Kumao could have been under no illusions about his perspective on the war when he arranged a meeting between Nishida and Navy Captain, Takagi Sōkichi, on 18 February 1938. Indeed, Nishida and Harada had been corresponding for some time, and Nishida had been consistently critical of the political orthodoxy. In keeping with the politics of Zen no kenkyū, Nishida still insisted that moral foreign policy, even expansionist foreign policy, should rest upon the cooperation of other nations rather than merely upon Japanese egoism. In a letter written in March 1937, for example, Nishida had said to Harada: I think that we must think about Japan in the World [sekai no nihon], not only about Japan’s Japan [nihon no nihon], otherwise things like ‘Great

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Asianism’ [Dai Ajia-shugi] will have no meaning and the world of the future will not settle-down into the nationalisms of independent nations as conceived by some people today.31 Surely we will be unable to settle on any meaning whatsoever if we cannot cooperate globally [sekaiteki kyōchō dekinakereba]… I would like our country’s politicians to turn their attention to such a place [of cooperation].32 (NKZ XVIII:589) Takagi and Nishida met a number of times throughout the course of the war, but the sixty-seven-year-old Nishida was already sceptical about his ability to influence policy and he directed the navy officials towards his student Kōyama Iwao, who was then teaching in Kyoto.33 Arguably, Nishida reached the height of his prestige at the end of 1939, when he was invited to give the New Year’s lecture to the Emperor.34 However, despite publishing a number of papers on broadly political issues in the early years of the 1940s in which he ‘attempted a more critical, philosophical reading of the themes dealt with in Fundamentals of the National Polity’, or Kokutai no hongi,35 Nishida was relatively uninvolved in political activity until 1943.36 It is interesting to note at this point that Nishida reentered the political discourse shortly after the wider Kyoto School had dragged (and manipulated) his philosophical conventions into the public ideological debates about Japanese imperialism, characterized by the Chūōkōron and Bungakkai symposia. The year 1943 marked the beginning of what has come to be known as the ‘sekai shinchitsujo no genri’ jiken, or the ‘Principles of the New World Order’ Incident. The incident began in March when Yatsugi Kazuo (1899–1983) visited Nishida to ask him whether he would be willing to participate in some discussions about the situation in East Asia. At that time, Yatsugi was head of the kokusaku kenkyūkai (National Strategy Research Centre), which had very close ties with the army and with the government, insofar as it produced documents (called kokusaku ritsuan— national strategy plans) which officials consulted.37 Yatsugi suggested to Nishida that this might provide him with an opportunity to influence the content of the speech Prime Minister Tōjō was planning for the Great East Asia Conference (Dai tōa kaigi) in November of that year.38 Amidst his disappointment about the minimal impact he felt that his ideas eventually had on Tōjō, Nishida later implied that he had been pleased to be offered this chance to influence the army, presumably because his existing contacts were mostly with the navy: ‘It is only rarely that the army asks for my thoughts; if only I could gradually get even some of them to understand…’ (NKZ XIX:245).39 Was this an opportunity to speak truth to power? Nishida did attend the kokusaku kenkyūkai meeting on 19 May and, on the request of Yatsugi, he transformed his comments into a paper—the now infamous sekai shinchitsujo no genri, which he submitted at the end of the same month (28 May). The essay was quickly returned to him, rejected by Yatsugi on behalf of the army officials because they would have found it incomprehensible.

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In a famous display of uncharacteristic intellectual indifference, Nishida handed his essay over to Tanabe Juri for rewriting.40 By his own admission, Tanabe tried to simplify Nishida’s essay to such an extent that it would become comprehensible to a non-philosopher audience. Yatsugi approved Tanabe’s draft and subsequently circulated it to Prime Minister Tōjō and his Army and Navy Ministers. There is no record that Nishida objected to the changes made by Tanabe. Indeed, the fact that the seventy-three-year old philosopher continued to receive Tanabe at his home after the work had been done indicates that there was little ill feeling between them.41 In letters to Watsuji and Hori Koretaka on 14 June, Nishida expresses his anxiety about whether Tanabe’s draft would successfully transmit his ideas to the public, if it influenced Tōjō’s speech, planned for the following day. However, the concern is not for whether Tanabe has been faithful to his ideas but rather whether the audience would understand the ideas correctly. Nishida appears to be fully aware of the dangers facing a backward marching revolutionary, especially in such a nationalistically charged environment: ‘unlike the narrow-minded Japanists, I want to insist that within the Japanese spirit (nihon seishin) there is a global aspect (sekaisei)’ (NKZ XIX: 243).42 Never solidarity before critique. However, Nishida was ‘disappointed by Tōjō’s speech’. He felt as though his ‘ideas were not understood in the slightest (and it’s not as though they’re impossible)’ (NZK XIX:245).43 Interestingly, Nishida does not vent any of his rage against Tanabe, suggesting that he was at least reasonably happy that his draft was not to blame. Nishida simply ‘became really annoyed’ when he picked up a newspaper with a copy of Tōjō’s speech in it and he realized that his ‘thought hadn’t been understood at all. There is none of it in there’ (NKZ XIX: 244).44 Nishida’s annoyance is with the apparent inability of Tōjō and the masses (uzōmuzō) to understand his ideas, which he obviously felt were reasonably clear in Tanabe’s text. There is an interesting anomaly, then, in the fact that a number of post-war scholars have used Tanabe’s draft to demonstrate Nishida’s ultra-nationalistic orthodoxy,45 and some revisionist scholars have suggested that the differences between Nishida’s own draft and that of Tanabe liberate Nishida from such charges.46 If Nishida were both reasonably happy with Tanabe’s draft and ‘really annoyed’ that none of it appeared in the official orthodoxy, then the real issue is inter-textual: Nishida’s understanding of Tanabe’s text was different from the understanding of Tōjō and the masses (and possibly of Tanabe himself). It becomes a question of contexts: Nishida wrote (and reread) his work in the context of his own wider philosophical corpus, complete with his particular manipulations of conventions, and Tōjō (and the uzōmuzō) read his (edited) work in the context of the orthodox conventions of the dominant social discourse. Tanabe was explicitly involved in de-philosophizing Nishida’s work for general consumption—and Nishida could have filled in the philosophy in his mind as he read the simplified draft.47 Hence, it is not so much a question of Tanabe’s text

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perverting Nishida’s original. Rather, Tanabe’s de-philosophized and hollow ambiguïté permitted Nishida and Tōjō to effect two different interpretations, in accordance with their own contexts.48 Nishida’s political philosophy during the 1930s and 1940s was forced to utilize the language of the day, not only because this is the very nature of language but also, in the particular circumstances of wartime Japan, because of the extensive activities of the Special Higher (Thought) Police operating under the increasingly strict terms of the Peace Preservation Law. Hence, the only space within which Nishida could dissent was terms of the manipulation of conventions effected by his philosophical context—that is, the philosophical content of orthodox terms. The philosophical space became the only possible space for political discourse. Yet, it was precisely this philosophical content (or at least the flags to Nishida’s wider philosophical body) that was removed by Tanabe (the sociologist) for consumption by Tōjō (the Army General and Prime Minister) and by the masses.49 The key to understanding the political philosophy in Nishida’s later works is to read them as philosophy. That said, the fact that Nishida was engaged in a hidden political dialogue in a philosophical space does not dissolve his political responsibility completely, since his work was still employable as ideology because his strategies for dissent were ineffective, despite his many protestations that he was being misunderstood. The differences between the Tanabe draft (TD)50 and Nishida’s original may never be fully understood, since his original manuscript has never been found. However, Nishida felt the need to revise Tanabe’s draft in 1944, presumably along the lines of his original, and it is this text that has become the standard manuscript since its inclusion in NKZ XII in 1966 (ND). There are many differences between TD and the subsequent ND, and it will suit our purposes well to analyse them in some depth. Perhaps the most obvious differences are in terms of both the length and style of the respective pieces. ND is nearly twice as long as TD, written in a carefully qualified and scholarly (or, perhaps, tortuous) style, typical of Nishida’s wider output. TD is stative, assertive and terse in comparison—Nishida’s characteristic use of the passive tense, for example, is largely absent. Whilst the structures of the two pieces are broadly similar, there are a number of substantive differences in their content that should be highlighted. For example, the TD commences with a full-page introductory summary (yōshi) in which the purpose of the Co-Prosperity Sphere is described as the ‘destruction and extermination [gekimetsu, konzetsu] of the common enemy, AngloAmerican imperialism’ (TD:366).51 This introduction also states that Germany and Italy are fighting in Europe for the same purpose as Japan is fighting in Asia, and it suggests that the victories of the Axis powers in Asia and Europe will usher in a new period of world peace. Nishida deleted this section completely from his subsequent draft. At no point does he call for the destruction or extermination of the Anglo-American powers. Indeed, for Nishida the problem is ‘the imperialism of European peoples’ and he

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pays scant attention to the United States, despite the war raging around him (ND: 429).52 In fact, Nishida only mentions Eibei (the Anglo-American powers) once, when he calls on them to obey the principle of sekaitekisekai-keiseishugi (worldof-worlds formationism) in his very last paragraph. Interestingly, this is also the context in which ND makes its only reference to the Axis powers. Far from congratulating them on fighting the good war in Europe, Nishida calls on them also to obey the principle of sekaitekisekai-keiseishugi: ‘It is not only the AngloAmerican powers who should obey this [principle] but the Axis powers should also imitate it’ (ND:434).53 Leaving aside the substantive differences in content between TD and ND, there are also a host of more subtle, linguistic differences, which are no less important. TD, for example, is full of dynamic verbs, such as ‘strive’ (doryoku), ‘construct’ (kensetsu) and ‘conquer’ (kokufuku) (TD:367, 366, 370). As we have already seen, Nishida himself was very wary of the utility of human agency as a force for historical change or moral progress, and he expressed this anxiety in his choice of verbs (and in his preference for the passive form). An important example concerns the verb chosen to mean ‘construct’ in TD and ND. The introduction of TD describes how war can contribute to the construction of the new world order. The word here is kensetsu, which implies the role of human action in a site of activity or kensetsu-genba (construction site).54 Nishida rarely uses this word. In its place, he uses the term kōsei (compose/constitute), which suggests that actors become the constituent elements (kōsei-bunshi) of their construction, rather than the agents who build it as an objective other.55 One of the more subtle problems with TD’s introductory paragraphs is that they provide the context for the rest of the text.56 Hence, when kōsei does appear in the text of TD, it appears as though interchangeable with kensetsu. Indeed, we might suppose that the two terms were interchangeable in the mind of Tanabe, even though Nishida would have been relieved to see his original term in the text when he read it on 9 June 1943. However, TD does violence to kōsei not only by linking it to kensetsu, but also by neglecting the nuance of Nishida’s philosophical style of writing. In two passages that appear very similar, the stylistic differences between TD and ND become clear: TD:

(TD:368) ND:

(ND:427)

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The first sentence in TD here is plain and stative: ‘Today’s world is a period of global self-awakening.’ In ND the same sentence is much softer—kangaeru gives a sense of consideration rather than assertion: ‘As for today’s world [unlike the previous periods], I think of it as an age of global self-awakening.’ In TD there is no doubt that the present has already achieved to global self-awakening, whereas ND suggests that this will be the character of the present age but passes no real judgment on whether it has already been realized.57 The next sentence in TD is also straightforward: ‘By each nation [kokumin] self-awakening to its own world-historical mission, there will be one completely new age, that is an age in which [we] must create a world-historical world, or a world of worlds.’ However, there are important differences between this and the second sentence in ND: ‘By each nation [kokka] self-awakening to its own world mission, they shall facilitate the constitution of a single world-historical world, that is a world-of-worlds.’ The most obvious difference is the term used for ‘nation’. In TD, kokumin (nation) and minzoku (ethnic group) are used loosely and interchangeably. In this section of ND, however, Nishida is careful to use kokka, which had become the label for his ‘ethical state’ since the publication of Kokka riyū no mondai in 1941, consciously differentiated from minzoku and kokumin. Indeed, to put it in context, ND originally appeared as the third appendix to Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi (1944), which is essentially a distillation of this long and intricate essay of 1941. As we saw earlier, kokka was also Nishida’s term of choice in Zen no kenkyū, 1911. Hence, the use of kokka here is a clear signpost to Nishida’s wider philosophical corpus, and it signifies the nation in ND as a different (moral) entity from the racial and material body in TD.58 A final distinction between these ostensibly similar passages in TD and ND concerns the form of the verb kōsei. In TD it is a simple imperative with no stated subject—hence: [we] must create. In context, as we have seen, this ‘creation’ refers to war. In ND, on the other hand, it is a permissive imperative and the subjects are kaku kokka—hence: each nation must permit the constitution of a new world.59 And this facilitating behaviour takes the form of selfawakening. In ND, this passage is inclusivist and non-confrontational. In TD it calls for war. Hence, in ND, Nishida develops sekaitekisekaikeisei no genri (the principle of world-of-worlds formationism) into the self-awakening of nations to a mentality of inclusiveness, tolerance and synthesis. He even co-opts the nationalist slogan hakkō ichiu to mean the same thing (ND:434).60 In the end, Nishida even seems to feel as though he has to reassure his audience that he is not abandoning nationalism completely, and that it is still acceptable in the present world, albeit nationalism on his terms. He explains that ‘world-of-worlds formationism does not mean that our nation [kokka] will lose its autonomy’, despite the fact that it involves the emptying of self and the embrace of others, because ‘the emptying of self and the embrace of others is our nation’s particular subjective principle’.61

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For Nishida, the ‘essence of our national polity [kokutai]’ is found in this principle (ND:434). In the end, then, Nishida is able to placate the censors and advocate both hakkō ichiu and kokutai, but he does this without ultra-nationalist or imperialist overtones. In his conclusion, he states that ‘the solution to today’s worldhistorical task can be drawn from the principle of our national polity’, and that this solution will be facilitated if the Japanese ‘stand in accord with this principle and demonstrate to the world the unceasing essence of our national polity’ (ND:434). Japan must act as an example of tolerance for the world—which the AngloAmerican powers will ‘obey’ and the Axis powers will ‘imitate’. By contrast, the last line of TD states, as though summarizing the thrust of the text: ‘world-of-worlds formationism, that is new-worldism, is simply to shoulder the burden of the mission to conquer Anglo-American imperialism’ (TD:370). TD works to manipulate the conventions of Nishida tetsugaku, effectively reinforming concepts from Nishida’s philosophy with meanings from the political orthodoxy. Of course, this is the flip-side of Nishida’s own strategy, but it has the advantage that the context required to support this reading is the orthodox, dominant discourse. TD ‘simplifies’ Nishida’s text to make it accessible to the masses (who might find his philosophical context inaccessible) and to associate Nishida’s prestige (and terminology) with the orthodoxy. In doing so TD almost inverts the text’s significance as a speech-act. It is interesting to reflect that the difference between the content of Tanabe’s draft and Nishida’s draft cannot have gone unnoticed by the professional thinkers of the ultra-nationalist regime—the Ministry of Education’s Thought Inquisition (shisō shingikai). Whilst Tanabe’s draft was widely distributed and accepted, even arriving on the desk of Tōjō himself, Nishida still found himself under surveillance by the shisō shingikai in 1944, suspected of harbouring unpatriotic sentiments (NKZ XIX:317–78).62 By this time, Nishida was frequently being criticized for being too pro-Western, because of his engagement with ‘philosophy’. It is at least conceivable that Nishida would also have been under suspicion because of the company he kept. For example, his former student, Miki Kiyoshi, called on Nishida regularly, until he was thrown in jail for harbouring a communist in March 1945. Even figures such as Konoe Fumimaro, Kido Kōichi, Harada Kumao and Yatsugi Kazuo would have raised suspicions at various times during the war period. Whilst these figures were far from being liberals or communists (Konoe admired the fascist model of politics), none of them were pro-Tōjō. Konoe in particular, with whom Nishida talked regularly, was ‘pessimistic about the outcome of the war, which he feared Japan could not win’ (Shillony 1981/2001:51). Konoe, as de facto leader of the jūshin (the group of seven former Prime Ministers), was actively engaged in rallying support to have Tōjō removed (Shillony 1981/2001: chapter 2).

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Orthodox dialogues: Nishida and Kokutai no hongi It is relatively clear from his biography that Nishida did not intend to join the ultra-nationalistic side of the political discourse in the 1930s and the early 1940s. However, such biographical details are ultimately unconvincing in the defence of Nishida against charges of complicity with the wartime regime because they comprise essentially circumstantial evidence.63 It is simply not good enough to indicate that Nishida wrote diary entries and personal correspondence criticizing the political orthodoxy if it can subsequently be shown that his public works were basically ideological propaganda. An additional problem concerns the vagueness of Nishida’s documented ‘intent’ in his correspondence: Nishida may have been keen to ensure that the military understood that the Japanese spirit should contain a global aspect (sekaisei), but it is not entirely clear from the correspondence what sekaisei actually meant. As Arisaka (1999) has pointed out, philosophical universalism is not in itself anti-imperialistic, even though it can act as an attack on nationalistic particularism.64 The particular nature of Nishida’s universalism can only be understood through engagement with his philosophy. As we have seen, in the existing literature the dominant interpretation of Nishida’s politics suggests that he defined ‘the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism’ (Najita and Harootunian 1988:239) or, at least, that the Kyoto School that followed him ‘justified the Pacific War as a legitimate response by Asia to Western imperialism’ (Shillony 1981/2001:112). Perhaps the most persuasive and extended exposition of this interpretation in English is Pierre Lavelle’s misleadingly titled, ‘The Political Thought of Nishida Kitarō’ (1994).65 Lavelle suggests that Nishida’s complicity in Japanese imperialism during the 1940s is evident in the similarities between the language of his work from that period and the language of Kokutai no hongi, which defined the ultra-nationalist orthodoxy. He succeeds in drawing our attention to a useful and revealing comparative opportunity in 1940s Japanese political ideas. Quite correctly, Lavelle observes that the political discourse of the late 1930s and early 1940s contained a spectrum of different perspectives and that Kokutai no hongi ‘provided a systematic account of official doctrine’ that ‘revealed a not inconsiderable level of intellectual thought’. Lavelle goes on to argue that in order ‘to situate and assess any Japanese political texts of that time (in the present case, those of Nishida Kitarō), it is essential to compare them to Kokutai no hongi’ (Lavelle 1994:142–3).66 Whilst I am reasonably convinced of the wisdom of this method, I am unconvinced by the findings reached by Lavelle, who admits of a certain ambiguity in Nishida’s work but concludes that in general his ‘interpretations are those of Kokutai no hongi’ (Lavelle 1994:152). Lavelle is not interested in Nishida’s biography, and he professes to explicate the ‘Basics of Nishida’s Political Thought’ using texts exclusively from the 1940s (Lavelle 1994:145).67 In particular, he suggests that Nishida’s controversial 1944

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essay, Kokutai, is the ‘text that best summarizes the basis of Nishida’s political thought’ (Lavelle 1994:146).68 He argues that this basis resonates closely with Kokutai no hongi: ‘an orthodox tennō-centricism; the definition, equally orthodox, of the Japanese mind as the union of facts and principles, guaranteed by the existence of the Imperial House…and, finally, expansionism’ (Lavelle 1994:147).69 He argues that Nishida ‘associated’ philosophical formulae, such as zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu (the self-identity of absolute contradictions), with the jingoism of Japanese ultra-nationalism—such terms as ‘Imperial House’ and Japanese mind’ (Lavelle 1994:146). But nowhere is there an attempt to understand the nature of this ‘association’ or the philosophical content of the complex and difficult phrase zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu. The relationship between Nishida and the linguistic and ideological conventions of the time is left unproblematized. In other words, Lavelle begins his inquiry with the assumption that Nishida’s philosophy is essentially a metaphor for the ideology of ultra-nationalism, and that, consequently, the content of terms such as kokutai is the same when it is employed in both Kokutai no hongi and Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi [Kokutai]. This is quite consistent with most of the established literature on Nishida and the Kyoto School, but it ignores Nishida’s personal context, the possibility of his manipulation of conventions, as well as the history of Japanese philosophy in general and of the concept of kokutai in particular.70 The term kokutai has been used at various points in Japanese history to correspond with various different political ideas. It is not a static or uncontested concept. For his part, as we have also seen, Nishida was well versed in these intellectual traditions of Japan.71 We must at least concede the possibility that the meaning of kokutai for Nishida and its conventional meaning in Kokutai no hongi were different, and that this difference was a political speech-act by Nishida, whether effective or not. With no discussion of Nishida’s philosophy, or of terms such as basho no ronri, mu no basho, junsui keiken, rekishiteki shintai or sekaiteki sekai which comprise the real ‘basis of Nishida’s political thought’, Lavelle is left tracing the mutual occurrence of propagandist terms in Kokutai no hongi and Nishida’s 1940s’ philosophical output. We have already seen how deviation from the orthodox vocabulary was made increasingly difficult through the 1930s and 1940s and that it was only its philosophical content that remained negotiable— hence, we should not be surprised to see these terms in Nishida’s output. Conceivably, had these terms not been included, the texts would never have been printed in the first place.72 This is the dilemma of the backward marching revolutionary. It is certainly possible (and, indeed, likely) that a non-philosopher, ultranationalist audience in war-stricken Japan would have understood Nishida in accordance with Lavelle’s interpretation, but that in no way makes it the only or best interpretation, and it certainly does not take his ideas seriously as objects of historical inquiry in their own right. Rather than assessing the philosophical

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context or the ideological, linguistic and political meaning of Nishida’s work as a series of speech-acts, Lavelle assesses its effectiveness in society. However, even ineffective dissent is dissent, and whilst Lavelle’s approach suggests that Nishida should (or would) have remained silent if he were really dissenting, this neglects the responsibility of the intellectual to ‘speak truth to power’. As Eco has said, ‘sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the “scientific” certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way’. Nishida’s case serves to demonstrate the great dangers of failing to be unassailable. Kokutai no hongi The content of Kokutai no hongi is surprisingly under-studied. As we have already seen, it was written by a team of scholars, mostly from Tokyo Imperial University, which included Nishida’s friend and erstwhile colleague Watsuji Tetsurō.73 The final draft was substantially re-written by Itō Enkichi, chief of the Bureau of Thought Control at the Ministry of Education, and the resultant publication has been viewed as largely his work (Hall 1949:7). It was published on 30 March 1937, when 300,000 copies were distributed to educational establishments for use in ethics classes. By 1945 a further two million copies had been sold. The purpose of the 156 page-book, as inscribed on the inside of the front cover, was to ‘clarify our national entity [kokutai] and to cultivate and enrich our national spirit [kokuminseishin]’ (KH: frontspiece). The kokutai of Kokutai no hongi was ‘the eternal and changeless great basis of our nation; it shines clearly throughout our history’ (KH:9). To be more precise, kokutai was identical with the person of the emperor: ‘the Imperial Throne [hōso], which is coeval with heaven and earth, is the foundation of our national entity’ (KH:17). The question of why the emperor is to be considered ‘coeval with heaven and earth [tenjōmukyū]’ is answered by reference to Japanese mythology, as expressed in the Kojiki: ‘The Emperor is an honoured descendant of Amaterasu Omikami, and is the divine descendent of the imperial ancestors—the founders of the empire’ (KH:24).74 Elsewhere, the emperor is called ‘deity incarnate’ (KH:16). The consequences of the emperor’s divinity are immediately obvious for his people. The ‘Way of the Subject’ (shinmin no michi) is carefully mapped out in traditionally hierarchical Confucian terms: ‘loyalty is our fundamental Way as subjects, and it is the foundation of our national morality [kokumin dōtoku]’ (KH: 38). All subjects should ‘with a good understanding of our true spirit, follow our own respective occupations’ (KH:90–1), but this occupation is not chosen freely, rather subjects must ‘be loyal to their respective duties both in the literary and military spheres’ (KH:142), as commanded by the emperor. In other words, the individual people within the kokutai ‘naturally [umarenagara nishite] serve the Emperor and walk the Imperial Way’ (KH:32– 3). There is no sense of individual freedom and no sense of the importance of

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self-actualization. Indeed, individualism is to be eradicated because it challenges social harmony, which is defined in terms of harmony with the will of the emperor.75 Subjects are servants by nature, and service is all the satisfaction that they require. However, harmony itself does not appear to be natural because it must be created both within society (through the eradication of individualism) and in the wider world: ‘war should be a thing that brings about great harmony— that is, peace’ (KH:52— emphasis added). Of course, this was also a classic concept in European fascism. Everybody’s satisfaction and the harmonious functioning of the nation (together with its laws) is ‘rooted in the Emperor’s own majesty’ (KH:135). The imperial will is the word of God and ‘above all, the fundamental principles of the system of government…are entirely those of direct rule by the Emperor [goshinsei]’ (KH:133). The emperor is the only, the ultimate (and, indeed, the absolute) subject (shutai) of sovereignty This is exactly what Nishida condemned as ‘authority theory’ in Zen no kenkyū. Because the emperor is divine and because he is also Japanese, the Japanese kokutai is unique in all the world. In keeping with European fascist logic, Kokutai no hongi suggests that other nations may have national cultures, some of them may even be old and distinguished, but none of them are unbroken for ages eternal, coeval with heaven and earth: ‘in other countries, because of revolutions and downfalls, the country’s life is revoked and the spirit of the founding nation [kenkoku] is interrupted and becomes extinct’ (KH:63).76 The result is that other national cultures are not ‘true cultures’ (shin no bunka) because they have been cut off from their source. Instead, such cultures develop ‘abstract ideas’ which are always separate from ‘concrete history’. It is precisely because such ideas are insubstantial that they can become universal, transcending national boundaries. However, in Japan ‘the spirit of the founding nation [chōkoku] gloriously persists, and thus it is at one with our history’ (KH:115). In this way, the Kokutai no hongi privileges the concrete particular over the abstract universal. Not only is this a way to disparage the universalism of EuroAmerican nations, suggesting that their cultures are essentially vacuous and that their universalization itself proves this vacuity, but it also resolves the conservative dilemma that had been plaguing Japan since the late nineteenth century: Japan can assimilate aspects of Western culture without losing its identity precisely because Western culture is abstract, universal and insubstantial. Furthermore, placing priority on the concrete particular of Japan implies that genuine world peace and harmony can legitimately be imposed on the world because its form and content is defined by the will of the divine Japanese emperor, around whom the world should properly be organized: all the world under one roof (hakkō ichiu). Kokutai no hongi presents the world view that Nishida characterized (and condemned) as ‘divine heteronomous political ethics’, modelled on a strictly hierarchical interpretation of Confucianism, fused with Shintō imagery.

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According to Lavelle, ‘Nishida expressed his political thought by using set formulas that articulated official doctrine [from Kokutai no hongi] and which he developed more fully with his own philosophy’ (Lavelle 1994:147). Even Lavelle seems to sense that he is doing some violence to Nishida when he suggests, for example, that Nishida’s ‘real state’ [shin no kokka] is ‘almost synonymous with “kokutai”’ (Lavelle 1994:149—emphasis added). This innocuous ‘almost’ hides Nishida’s entire moral and political philosophy, and it leads Lavelle to ignore Nishida’s moral conditional and to conclude that Nishida saw the ‘wars instigated by Japan’ as beneficial to the world, because its kokutai was ideal (Lavelle 1994:155). For Nishida, as we have seen, the Japanese kokutai was not even almost ideal in practice, and his manipulation of the evaluative-descriptive conventions is clear from his context. Lavelle’s confusion regarding the subtleties of Nishida’s position is finally laid bare when he resorts to strange linguistic contortions in order to explain it: Nishida was, apparently, opposed to ‘the ultra-orthodox extremists’, whatever that means, ‘but not to the official doctrine itself’ (Lavelle 1994:164), and this is despite the fact that Lavelle asserts right at the start that ‘Nishida’s position in the political debates was quite precise’ (Lavelle 1994:139). To his credit, Lavelle does isolate one possible source of Nishida’s potential heterodoxy when he points out that Nishida drew many of his terms from Buddhism. However, Lavelle suggests that the use of such terms was ‘close to orthodoxy’ and ‘not in itself a sign of significant heterodoxy’ (Lavelle 1994:148 —emphasis added). Nonetheless, the lack of Buddhist influences on Kokutai no hongi is one of its most striking features. The text itself suggests that the ‘Chinese ideas that have been introduced into our country are mainly Confucianism and Taoism’ (KH:146). Buddhism is mentioned only in passing, and it is ascribed to India (KH:147).77 We have already seen, however, how the influence of Buddhist philosophy has served to soften the hierarchical rigidity of Confucian political ideas throughout Japanese intellectual history, and it is clear from Nishida’s diaries that he was engaged in Buddhist dialogue and study throughout his life, including the 1940s.78 At the very least, we should take Buddhism seriously as an influence on (and part of the context of) Nishida’s work before we judge whether it was close to being an almost significant source of dissent. If Lavelle is to be believed, then, and there is no substantial philosophical content to the ‘almost’, Nishida’s political thought is characterized by a conception of the Japanese nation in the 1940s as empirically identical to the kokutai; the kokutai is eternal and unchanging because it is identical with the Imperial Household and the person of the emperor—who is coeval with heaven and earth because he is a deity incarnate. Subjects have no political rights, and only one duty—to serve the emperor. The emperor has no duties because his will defines both law, morality and truth. Futhermore, because Japan is the only nation with an unbroken culture, the emperor’s will is of universal validity.

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Rediscovering the political dialogue: commentary, critique and Kokutai no hongi In the years that followed the publication of Kokutai no hongi, a small industry developed producing commentaries on it, most of which simply elucidated the often obscure references to ancient Japanese myth and legend that peppered the text.79 Nishida did not publish a direct response to the Ministry’s text, although it is undeniably true that many of his subsequent publications utilized its language. The issue in question here, however, is not whether or even why Nishida used the language of the late 1930s and 1940s, but how he used it. One of the first political statements made by Nishida after the publication of Kokutai no hongi in March 1937 was in September of that year, when he gave two public lectures in Nagano, Rekishiteki shintai.80 The timing and content of these lectures is significant, so we will dwell on them at some length. For those commentators who maintain that Nishida underwent a fundamental ‘turn’ towards political interests in his later career, Rekishiteki shintai should represent a pivotal moment in which he began to address explicitly political concerns in a public arena. In practice, however, the text is relatively underappreciated in the literature.81 Whilst the lectures do demonstrate a shift towards the employment of the orthodox political terms that Lavelle finds so offensive, what is most interesting about them is their philosophical consistency with Nishida’s earlier work—Nishida himself opens the first lecture with the admission that The first thing I wrote was Zen no kenkyū. Between then and now a considerable amount of time has passed. Although many things have changed in that time, I should say that the basic spirit of all my intervening work emerged out of Zen no kenkyū.82 (NKZ XIV:265) At the outset, then, Nishida himself appeals to us to consider his philosophical context when reading what is to come. As we have already seen, Nishida also used this opportunity to lament the dilemma of the effective intellectual: ‘although it is something created by me, it separates from me, becomes independent, and acts upon me in return’ (NKZ XIV:270). The dialectic of creation and created occupies a central place in these lectures, not only in terms of the responsibility of the creator, but also in terms of what it means to genuinely exist: for Nishida, genuine existence is creative and created. Just as it was the case in Zen no kenkyū that true morality could only be expressed in terms of acting intuition or willed action—that is, in terms of the unity of action and intention—so Nishida here suggests that an individual personality (or what he now calls a ‘historical body’) is only genuinely real to the extent that it unifies its bodily existence with a creative impulse. In a manner that we have already seen as characteristic of Nishida’s work, the good (of Zen no kenkyū) is

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conflated with the genuinely real (rather than merely empirical reality). The historical body plays a deliberate role in history: to be real ‘our activity must be productive activity’ (NKZ XIV:270). However, just as in Zen no kenkyū, it is not the case that Nishida locates historical agency exclusively in the ego of the everyday individual. There are greater levels of unity which are also historically productive. Nishida gives these contradictory identities the provisional label ‘historical species’ (rekishiteki shu), although he is careful to distance the concept from its racialized or zoological connotations: historical species achieves their form by the way they act and according to the pattern of their actions, not by their racial make-up per se (NKZ XIV:288). In other words, the historical species is defined by its created and creative actions; it is a cultural, not a biological form. To underline this idea, Nishida quickly replaces the problematic term, rekishiteki shu, with the potentially more dangerous term (at least in the climate of 1937), rekishiteki shintaiteki shakai (historical-bodily society) (NKZ XIV:290).83 Although it is certainly the case that Nishida does not consider all empirical states to have attained to the level of historical-bodily society, and he does point to Japan as an example of a society that may have attained to this level, the term is far from exclusive, and Nishida is explicit about the criteria that must be met in order for a society to be considered ‘historical-bodily’: ‘the peoples who have [developed] various individual cultures have produced their respective historical species. By being creative, these species come into relationships with each other and thus develop further’ (NKZ XIV:290—emphasis added). In particular, Nishida points to China, and he states explicitly that, like Japan, it has developed its own historically distinct society: ‘They are both historical-bodily societies, or historical species’ (NKZ XIV:290).84 The character of a historical-bodily society is determined by the evolution of a given nation, and it determines the identity of the people who participate in that nation.85 Here Nishida is overlapping with his earlier essay, Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai, (1934) in which he suggested that the great civilizations of the world differed most fundamentally in their conceptions of metaphysics. In Rekishiteki shintai, Nishida suggests that we become members of given societies through our participation in the idea (or principle) of that society (or in the idea of what it means ‘to be’, in that society) which has developed within the particular history of that nation. Just as ‘Plato says that human beings are human beings through their participation in the Idea of humanity’ (NKZ XIV:288), Nishida suggests that our genuine personalities are formed through our participation in the idea of our genuine society. One of the problems Nishida has with Plato is that no universal society has yet developed within the idea of which we could participate in order to genuinely understand our common humanity—all of our personalities are necessarily relative to our particular historical bodies. At the present time the world is still composed of nations looking in on themselves to form national awarenesses, hence any existing universalism is necessarily abstract, hollow and, most

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importantly, ahistorical.86 However, Nishida suggests elsewhere that the twentieth century might represent the beginning of a globalized world, in which historical-bodily societies will enter into a ‘compact space’, thanks to advances in technology, and, through their interactions, they will begin to participate in the idea of a world of historical species, a world-historical world (sekaishiteki sekai) or a world-of-worlds (sekaiteki sekai).87 The attention of nations would be turned around from national awareness to awareness of a global history in which they each participate—this is the so-called sekaishiteki tachiba (world-historical standpoint) that we will see in Chapter 5. For Nishida, the twentieth century was a moment in history that should finally bring Plato’s Idea of humanity within reach. Intra-kokutai relations An important question at this juncture concerns the proper nature of the relationship between historical bodies. At the domestic level, where individual egos constitute historical bodies, the correct relationship between people is determined by their mutual participation in the idea of the greater unity which is the historical-bodily society: ‘historical-bodily societies come into being and it is from them that we create things’ (NKZ XIV:290). However, because individual people and societies are both historical bodies only to the extent that they are both creative and created, the two exist in dialectical tension and unity, each forming and being formed by the other. Hence, social orders (and historicalbodily societies) are not static systems, they evolve dynamically, feeding off the creative momentum that their contradictory identity provides. There is no static and ageless Confucian hierarchy here. There is an important conditional hidden within this conception of the state. For Nishida, the state is essentially a moral construct, premised upon and formed around the mutual satisfaction of each of its individual members. As we have seen, greater levels of unity of personality constitute greater goods, but only to the extent that they are genuine unities. Somewhat like Rousseau, Nishida envisions a really existing unity (or general will) that is created (or revealed) by the interactions between each individual (and by those between the state and other states). He calls this a genuine syncretism (shin no shosetsukongō). A state is only considered to be a genuine (or moral) state to the extent that it approximates the form of this true, syncretic unity, which is determined by the historical matrix within any given society.88 It is in this spirit that Nishida states: ‘what I term the nation does not just signify a nation in the sense of a modern nation’ (NKZ XII:422).89 Here, as in Zen no kenkyū, Nishida utilizes the word kokka for nation—rather than the more populist kokumin. For Nishida, the concept of nation does not carry with it the institutional baggage associated with it in the European tradition, which gave rise to the League of Nations, rather a nation is any grouping of people who constitute a ‘world forming itself in individual form with a historical-bodily

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existence as a structure of the contradictory identity of the individual and the whole’ (NKZ XII:422). Indeed, Nishida was critical of the League of Nations for forcing an ‘eighteenth century abstract world ideology’ onto the world, which merely advocated the ‘self-determination’ of peoples defined in terms of their institutional and legal independence, rather than in terms of their genuine selfactualization (NKZ XII:428). Nations should not be judged by the presence or absence of governmental institutions but by the extent to which they are genuinely historical-bodily societies. In later essays, such as Kokka riyū no mondai (1941) and Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi [Kokutai] (1944), the divergence between Nishida’s conception of the ethical nation and the conventional sense of an institutional nation becomes so marked that Nishida coopts the term ‘kokutai’ to describe the former. He points out that the term is unique to Japanese, and suggests that it ‘can serve as a new starting point for the science of nations’. Inter-kokutai relations becomes the ethical equivalent of international relations. In other words, kokutai is a technical term in Nishida’s philosophy, referring to the basic (and ideal) unit of global affairs—every genuine nation has a kokutai—it is far from the unique product of a divine will, as presented in Kokutai no hongi. Because the nation is an intermediate location between the private individual and the universal world, it is subjected to dual contradictions, and its evolution is shaped not only from within but also from without.90 The interactions of a historical-bodily society in the world of historical-bodily societies form a dialectic in which the nation is continuously created, recreated, and also creative, forming the world that forms it. To some extent, then, the cultural content of every nation becomes a public good, insofar as it forms part of the international (inter-historical-bodily-societal, or inter-kokutai) dialectic that forms each nation and that in turn defines the character of the international system: ‘The things produced by the Japanese people move the Japanese people, but, because these things become public goods, they move the Chinese [people] too. Similarly, the goods produced in China move the Japanese people. It is in this way that the historical world comes to develop creatively’ (NKZ XIV:290). For Nishida then, culture was not a territorially rooted concept.91 Nations were the incubators in which cultures were nurtured and produced, but, once born, a culture, like any other product, including Nishida’s own philosophy, ‘takes on a life of its own’, independent of its creator, and acts upon its creator in turn. Hence, unlike the authors of Kokutai no hongi, Nishida did not believe that discontinuities in a nation’s history meant that their cultures lost their potency Indeed, for Nishida, the special or unique features (tokushoku) of a culture should survive forever,92 even after the death of the nation that originally produced it: for example, ‘the nations of Greece and India died out many tens-ofthousands of years ago, but their cultures live on to this day’ (NKZ XII:424)93 because they became public goods and thus creative elements of the international system as features of other national cultures. The dilemma for Nishida was not discontinuity or even change within nations, as it was in Kokutai no hongi, rather

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the problem was one of inauthentic (or heteronomously induced) change: foreign ideas should not be forced upon others or adopted because of coercion. Hence, whilst Nishida and the authors of Kokutai no hongi both exhibit kinds of conservatism, for Nishida conservatism is not incompatible with cosmopolitanism.94 Nishida did believe that Japanese culture had some special features of eternal value: ‘its special characteristic consisted of being an emotional culture’ (NKZ VII: 443).95 Being an emotional culture meant that the Japanese ‘moved immanently from thing to thing’, living spontaneously in the absolute present, without regard for ritual or religion. One consequence of this special culture was that Japan was particularly well-suited to assimilating the cultural products of other cultures in an authentic (or self-reflective) manner (i.e. assimilation itself was consistent with its own historical identity). Nishida is quite clear that it is in this spirit that we should interpret slogans such as ‘all the world under one roof’ (hakkō ichiu), which appeared in Kokutai no hongi, where they were used to justify Japanese imperialism as a means to bring the world under the rule of the emperor (who, being a deity incarnate, could reach out over the world like the roof of heaven and impose his will on the conduct of all). However, for Nishida, the term hakkō ichiu bespoke cosmopolitianism, not only in the international system but also on the domestic level, where it represents the ‘funda-mental principle of world-of-worldsformationism’ in which myriad fluid cultures are embraced and preserved together under the roof of a single nation—in contemporary parlance, this is the nation (or world) as melting-pot. Japan’s kokutai could be characterized by hakkō ichiu not because it was expansionist in an imperialist sense but because it was inclusive and cosmopolitan. In this respect, Nishida’s idea of hakkō ichiu had more in common with Saichō’s expression ichinen sanzen (one thought, three thousand worlds) than it did with the usage in Kokutai no hongi. For Saichō and Nishida, universalism and particularism were not contradictory at ground. For Nishida, the emperor and the Imperial House (kōshitsu) symbolize this inclusive principle of the national polity because, amidst the insistent changes over time, they have remained constant fixtures in the history of Japan: ‘one line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal [bansei ikkei]’ (NKZ XII:430). Nishida is explicit that the importance of the Imperial House is the inclusive principle that it represents rather than the divine, racial purity that it is used to suggest in Kokutai no hongi: ‘Our nation’s Imperial House is not simply the centre of one particular ethnic-nation [minzokuteki kokka]. Rather, contained within our nation’s Imperial Way [kōdō] is the world-formation principle of hakkō ichiu’ (NKZ XII:430). In line with this interpretation of Japanese kokutai, Nishida discusses other terms from the Kokutai no hongi. For example, whilst both Nishida and the authors of Kokutai no hongi locate ‘loyalty’ (chū/magokoro) as the ‘highest moral ideal in Japan’, the content of this term is radically different in each presentation (NKZ VII:443). In the Kokutai no hongi, as we have seen, loyalty is

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interpreted within a strict Confucian hierarchy, in which each individual is allotted his place in life by the authorities or simply by the social structure itself. There is no sense in which this structure is dynamically and dialectically determined by the mutual self-actualization of individuals and state. For Nishida, on the other hand, loyalty is an ‘expression of pure-feeling [junjō]’ (NKZ VII: 443) which is not ‘something that judges us from without’ (NKZ VII:443) in the manner of a static legal or moral structure. In other words, whilst he locates loyalty at the centre of the Japanese spirit, Nishida still refuses to adopt the heteronomous ethical theory implied by strict Confucian hierarchies, echoing his original treatment of ethical theory in Zen no kenkyū.96 Even in his later work Nishida is quick to discard the idea that Japan is a ‘religious culture that receives and nurtures the judgments and laws [rippō] of an exterior god’ (NKZ VII:443). Whilst his target in this part of Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai was probably Indian culture, the criticism also rings true of Shintō-Confucian ideas of the divine rule of the emperor, and as such flatly contradicts statements from the Kokutai no hongi such as ‘the fundamental principles of the system of government…are entirely those of direct rule by the Emperor…all our laws are rooted in the emperor’s own majesty’ (KH:133, 135).97 As in Zen no kenkyū, Nishida is equally damning of both divine and monarchical (secular) heteronomous ethics, such as those in Confucianism ]of the Sage Kings [seiō]’ (NKZ premised on the ‘ritualistic teachings [reikyō VII:443). Again, in the mid-1930s, Nishida seems to direct this criticism at ancient Chinese culture, but the critique is equally damning of the Confucianism in Kokutai no hongi, wherein individuals are appointed roles in society in accordance with the will of the emperor and the (invented) traditional structure of Japanese society. Whilst the imperial subject of Kokutai no hongi is expected to find satisfaction in his/her service to the emperor in a form determined by the state or by the imperial will, Nishida is clear that the Japanese kokutai should not be ‘regulated by commandment, law, or ritual’ (NKZ VII:443), but instead it should be sustained by pure feeling, which is not simply egoism but ‘is something neither autonomous nor heteronomous’ (NKZ VII:444). The influence of Mahāyāna ideas on Nishida’s formulation of the state and the kokutai is fundamental here—and their absence from Kokutai no hongi is stark; Nishida’s kokutai should be characterized by his political utopia, in which all people have the liberty to self-actualize and thus contribute spontaneously to the dynamic dialectical unity which is the contradictory identity of the historical-bodily society. It is already clear, then, that Nishida’s conception of the Japanese kokutai differs significantly from that set out in Kokutai no hongi, despite the utilization of some of the same terms. In the first place, Nishida effectively transmutes the national kokutai into one of the many ‘worlds’ in a ‘world-of-worlds’, in which there is no evident hierarchy. There is nothing absolute about that particular ‘selfdetermination of the absolute present, which is the Imperial House’, as suggested

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by Lavelle’s cross-interpretation with Kokutai no hongi (Lavelle 1994:146).98 Whilst it is certainly true that Nishida perceives some special features in Japanese culture, he does not suggest that Japan was the only nation that had produced special cultural features of eternal value: ‘the special feature of modern European culture lies in its scientific spirit. It has a positivistic spirit’ (NKZ VII: 438). Indian culture was ‘religious’, whilst China ‘developed into a culture of social ritual [jitte sunawachi reizoku]’ (NKZ VII:434).99 Indeed, Nishida suggests that it is not necessarily the case that the form of everyday Japan in the 1930s and 1940s was identical with the ideal kokutai that it was ethically bound to approximate.100 Rather like Kant, Nishida was ambivalent about the historical stage reached by the present world. He did not think that all nations had actually awakened to their true forms, but he did ‘think of the present-day world as being in the age of global self-awakening [sekaiteki jikaku]’ (NKZ XII:427—emphasis added).101 The movement from the national to the global arena was, therefore, not merely a theoretical step for Nishida but also a historical one. The capacity to theorize and practice international relations in a genuinely universal manner would only arise once political agents had reached global self-awakening. Hence, even if we can concede that Nishida’s vision of the domestic order within the Japanese kokutai was different in some important respects from the vision in Kokutai no hongi, even that it was critical of the Shintō-Confucian orthodoxy, the more difficult question of international relations remains to be addressed: did Nishida succeed in adopting a genuinely world-historical perspective, or did his philosophy simply justify Japanese expansionism from within the national perspective of Japan? Inter-kokutai relations As we have seen, Lavelle suggests that Nishida’s thought is characterized by expansionism in the same way as Kokutai no hongi. Whilst it is relatively clear that Nishida did not attempt to sustain the idea that the Japanese Emperor should rule over the world because he was a deity incarnate and because Japan was the only true nation in the world, expansionism certainly does form an important part of Nishida’s political philosophy. However, the emphatic embrace of the particular as the universal found in Kokutai no hongi is antithetical to Nishida’s stance. Indeed, Nishida was concerned with the problem of universalism right from the start of his career, in Zen no kenkyū, when he realized that his conception of the morality of increasing levels of unity contained an ethical imperative for the expansion of personality into increasingly encompassing forms. However, because Nishida ascribed no hierarchy to the myriad personalities, the central political problematic became how to permit the continuous expansion of personality without infringing on the expansion of others. Even as early as 1911 Nishida attempted to assess the models of politics and international relations that had been generated in particular national cultures,

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particularly in what he called the ‘West’, but he found that none of them succeeded in combining universalism with the insight that each separate culture was of equal value. Their failures amounted to cultural imperialism. Effectively, Nishida was lamenting the contradictions between universalism and particularism in moral and political philosophy. In fact, in contrast to the difficult textual leg-work needed to uncover the consistent manipulation of orthodox ultra-nationalist conventions in Nishida’s late works, Nishida’s position on universalism is startling in its consistency and transparency throughout his career. Over more than thirty years, Nishida hardly changes a word. 1911, in Zen no kenkyū: Genuine globalism [shinsei no sekaishugi] does not mean that each nation will cease to be. It means that each nation becomes increasingly stable, displays its own respective characteristics, and contributes to the history of the world. (ZK:201) 1934, in Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai: Of course, the world’s cultures are not all the same. In fact, something that has lost its particularity ceases to be a culture. Therefore, from the standpoint of authentic culture, the development of authentic cultures cannot merely follow an abstract advance in a particularistic direction— that would amount to the repudiation of culture. A true world culture, which accords with the principle of self-development through the mediation of the world, will be formed only by the various cultures preserving their own respective standpoints. (NKZ VII:452–3) Then, finally, in 1943, in Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, this time with the admixture of the language of national missions, so much in vogue in the 1940s: As a result of scientific, technological, and economic development, today each national people [kokkaminzoku] have entered into a single compact global space. The solution is nothing other than for each nation to awaken to its world-historical mission and for each to transcend itself while remaining completely true to itself, and to create a single world-of-worlds [sekaiteki sekai]. (NKZ XII:428) In other words, Nishida is profoundly sceptical about the extent to which any genuine culture can be universalized, since genuine culture is necessarily

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historical and particular, and he appears to insist on the equality of all such cultures on the international stage. The most obvious target for his attack in the context of 1940s Japan was Western culture, which had been flooding into Asia along with British, French, Dutch and American troops for eighty years. Nishida repeatedly points out that the ‘West’ had forced the nations of East Asia to conform to its conceptions of politics, the good and the nation, and that consequently the historical bodies of Asian societies had been suppressed; as actual or virtual colonies of European powers the nations of Asia had lost their capacity to self-actualize since their form was now determined heteronomously: ‘now the various peoples of East Asia must awaken (jikaku) to their own world-historical mission as East Asian peoples; they must each transcend themselves and create a single particular world [tokushuteki sekai] and thus achieve their own world-historical missions as East Asian peoples. This is the principle of the construction of an East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [tōa kyōeiken keisei]’ (NKZ XII:429).102 In the context of the 1943 Greater East Asia Conference, it is easy to see how such ideas were far from unassailable and could be read as supporting Japanese imperialism as a force to liberate Asia from the evils of Western imperialism. However, within the context of Nishida’s philosophy, this passage reveals that the principle (genri) referred to in the last line is actually that of awakening (jikaku) and not of coercion in any form.103 The problem, however, is not just with the presence of Western forces in Asia. The problem is also with the nature of Western culture, which espouses a universal morality even though, like all moral theories, ‘the moral theory of the age of the Enlightenment was based in a particular time and race of people (particularly the French people). The insistence on a formal, universalistic morality itself expresses a specific moral content. However, today, as a result of historical development…no race of people can live only according to itself… The time has come in which the essence of true morality can be clarified’ (NKZ XII:408).104 International/ inter-kokutai discourse in the twentieth century should create a world-historical world in which universalism can become concrete. Nishida links the ‘formal universalistic morality’ of ‘Western’ thought to the principles behind the League of Nations. He implies that the exclusion of Eastern ideas from the discourse after the First World War meant that ‘other than the old abstract ideas about the world [sekairinen] there was no new principle of world construction. Above all, this is the reason why again today the Great World War is being repeated’ (NKZ XII:427).105 Nishida is very clear that a genuine transnational grouping must not be based on the culture of one particularity: if one speaks of a co-prosperity sphere, the peoples that become its constituents should not be chosen arbitrarily as they are in the League of Nations, rather it must be formed historically. In this way, a true coprosperity sphere [shin kyōeiken] will be established… This is the basic difference between world-of-worlds-formationism [sekaitekisekai

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keiseishugi] and the principles of the League of Nations [kokusai renmeishugi].106 (NKZ XII:432–3) A legitimately moral trans-national grouping must be sensitive to the particular cultures of each constituent nation. Nishida is clear that this is most likely to happen (or, at least, likely to happen first) in geographically contiguous regions wherein there are common cultural commodities. Nishida calls this regional grouping the ‘particular world’ (tokushuteki sekai) or Co-Prosperity Sphere, and he sees it as a stepping stone towards the creation of a unified world-of-worlds— a stage between the particular nation and the world itself: forming a single world-of-worlds in which each national people [kokkaminzoku] transcend themselves while remaining true to themselves must mean that, first of all, each transcends itself and, in accordance with its own respective regional traditions, creates a single particular world [tokushuteki sekai]. Then, in the same way, the particular worlds, which have been constructed on historical foundations, will unite and a single world-of-worlds will cover the whole globe. (NKZ XII:428) It is quite conceivable that Nishida would have conceded that the League of Nations constituted a particular world in Europe, if only it had not tried to encompass other nations that it had made no effort to understand.107 Conversely, it is far from clear that Nishida found his ideal particular world in the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere itself. Whilst explicit criticism of the national polity was not permitted in public, it is clear that the logic of Nishida’s philosophy does provide a critique, albeit in the philosophical language impenetrable to most of his audience. In his private correspondence, Nishida is less guarded—he states that his conception of the Co-Prosperity Sphere: …is definitely not imperialism. Above all, if anyone inside the sphere is dissatisfied, then it is not a co-prosperity sphere. If the sphere were based on a selfish decision [by one state] and the others were coerced into it, that would violate everyone’s freewill, and that would not be a co-prosperity sphere… If it were a true co-prosperity sphere [hontō no kyōeiken], Japan would be asked [by the others] to create it. If that is not the case, we cannot talk of a crusade [seisen]. (NKZ XII:471) In other words, it was certainly the case that Nishida was against Western imperialism, but this attitude was not the result of anti-Westernism or run-away ultra-nationalism, rather it was part and parcel of a grander anti-imperialism which must logically have encompassed Japanese imperialism as well: never

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solidarity before critique. Whilst universalism was something towards which Nishida thought that the historical world was aspiring, he is very clear that progress must be evolutionary rather than revolutionary: no particularism should be forcefully universalized, be it the Western concept of the self-determining state or the Kokutai no hongi’s idea of the divine national polity. Genuine (and moral) universalism should not involve the negation of competing nations and cultures, rather it should involve encompassing the differences within in a new, historical, syncretic unity. Dialogue, diplomacy and self-reflection, not guns, bombs and battle-plans, must be the fuel of historical progress. Towards a universal particularism In many respects the language of universalism and particularism obscures Nishida’s political vision, because Nishida’s universalism is anti-universalist in a number of important ways. Indeed, Nishida generally avoids the term ‘universalism’ (fuhenshugi), which he mainly ascribes to ‘Western moralism’, and he prefers to use ‘worldism’ (sekaishugi) or ‘genuine worldism’ (shinsei no sekaishugi), since the latter appeared to him to be less abstract and more grounded in experience. Hence, Nishida-apologists such as Yusa Michiko and Ueda Shizuteru are misguided when they suggest that universalism is incompatible with nationalism, and hence that Nishida’s ostensible universalism offers him salvation from charges of ultra-nationalist complicity As Arisaka Yōko has correctly pointed out, ‘universalist discourse was used both as a tool of liberation and oppression in Japan’s case’, because it established Japan simultaneously as the liberator and occupier of East Asia (Arisaka 1999:242). To find Nishida universalist in this sense is simply to throw him in with the authors of Kokutai no hongi. Whilst it is certainly the case that Nishida aspired to write a philosophy of universal value, drawing on his Buddhist heritage he conceived of it only in terms of a philosophy of liberation. In his case, philosophical universalism and political universalism were quite different. Nishida’s was a universalism of particulars, rather than a particular universalism: ‘The principle of world-ofworlds-formation does not negate the individual characteristics of each national people—in fact, it does precisely the opposite… When I talk about the world becoming concretely one, I mean that each national people must live completely in accordance with their own various historical lives’ (NKZ XII:430). It is exactly this kind of ‘universalism of particulars’ that Nishida was referring to in his correspondence, when he demanded that the Army should abandon their narrow nationalism and attempt to view Japanese culture from a world-historical perspective: ‘the nationalism of the present day must have its foundations in this kind of world-of-worlds-formationism’ (NKZ XII:430) otherwise it is simply ethnic-nationalism (minzokushugi) or imperialism. One of the difficulties Nishida faces with this type of universalism is the dilemma of perspectivism, usually associated with Nietzsche: how is it possible

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to maintain the validity of both the universal and each particular simultaneously?108 Indeed, Nishida was criticized by his eminent colleague Tanabe Hajime for grounding his thought in this contradiction. Whilst both Nishida and Tanabe agreed that all academic traditions are necessarily specific to a particular time and space (or ‘species’, shu), Nishida maintained that the place of nothingness (mu no basho), wherein there was the spontaneous selfawakening of absolute nothingness, was prior to historical-species and thus a genuine universal. However, because it was prior to all particularisms, nothing could be said about it within the conventional terms of any species. To the extent that Tanabe conceded the existence of such a place of nothingness, he argued that it ‘belonged outside the practice and language of philosophy, which cannot put up with such a complete lack of conceptual definition’ (THZ IV:306; Heisig 1999:376–7). For Tanabe, Nishida’s universal belonged to the genealogy of religion (particularly Japanese religion) —for there can be no such thing as unmediated experience, even religious experience is specific. However, Nishida is quite clear that he is not talking about religious experience but rather pure experience, which is empirically verifiable by all genuinely self-aware people, regardless of their specific location and time.109 Indeed, pure experience of absolute nothingness is what is left after all academic traditions and particularisms have fallen away (which, for him, is identical with blending them all together) — it is not part of one of them, it is prior to all of them. Throughout the intellectual history of Japan, we have seen the philosophical dilemma with which Nishida was struggling: is harmony something that evolves from mutual self-reflection and realization, or is it something imposed on people from above/outside? Whilst Nishida is undoubtedly located within the dominant discourse about harmony, he clearly takes the former interpretation, arguing that harmony does not necessitate homogeneity or a rigid, static structure. Indeed, for Nishida, as we have seen, heteronomous regulation is an evil to be avoided. His attitude towards this kind of Confucian hierarchism was clear in 1890, in his reaction to the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and it was similar in 1937, with the publication of Kokutai no hongi, which was based on (and riddled with references to) the Imperial Rescript. Making the world one should not mean imposing homogeneity on it. The imperialism of 1930s and 1940s Japan was an example of the kind of particular universalism that Nishida’s moral and political philosophy condemned. Nishida’s conception of the state and the kokutai are rather different from that found in the orthodox discourse of wartime Japan, although his language is sometimes the same. Unlike the ultra-nationalists, Nishida did not locate political legitimacy in the creation of a powerful and expansionist state: ‘a nation that is simply materially strong is not a true nation’. Instead, Nishida’s notion of legitimacy was ethical: ‘a true nation must have a moral individuality’ (NKZ XII: 422). In the terms of Nishida’s political and moral philosophy: ‘there are no inherent contradictions and conflicts between [true] nations or cultures’, that is, between self-actualized kokutai, rather ‘problems arise between particular kinds

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of nations or particular kinds of cultures’, that is, between the empirical nations of an immoral world (NKZ XII:425).

5 Nishida’s shadow The Kyoto School and the manipulation of nothingness

Depending on the circumstances, Nishida tetsugaku can have a fascist effect…or a feudal effect, but it is neither of these in essence. (TJZ II:342–3) Any political concept is dangerous if you push it too far— even the line between liberty and anarchy is narrow. (Spencer 2002) As we have seen, Nishida himself lamented that, once he had created it, his thought became a public good, beyond his control, and it acted on him in return. He further complained that nobody had yet understood his work, and that his words had been twisted and used out of context. If we are to take Nishida’s objections seriously, rather than to dismiss them as pleadings for exoneration,1 then we must seek to understand what happened to his thought once he set it onto paper— how did the speech-acts of others manipulate his particular linguistic and ideological conventions?2 If violence was indeed done to Nishida’s philosophy during its passage into the public domain, to what extent should this exonerate him; if his thought provided a direction or a path, should he be held responsible for the distance others travelled along it? One of the most obvious avenues for Nishida’s thought was through the school of philosophy that grew-up around him, the so-called Kyoto School. It is often overlooked in the literature that septuagenarian Nishida’s public presence during the war-years was, with the exception of a few notable incidents, mostly by proxy — his students and colleagues, such as Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji played far larger roles in public debates. Indeed, already in 1936, Tosaka Jun, once a student of Nishida and then one of his most vocal critics, doubts ‘how many progressive students of philosophy are reading Nishida tetsugaku…it is no longer at the vanguard of philosophy [sentanteki na tetsugaku]’ (TJZ II:343). Indeed, without the ‘counterfoil of Tanabe’s thought and the creative enlargements of Nishitani’, the Kyoto School would never have been born, and Nishida’s prominence might have been rather smaller or short-lived (Heisig 2001:7). Heisig suggests that even in the post-war period, Nishida’s eminence

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owes more to the popularity of the works of Tanabe and Nishitani than to his own writings. A crucial question, then, revolves around the relationship between Nishida’s political philosophy and that of the Kyoto School as a whole, or between the speech-acts of Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani and the other members of the school in the late 1930s–1940s. Because ‘Nishida was the wellspring’ of the Kyoto School (Heisig 2001:7), there has been an understandable tendency to attribute to him (even in a circuitous way) the speech-acts of his ‘followers’. This is a variation of the phenomenon lamented by Oscar Wilde (Said and Skinner) in chapter one, where prominent intellectuals are held symbolically responsible for the sins of their period. It is not the case, however, that the most politically active members of the Kyoto School were simply the faithful representatives of Nishida tetsugaku in the public sphere. Indeed, thinkers such as Tanabe, Nishitani and Miki Kiyoshi have become justly renowned as significant philosophers in their own right, not only since the end of the war but also during it, and the political standpoint of these ‘followers’ often diverges from that of Nishida himself. Even in the context of the 1930s, peripheral members of the Kyoto School, such as Tosaka Jun, were discussing the divergences between Nishida tetsugaku and the thought of Nishida’s successor as professor at Kyoto Imperial University, Tanabe Hajime, which had already been given the label Tanabe tetsugaku.3 Nishida himself was aware that Tanabe was moving his thought in new directions (or, conceivably, further in the same direction): this recent ‘Tanabe stuff is utterly fascist!’4 Unlike Nishida himself, a number of his associates did ‘disfigure themselves’ as intellectuals by explicitly placing solidarity before criticism, becoming ‘professional’ or ‘bureaucratic’ intellectuals. Miki Kiyoshi, for example, underwent tenkō and became a central ideologue of Prince Konoe’s New Order Movement, as President of the Cultural Problems Research Group in the Shōwa kenkyūkai. Watsuji Tetsurō became one of the authors of the Kokutai no hongi, and, with Tanabe Hajime, he played a central role in the Ministry of Education’s Kyōgaku sasshin hyōgikai (Committee for the Renewal of Education and Scholarship) from late 1935, which was chiefly responsible for formulating the ideas in that text.5 Tanabe published explicitly militarist propaganda, encouraging students to join the war-effort,6 and Nishitani (together with Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki and Suzuki Shigetaka) participated in highprofile public symposia which were later accused of being little more than ‘an elaborate justification of the war in Hegelian philosophic language’ (Harootunian 2000:43).7 Meanwhile, Nishida himself was criticized for being insufficiently socially minded, not least by other members of the Kyoto School, particularly Tanabe, Miki and Tosaka. Tosaka, for example, found Nishida’s thought too disengaged with the material realities of the political world, and he argued that Nishida was a ‘bourgeois idealist’.8 Indeed, as we have already seen, it was the abstract and philosophical tone of Nishida’s work that made it seem inaccessible and

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ineffectual as a thought-system to effect social change. Tanabe and others, on the other hand, abandoned the conventions of philosophical abstraction and ‘let loose a brood of ideas that seemed to flock right into the nests of the ultranationalists in a way that Nishida’s thought never explicitly did’ (Heisig 2001: 137). Hence, whilst Nishida lamented that the authorities had taken his words out of context and twisted them to fit their needs, in the case of some of the other members of the school, apologists have been forced to resort to assertions such as ‘it is as if Tanabe were quoting himself out of context’ (Heisig 2001:137— emphasis added). Here I suggest that, through his association with the Kyoto School, a number of Tanabe’s speech-acts (as well as those of Nishitani, Miki etc.) effectively quoted Nishida out of context, manipulating his linguistic and ideological conventions into forms that resonated much more closely with the ultra-nationalist orthodoxy. It is not the case, however, that Tanabe, Nishitani et al. (1942) completely misrepresented Nishida’s political system. Rather, they extended it and diversified it in the context of the political discourse around Japanese ultranationalism. In particular, they explicitly attempted to make Nishida’s conception of nothingness (mu), the centrality of which defines the Kyoto School approach, into a tool for understanding and prescribing everyday politics. Whilst Nishida always refused to take the step beyond defining the ideal as a moral critique of the extant, the Kyoto School engaged directly in debates about the empirical state of Japan and its coincidence with that ideal. Hence, the passage of Nishida’s political philosophy into the public domain, via the discourse within which the Kyoto School participated, demonstrates some of the dangers of utopian thinking, particularly in the context of totalitarian regimes. To this end, it is important to explore the political thought of some of the major thinkers of the Kyoto School at least briefly, indicating where their thought overlapped with and diverged from the thought of Nishida himself.9 Nishitani Keiji and Tanabe Hajime—The Kyoto ‘Loyalists’10 Tanabe and Nishitani shared much in common.11 Both began their careers with interests in philosophical themes such as phenomenology, religion and identity. With the support of Nishida, who never left Japan himself, both spent some time in Europe, where they spent time with Heidegger.12 Both returned to full professorships at Kyōdai with the encouragement and assistance of Nishida, who saw the future of the Kyoto School as being in their hands, after his early retirement in 1928. During the 1930s and early 1940s, both became explicitly involved in the politicization of philosophy, and Nishida’s philosophy in particular. After the end of the Second World War, both men were implicated as complicit in the fascist cause; Nishitani was purged from his teaching position in 1947 (but reinstated in 1952), and Tanabe retired into isolation in the mountains of Kita-Karuizawa in 1945. In the post-war period, both men focussed their

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energies on religious philosophy once again, and both received the prestigious Medal of Culture from the Emperor before they died, the highest honour afforded to scholars in Japan.13 Tanabe’s relationship with Nishida began to show signs of strain from the mid-1920s. Returning from Freiberg in 1924, Tanabe was beginning to develop a critique of Husserl’s phenomenology which he soon transformed into a critique of Nishida’s philosophy of place (basho). In 1925, along with Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, Tanabe attended Kawakami Hajime’s seminar on Marx and Marxism. Like his junior colleagues, Tanabe came away from that seminar with a sense that Nishida lacked a coherent political and social philosophy grounded in the material and historical reality of everyday experience. Throughout the early years of the 1930s, following the Manchuria Crisis (1931), Tanabe published a series of articles which became increasingly critical of Nishida. In his landmark essay Shu no ronri to sekai zushiki (1935), Tanabe went so far as to accuse Nishida of using his philosophy to escape from the problems of the real world (by maintaining that it was not ‘genuinely real’). In particular, Tanabe argued that Nishida’s philosophy of nothingness (mu no basho) neglected the role and importance of the nation, since it was consigned to a merely derivative or temporary position. Tanabe developed the concept of shu or ‘species’ to replace Nishida’s ‘ethical nation’, and his ‘logic of species’ became increasingly concerned with the priority of the state over the individual (THZ VI:169–264). The question of the extent to which Tanabe remained within Nishida’s framework is still under debate today. However, the work of Nishitani is revealing in this regard. Like Tanabe, Nishitani also developed Nishida’s thought into a more concrete political system, but, unlike Tanabe, he did not do so as a rebel but as a dutiful disciple. Hence, Nishitani did not attempt to overthrow Nishida’s nomenclature, instead he worked within the master’s language. A comparison of two key texts, published within a year of each other, immediately preceding the Chūōkōron debates at the end of 1941, reveals the extent to which the work of Tanabe and Nishitani differed in substance and in language at that time. In 1940, Tanabe published his lecture series, Rekishiteki genjitsu, as a book, at least partly in response to Nishida’s earlier lecture series Rekishiteki shintai. In 1941, Nishitani also took up the themes discussed in those essays in a book which foreshadowed his calls for the Chūōkōron debates, Sekaikan to kokkakan (world-view and nation-view). All three texts were important in setting the intellectual agenda of the Chūōkōron debates. Nishitani’s text, like Nishida’s before it, treads a fine line between nationalism, regionalism and universalism. He states that the ‘contemporary era is a turning point in world history’ because the end of the First World War saw the advent of a truly global world (NKC IV:297). Although he does not suggest that the old, Euro-centric order should be actively destroyed, he does argue that it will be superseded through the natural, organic processes of history. Having divided world history into three stages—Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific (named

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after the oceans around which the hegemonic civilizations were based)— Nishitani explains the contemporary world: Naturally, this does not mean that the Mediterranean and the Atlantic have lost their meaning, but only that the Pacific, which has not played a world historical role before, has graduated onto the stage of world history— which is to say that these three aforementioned oceans have now reached the point of communicating as though they were a single living creature. In other words, the world’s major oceans have, in political terms, united to form a single ocean.14 (NKC IV:298) An implication of Nishitani’s model is that the Pacific had become a hegemonic centre of the globe. In particular, he talks about how, like Britain on the edge of the Roman world (Mediterranean civilization), Japan is on the edge of the AngloAmerican world (Atlantic civilization) and will now carry the torch into the Pacific. He does not suggest that the Pacific should replace the Atlantic (which in turn did not replace the Mediterranean), rather it should become another locus of civilization: only a tripolar system of this kind could be genuinely ‘global’ in the contemporary era. In other words, the trend towards ‘world consciousness’ is off-set by another trend towards regional ‘life spheres’, or what Nishida called ‘particular worlds’ (tokushuteki sekai). Like Nishida Nishitani conceived of these regional blocs in terms of their shared cultures. They were ‘historical bodies’ (rekishiteki shintai), or, in Nishitani’s words, ‘culturally unified spheres’ (bunkateki tōitsu ken). Again like Nishida Nishitani argued that these regional blocs did not contradict universalism because they would eventually negate themselves, producing a truly global world: The present trend toward the appearance of blocs [shūketsu] means that the various individual politically and culturally unified spheres are reaching self-awareness [jikaku] of their own unified natures, and they are seeking the conclusions of their individual histories [kako no rekishi no shūketsuten], which include the creation and development of their unified characteristics. (NKC IV:300) In passages such as that one, however, Nishitani opens the door for the ideologues to interpret the empirical world (or, at least, Japan) as having reached the ideal state of which Nishida spoke. Neglecting Nishida’s moral conditionals, Nishitani suggests that the creation of regional blocs is in itself evidence of historical progress.15 The stage of the current world, according to Nishitani is that of a multipolar international system on cultural principles which might be familiar to Samuel Huntington (1996):16

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In other words, the fact that [the world] is now without a specific centre, and is thus without a periphery either, means that there are various geographical centres. This is, moreover, the most simple and most universal [fuhenteki] stimulus [for the new world order].17 (NKC IV:300) There is definite sympathy for regionalist aspirations here, and whilst Nishitani goes further than Nishida by suggesting that historical progress can be gauged by the ‘appearance of blocs’ itself, like Nishida Nishitani is careful to state that ‘of course, it is not yet possible to foresee what shape or form this [tendency to] bloc formation will take’ (NKC IV:300).18 However, rather than roundly condemning ‘heteronomous’ means of achieving this possible future, as Nishida did, Nishitani directly engages with the ‘Japanists’ who think that such prophesies can be simply derived from the mythology of Japanese history, as they were in Kokutai no hongi. Nishitani refers to the relationship between politics, religion and mythology as one of ‘subtle complexity’ (bimyō na fukuzatsu).19 The ‘blood and soil’ racialism of the ultra-nationalists is seen as an attempt to live mythology in the present. But Nishitani argues that nobody can live mythology, and nobody (not even the characters in it) have ever been able to do so: the creation of a ‘new mythology’ is a contradiction in terms. Hence, Nishitani is critical of the ultra-nationalists who appropriated the Shintō myths as religious truths to be lived in the present. For him, the dialectical relationship between religion and politics has a subtle complexity which does not permit the simplistic politicization of religion or the religionization (shūkyōkd) of politics. If we take religion as a device for the use of politics, then religion’s true power disappears—it becomes merely a powerful tool [of the state]. The best attitude for the use of religion by politics is when it is not transformed into a tool. (NKC IV:369) In Nishida’s terms, divine heteronomous polities are not moral. By unquestioningly accepting that there is a global character [sekaiteki seikaku] within [Japan’s] traditional spirit and thought and then forcing it onto the world, one ignores and neglects the fissure [kiretsu] between what is Japanese and what is global. This kind of coercion [kyōyō] can only result in isolation from the world. In the end, [Japan] would be pushed back into itself and fall into self-deluded ultra-nationalism [jikotōsui no kokusuishugi].20 (NKC IV:353) Nishitani does not stop with critique, however, and he attempts to prescribe political action based on this standpoint. Rather than drawing its mission from

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mythology, Nishitani suggests that Japan should find its unique place in the new world order by cultivating a ‘spirit of the present’. He argues that the leaders of the Meiji ishin tamed their ‘Japanist’ (nihonshugi) passion for the future of Japan through a grasp of Tokugawa writings from Japan and China. By blending the wisdom of China and Japan, the leaders affected ‘an honourable product of the mature spirit of the period’. Since Japan and China constituted the world order for Tokugawa Japan, the synthesis of their scholarship ‘had a world character for those times’ (NKC IV:349).21 Similarly, because Japan’s world of the 1930s– 1940s included the West, a true model of the world order could only be derived from a synthesis of Western rationalism and Eastern intuition. Adopting a theme that would later be much debated in the public symposia, Nishitani goes on to argue that Japan, as an Eastern nation with Western technology and reason, represents a particular modernity which is in a unique position to formulate the new world order. Kamei Katsuichirō (1907–66), in an essay peripheral to Kindai no chōkoku, will later describe Japan as the knot (musubime) between the world’s largest ocean and the world’s largest continent, tying the world together (Kamei 1942). As we have seen, Nishitani does not go so far as to argue that the Japanese nation should impose its will on the world, but his caution revolves around his doubts about whether Japan knows what to do, rather than about the morality of such action per se. Indeed, he does insist that the intellectual culture of Japan in the contemporary era is uniquely capable of coming to understand the future good. In particular, and implicitly, he maintains that the Kyoto School itself is in the perfect position to understand questions of the world order. In effect, Nishitani is calling for the Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon symposium in order to guide Japan in the direction of the ‘universal good’, and to prevent rampant and simplistic ‘Japanism’. Nonetheless, Nishitani opens the door to political and historical agency that Nishida had left closed. In the sixth lecture of his 1939 lecture series, Rekishiteki genjitsu, Tanabe deals with many of the same themes as Nishitani, but his phrasing is much more militant, and it foreshadows his later essay Iku gakusei niokuru hanamuke no kotoba (Farewell Words to Students on the Way to War, 1943).22 Although Tanabe was disturbed by accusations that he was toeing the totalitarian line during the war, after the war he explicitly repented for doing so.23 Indeed, Tanabe was one of the only members of the Kyoto School who was not attacked by the Army for being too anti-war during the war years.24 In great measure, this may have been because he more thoroughly internalized the orthodox linguistic and ideological conventions than did Nishida or even Nishitani. By the time he delivered this lecture series, Tanabe had already established his name as the architect of the ‘logic of species’ (shu no ronri) with a series of publications throughout the mid-1930s.25 The basic principle of ‘species’ could be found in the work of Nishida—the idea that greater levels of unity were greater moral goods. Tanabe, however, was willing to make the Hegelian political leap that Nishida (and Nishitani) shied away from, when he argued that

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this made the nation more essential than the individual. In contrast to Nishida who saw the nation as an intermediate stage, but like Hegel, Tanabe argued that the nation was the highest type of social form: ‘human beings can only actualise the highest good and live the highest life in the nation’ (THZ VIII:160). For Tanabe, the nation, not the individual (except by participation in the nation) was the proper subject of world history, and ‘history is not merely development but construction’ (kensetsu) (THZ VIII:161). Although Tanabe’s formulation of ‘construction’ is quite sophisticated, by introducing the idea that to some degree history should be controlled by the nation, Tanabe opened the door to ultra-nationalists who were looking for philosophical rationalizations of expansionism. Indeed, readers at the time, who saw Tanabe as an interpreter of Nishida, could easily have read such a justification back into the work of Nishida himself, where evolution had been privileged over revolution. In reality, Tanabe did not intend to open the door to ultra-nationalism so completely. He did not totally abandon Nishida’s ideas about the meta-force operating behind historical progress. However, his appeals to the inertia of history itself come across in a less utopian manner than did those of Nishida or even Nishitani, giving Tanabe’s writing a more practical political tone. In particular, Tanabe adds a new dimension to Nishida’s conception of historical progress; whilst Nishida shared with Kant the idea that history moves generally forward but that its path is uneven and spasmodic, Tanabe suggests that the present is always the manifestation of historical progress: It must be admitted that it is the direction of reality [genjitsu no hōkō] which makes possible particular constructions… When it is said that the Japanese nation is constructing a new stage of world history, it must be asked whether or not its efforts are built on real foundations and moving in accord with the direction of reality. (THZ VIII:161) In a similar way to Nishitani, Tanabe argues that a true ‘spirit of the present’ must guide our understanding of the future shape of the world order. Tanabe reasoned, like Nishitani, that world history was not a simple process of one hegemonic civilization replacing another, but was rather a process of admixture: ‘It is not simply that a particular stage is overlaid with next one, rather the presently advancing form and forms returning from the future [recalling the past] are mingled/blended together’ (THZ VIII:162). However, Tanabe is not as permissive as Nishitani’s tripolar, regionalist formulation of the world order. Where Nishitani prioritized culture and cultural interdependence as factors in the new world order, for Tanabe the important organizing factors were politics and political power. As far as Tanabe was concerned, the Atlantic and Mediterranean civilizations may be preserved in the cultural mix of the ‘spirit of the present’, but they should lose their world-political centrality. Eastern culture may not replace Western culture— since Japan represented a synthesis of the two—but

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Japan would (and should) replace Europe as the locus of world-political power.26 To some extent, Tanabe was the first Kyoto School thinker to recognize a distinction between the intellectual needs of philosophy and the actual, concrete (gutaiteki) needs of politics. Certainly more than Nishida or Nishitani, Tanabe blended his philosophical and ideological identities. Unlike Nishitani, who maintained Nishida’s evolutionary approach to historical progress, Tanabe asserts that because Japan is located in that unique intersection between West and East, its world view is the ‘spirit of the present’ by definition. Hence, Japan is in the perfect position to construct a new world order—for Tanabe there was no need for a symposium like Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, and he played no part in it. Furthermore, Tanabe’s confidence that Japan was working for the ultimate good permitted him to pre-empt many of his writings in the early 1940s and call on the Japanese people to participate in its efforts: ‘An individual can become linked to the eternal through his participation in the construction of mankind’s culture, through [his participation in] the nation’ (THZ VIII:167). Miki and Tosaka—The Kyoto ‘Rebels’ Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun were probably the most outspoken critics of Nishida’s thought in the interwar period.27 For nearly twenty years, the two men were good friends, and they shared common views about the nature of politics and philosophy. In the late 1930s/early 1940s, Miki executed an about face, a ‘turn’ towards endorsement of the state paralleled by Heidegger’s coincident ‘turn’ in Germany. Tosaka, however, never lost his nerve.28 Both Miki and Tosaka were drawn to Kyōdai by the mystique of Nishida and Tanabe. They completed their entire university educations in the Philosophy Faculty in Kyoto, with Miki starting graduate school (1920) as Tosaka arrived to start the undergraduate course (1921). In the early years of his career, Miki was a favourite of Nishida, and he helped to secure his student an Iwanami scholarship so that he could spend a number of years in Europe studying with Rickert and Heidegger, but also spending some time in Paris. Tosaka was not so privileged. However, on his return from Europe in 1925, Miki started to cultivate a close friendship with Tosaka, who had just started graduate school at that time. Indeed, with Nishitani, the two men founded the Aristotle Society’ in Kyoto (1925), which was a forum within which they could discuss their political and philosophical views. In particular, Miki and Tosaka were beginning to develop interests in Marxism, and the Aristotle Society gave them a space to discuss the famous lectures and seminars of Kawakami Hajime, which were held in Kyōdai in the same year.29 From about 1927, both men had started to concentrate on Marxist themes in their publications. Tosaka joined an artillery regiment in Chiba, 1927, and Nishida arranged for Miki to be offered a teaching position in Hōsei University, Tokyo.

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From about 1927 until 1937, Miki and Tosaka collaborated on a number of ventures, including the formation of the League for Academic Freedom (1933) following the Kyoto University and Takikawa Incidents.30 Both men spent some time in jail, on suspicion of donating money to or participating in the Japan Communist Party (JCP). Tosaka even took over from Miki at Hōsei University in 1931, when Miki was arrested. However, whilst Tosaka developed into a serious materialist (he founded Yuiken, the Research Group on Materialism, in 1932, which was under continuous surveillance by the police), and whilst he became gradually marginalized from the academic community—being sacked from his last teaching position at Hōsei in 1934 because of his political views—Miki managed to remain in the mainstream, conducting roundtable discussions with Nishida on themes such as ‘religion, philosophy, and culture’, or on the ‘characteristics of Japanese culture’.31 He never fully embraced Marxism and his will was broken by government pressure. Unlike the other members of the Kyoto School, who generally demonstrate impressive continuity throughout their careers, Miki underwent an abrupt tenkō (conversion) in the late 1930s. In 1938, he publicly abandoned Marxism and became one of the leading members of the Shōwa kenkyūkai (The Shōwa Research Association), which was effectively Prince Konoe Fumimaro’s brain-trust (burēn-shūdan), and thus became one of the most politically active philosophers of the period.32 During the earlier years of the 1930s, like Tanabe, both Miki and Tosaka criticized Nishida for being insufficiently socio-politically aware. Miki, of course, went on deliberately to formulate a justification of the new world order in Asia ostensibly on the basis of Nishida’s thought. In the influential Shōwa kenkyūkai paper, Shin-Nihon no shisō genri, Miki set out a view of the Asia-bloc rooted in Nishida’s philosophy, but communicated in more prescriptive political terms (MKZ XVII:507–630). Going even further than Tanabe on the question of agency, Miki argued that Japan’s unique ability to unite Asia rested on its history of assimilating foreign (Chinese) culture, giving it the understanding to instigate a kyōdōtai (cooperative body) in East Asia. Japan’s assimilation of Western technology gave it the material power necessary to expel the West from China, which was crucial before a peaceful kyōdōtai could be established on the principles of cooperativism (kyōdōshugi), which he envisioned as an Asian alternative to socialism and liberalism.33 Much of Miki’s language appeared in Prime Minister Konoe’s proclamation of the new order in East Asia, which was made on national radio, 3 November 1938.34 With Miki, a strand of the Kyoto School is securely woven into fascist thread. Unlike Miki, Tosaka did not see how Nishida’s thought could produce a concrete political philosophy for the everyday (nichijōsei no genri). He criticized Tanabe for twisting an ultra-nationalist reading out of Nishida’s thought, but defended Nishida himself against similar charges of mysticism or fascism. However, he argued that Nishida’s thought was bourgeois and overly preoccupied with intellectual matters at the expense of material reality. Nishida’s ‘logic of nothingness’ was not a real logic of existence, it was only a logic of

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consciousness, which, for a materialist like Tosaka, amounted to nothing more than self-indulgence. Tosaka saw no value in the kind of utopian political scheme set up by Nishida—and he lamented its simple perversion by other ‘bourgeois philosophers’ into Japanism (nihonshugi). Whilst Nishida tetsugaku was not fascist itself, it could be easily pulled in that direction by a dominant discourse (TJZ II:340–8). Tosaka never developed a political theory of his own, instead he adopted a critical perspective on the social discourse of the day. In general, he was adverse to any ideology which privileged ideas or culture over material reality, and this positioned him against the tide of most interwar thought in Japan. For Tosaka, any theory which was not universally applicable was thrown out as unreliable: hence the Kyoto School’s penchant for cultural relativism and gradual assimilation was dismissed out of hand. In a controversial essay in 1935, Tosaka issued a sharp attack on ‘Japanism’ (nihonshugi) and liberalism (jiyūshugi). He argued that the Japanists (the ultranationalists) were mistaken in their assumptions that liberalism was related to materialism simply because they both originated in the West. For Tosaka, liberalism had been ‘absorbed within the realm [rachi uchi] of Japanism’ (TJZ 11:229). In terms of its philosophical (rather than geographical) origins, liberalism was fundamentally opposed to materialism, but in Japan it was ‘nothing but a preparation for Japanism’ (TJZ II:233). Tosaka claimed that liberalism had provided Japanists with sophisticated philosophical tools, which permitted them to express their Japanism with more deceptive profundity. Not only that, he reasoned that liberalism, as an ideology that permits cultural expression, would inevitably have led to the expression of the ‘Japanese spirit’ in Japan. Only materialism, which admits no importance for ideas, could have prevented the rise of Japanism. Nishida tetsugaku may not be fascist, but it could not provide an effective defence against the dangers of Japanism, which could (and did) co-opt any system of thought in 1930s Japan that prioritized ideas or culture. In a later essay, in 1936, Tosaka deconstructs the idea of the Japanese spirit’. In the opening sections, he asserts that the very fact that there are so many people arguing about what the Japanese spirit is implies that ‘its theoretical substance is unsubstantial and confused [kūso de zatsuzen]’ (TJZ II:292). The first half of the paper is a survey of the various formulations of ‘Japanese spirit’ vocalized during the 1930s. There is no mention of the Kyoto School, which, with the possible exception of Tanabe, Tosaka did not consider to be Japanist. However, the second half of the paper implicitly takes on the Kyoto School’s abstract claims that Japan’s special location at the intersection between East and West gives it a unique ability to comprehend the new world order. Tosaka is unimpressed: In my view, there is no rational or scientific explanation for what the Japanese spirit (or the superior essence of Japan) actually is. This is to be expected since,…even for the Japanists, the Japanese spirit is not

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something that should be explained. In fact, on closer inspection, it is merely a method and a principle employed arbitrarily to explain everything… Japan’s special character [tokushitsu] appears to be in the claim that its spirit is superior to other nations and peoples [kokka naishi minzoku].35 (TJZ II:294–5) Tosaka Jun was the closest thing the Japanese intellectual discourse had to a ‘Western’ participant during the 1930s, and to some extent he foreshadows postwar Western critiques of ‘Japanism’, such as those by Peter Dale.36 His criticisms are in the rational language that the Kyoto School worked so hard to transcend using Nishida’s method of ‘intellectual intuition’. Of course, Tosaka had worked hard to escape from the ‘native traditions’ of Japanese intellectual history in which Nishida had immersed himself: ‘compared to those of us in the modern age, Nishida has tremendous Eastern (Buddhist and Confucian)… refinement [kyōyō]’ (TJZ II:342). However, unlike Tosaka, the majority of thinkers in the early years of twentieth Japan eschewed material logic, even the ostensible Marxists such as Kawakami Hajime.37 In fact, Tosaka might have fitted more comfortably into nineteenth century Meiji, when thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) were advocating the wholescale adoption of a Japanese Enlightenment on the European model. In the atmosphere of the 1930s, however, following the promulgation of the Peace Preservation Law (chian iji hō) in 1925, it took a serious commitment to maintain the validity of (what was perceived to be) ‘Western’ reason above ‘Eastern’ intuition. Such a stance had become deeply politicized. Even thinkers as sophisticated and independentminded as Miki Kiyoshi bent under pressure from the state. But Miki’s tenkō only saved him for a few years. Tosaka spent the entire war-period moving in and out of jail, hidden from public view and removed from the intellectual discourse, before finally dying in his cell. Despite his services to the state throughout the late 1930s/early 1940s, Miki lost favour with the authorities for allegedly harbouring the communist Takakura Teru, and he was returned to jail, where he also died of mistreatment just a month later than Tosaka, in September 1945. In summary, whilst the Kyoto School does constitute an authentic school of philosophy, insofar as its members, all associated with the same university, demonstrate similar concerns and methods pioneered by the school’s founder, Nishida Kitarō, it is not the case that the political standpoint of the school was monolithic— it was not a school of politics. The Kyoto School as a whole was concerned with the philosophical and social consequences of ‘nothingness’, ‘pure experience’ and ‘levels of unity’. But each member carried these concepts to different places. As Tosaka pointed out, these concepts are not dangerous in themselves, but could become dangerous in particular circumstances. Even Nishida’s protégé, Nishitani Keiji, pushed the thought of his mentor further into the hands of the ideologues by suggesting an equation of the empirical with the

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ideal. Tanabe, heavily influenced by Heidegger, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship, went even further than Nishitani, arguing that the state was an absolute value which subordinated individualism, and that Japan represented the vanguard of history. Miki Kiyoshi sold Nishida’s philosophical system to Prince Konoe, with whom Nishida already had a relationship, and effected the most explicit confusion of the empirical and ideal—manipulating the evaluativedescriptive conventions of Nishida’s system to apply it empirically to the Japan of the late 1930s. Only Tosaka Jun seemed to resist the pull of everyday politics, and he did this by emphasizing how ineffective (and bourgeois) Nishida’s idealism was in the everyday world of material reality—Nishida’s stance was readily exploitable in the atmosphere of the late 1930s and 1940s. Between them, Miki, Nishida and Tosaka provide a crisp cross-section of Japanese intellectual life in the war-period: whilst Miki committed tenkō and became an ideologue, Nishida marched backwards (and was exploited by the ideologues), but Tosaka remained vocal and critical, spending much of the war in jail, silenced, where he died. In general, the political speech-acts of the wider Kyoto School moved Nishida’s thought away from its emphasis on the unknowable and the ideal. Politicians and ideologues were interested in prescriptions for (or justifications of) everyday actions and thus the moral importance of the noumenal realm (in Kant’s terms) was overlooked or ignored—Nishida had left a gap between the universal ground of absolute nothingness and the empirical events that made up the everyday world in which we live, and he had not attempted to traverse that chasm in prescriptive terms because the universal ground was unknowable in everyday terms. However, in order for his philosophy to be of use to the state, the gap had to be bridged, and members of the Kyoto School bridged it through appeals to the special character of Japan itself. With regard to Nishida’s complaints that his words were misunderstood and that they were twisted into things that then acted on him in return, it is worthwhile to note that the texts by Tanabe, Nishitani, Miki and Tosaka that we have reviewed here all antedate Nishida’s wartime works, in which he utilizes the language of ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ for the first time. Tanabe, Nishitani and Miki in particular, responded to Nishida’s philosophy in Rekishiteki shintai (1937) by manipulating it into the language of everyday politics (in 1940, 1941, 1938 respectively). As we will see in the next section, the ‘Kyoto School’ held a symposium after the publication of these works, Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, in which their linguistic and ideological meanings were consolidated. Because of the ostensible affiliation of these thinkers with him, and thus the association of their terms with his thought, Nishida’s response (particularly in Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, 1943) had to take up their language. His thought, as a public good, was acting on him in return.

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Japan and the standpoint of world history The literature of Japanese intellectual history has tended to treat the Chūōkōron discussions as symbols of growing ultra-nationalism amongst the interwar intelligentsia rather than as a genuine scholarly forum. In most cases, no serious attention is paid to the content of the dialogue, only to the fact of its existence.38 However, it is unfair to dismiss these discussions in such a cavalier manner; in the highly nationalistic and belligerent atmosphere of November 1941, these symposia retained a surprisingly sophisticated and scholarly tone. The transcripts of the symposia set out the Kyoto School’s thought about politics and international relations in terms readily accessible to the authorities and the masses. It is not the case that the position elucidated in these talks was a simple ‘ideological rationalisation for the Axis war effort’ in orthodox terms, but it did provide Japan with a philosophical ‘representation of its colonial aspirations in Asia as a new and advanced stage in the development of world history’ (Harootunian 2000:43). In doing so, the Kyoto School removed the idealist moral imperatives from Nishida’s thought and manipulated his terms into political prescriptions and empirical observations about the concrete world of the early 1940s. In the context of wartime Japan, as we will see later in the section on the Kindai no chōkoku debates, the position of the Kyoto School was relatively moderate, even if it was certainly not the critique that Nishida intended. Ōshima Yasumasa, a student of Tanabe Hajime at the time of the discussions, reveals that the Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon debate was actually the first of a series of such debates, only three of which would be published in Chūōkōron and then later compiled into a book of the same name (1943). In fact, Ōshima claims to have been the chief administrator of a society set up in the Philosophy Faculty of Kyōdai at the request of the Imperial Navy. He asserts that the working title of the first discussion was actually, ‘On How To Avoid War (with the USA)’, but that it was changed in order to get it passed the censures for publication (Ōshima 1965:130). Ōshima recalls how the Navy was growing wary of the Army’s autonomy from civilian control, which had been growing since the Manchuria incident (1931). He recounts how political infighting within the Navy ranks prevented it from making an effective stand against the Army’s increasingly expansionist aspirations.39 According to Ōshima, the Navy decided to approach the Kyoto School because of their faith in its more moderate philosophical stance, its popularity with the public, and because of Nishida’s personal ties with former Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, who was not an advocate of war with the United States. Whilst it was certainly true that antipathy existed between the Navy and the Army, and that a special relationship did exist between the Kyoto School, the Navy and Konoe, in the absence of documentary evidence it is hard to know how seriously to take Oshima’s testimony that Chūōkōron had to remove extensive criticism of Tōjō and the Army before it could print the discussion.40 On the other

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hand, it is widely known that, following the publication of the first symposium, Prime Minister Tōjō requested that the military police should investigate Nishida himself, and that after the first two print-runs of the compiled book (totalling 16, 000 copies, which sold out) it was banned. Horio Tsutomu reports that the national press heralded the 1941 symposium as progressive and free-thinking (Horio 1995:290),41 and he suggests that the public found the philosophical tone of the proceedings refreshing in the atmosphere of intellectual stagnation fostered by the imperial authorities. Imperial Way ‘philosophers’, such as Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), condemned the Chūōkōron debates as the ‘Ivory-tower conjecture’ of out-of-touch philosophers and academics.42 The far-right attacked the Kyoto School’s symposium for effectively reducing Japan to being just one actor in world history. The ‘world historical standpoint’ seemed to equate Japan’s position with those of the other developed countries in a new, pluralist world order, removing the ideas of centre and periphery so central to the hierarchical Neo-Shintō-Confucian orthodoxy. Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon43 Four members of the Kyoto School took part in the symposium: Kōsaka Masaaki, professor at the Institute for Humanities; Kōyama Iwao, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy; Suzuki Shigetaka, lecturer in Western History; and Nishitani Keiji, at that time assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy.44 Whilst the topics of discussion ranged from Ranke’s philosophy of moralische energie to the nature of correct historical method, the whole symposium was themed on the effects produced by the perception that the world had entered a new stage of history—what Nishida would later call a ‘compact global space’ (NKZ XII:428). In language that echoed Nishitani’s recent book (Sekaikan to kokkakan, 1941), the conference commences with its fundamental insight that ‘true world history began at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time the world outside Europe also became part of the twentieth century’ (Kōyama CK:152). The historical stage of the present was the third in history: the Mediterranean was the first, the Atlantic the second, and the Pacific, which ushered in a truly ‘world historical’ standpoint, was the third. Just as Tanabe had argued (in Rekishiteki genjitsu, 1940), the third, or Pacific stage of history was ‘world historical’ precisely because history was not a process of replacing one time with another, but because ‘history advances by creating a vortex [uzumaki]’ of returns to the past, and ‘the course of advance appears naturally from this counter-current’ (Nishitani CK:171). The Pacific age added to the Atlantic, which in turn had added to the Mediterranean. It was not a replacement of one centre with another, the third stage was at worst tripolar and at best completely without poles. Rather than seeing modernity as a threat to Japan, by de-coupling the ideas of modernization and Westernization the delegates understood how the Pacific stage of history could be interpreted as a threat by Europe. The issue for Europe

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was not so much the rise of the East to cultural and political parity with the West, thus creating a truly ‘world order’ for the first time in history Rather, the issue was the dawning realization that the world could no longer be perceived in entirely Euro-centric terms: modernity no longer meant merely to be European. Suzuki asks: ‘As regards the issue of the new world order, is it not the case that Europe is not conscious of the true meaning of world history, but rather conscious of a sense of crisis?’ (CK:152). In a subsection of the debate entitled European Consciousness of Crisis and the Japanese Consciousness of World History, Suzuki goes on to explain that the crisis in Europe is not just one of international relations, but also an issue of domestic identity. He argued that some thinkers in Germany were approaching ‘pseudo-orientalism’ (giji tōyōshugi) in their thinking (CK:154). Just as ‘modernity’ in Japan had been ushered in by an influx of European ideas, so Europe was being invaded by Asian ideas.45 Suzuki, unlike the far-right conservatives, thought that Japan should and could embrace this compound modernity together with the new ‘world historical’ world order, and that only in Europe could such globalization be understood as a crisis. Japan was riding the wave of history; Europe was being washed over.46 Modernity forced Europe to reassess itself just as it did Japan.47 However, whilst Europe was losing it ability to sustain itself as a solitary ‘Middle Kingdom’ (chūka), Japan was gaining a leading role in the new world.48 One of the many ironies was that Europeans had laid the groundwork for the third stage of history by opening Japan in the first place, and yet still they ‘seem to think that the East is outside the world’ (Kōsaka CK:155). The symposium delegates also recognized that Japan’s perceptions of America had been inherited from the ‘old world’ view of Europeans, who tended to ‘dismiss it as superficial’ (Suzuki CK:189). There is some recognition that Japan should not dismiss America so easily, since to do so would be to immerse itself in the same ‘old world’ view that had marginalized Japan. The preoccupation of the Japanese social and intellectual discourse with Europe had marginalized the importance of America in the new world order, and led to an under-appreciation of its world historical significance: The habit of European thinking is to dismiss America as superficial. I think there are certainly some ways in which this has influenced us. It is invariably not the case that we have judged it to be superficial from what we have seen with our own eyes. (CK:189) There is some appreciation that American society is quite different from European societies, and that there is a great need to better understand it in its own terms. Kōsaka suggests that one of the crucial characteristics of America is its ability to assimilate other cultures (and immigrants) into a single society, which, we will recall, was something that Nishida and the Kyoto School praised

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highly as a moral aspect of (Japanese) modernity (CK:189). He also suggests that, because of its continental scope, America might share some of the attributes of China. At the close of the subsection, On America, all four delegates agree that ‘we should study America more’ (Kōsaka CK:190). There is, in other words, a definite call to take America seriously, and thus an implicit caution against embroiling Japan in a conflict with an unknown enemy The caution is dressed up in the language of historical method— ‘everything we know [about America] is based on the influence of European history’ (Suzuki CK:190).49 This is not a call to arms, it is a call for scholarship. The question of the meaning of history was a pressing one in a number of ways. Suzuki was clear that sekaiteki (worldly) history could not be modelled after the ‘steps on the ladder of European’ history (CK:172).50 The idea of linear history implied a sense of replacement and loss that neither Nishida nor the Kyoto School was prepared to embrace. Nishitani’s ‘Vortex’ and Tanabe’s ‘admixture’ painted a picture of modernity which was a defence of Japanese traditions, without being reactionary, and a defence of cultural borrowing, without advocating wholescale Westernization.51 In many ways, the only difference between these ideas of history and Nishida’s original conception of the movement towards absolute unity through continuous self-realization and synthesis differed only in the language. However, the delegates at the symposium were concrete in their policy prescriptions in a way that Nishida never was. Taking on the Japanists, who advocated that the Japanese education system should be purged of Western learning and restricted to Japanese classics and Shintō mythology, Nishitani states quite bluntly that such a system will ‘simply create a frog in a well’ (CK:174). Suzuki even goes so far as to warn against the dangers of ‘developing national history as a weapon’ (yari lit. spear) (CK:174). Reiterating his previous points about the ‘spirit of the present’, Nishitani argues that history should be taught in a manner that reflects the ‘world historical’ nature of the present stage of history. He thinks that Japanese historiography is inferior to European historiography in this respect, because Europe already has an international standpoint: ‘In fact, the study of history will not develop its real power if it is not studied in a way that encompasses the complex negotiated relations between various opposed countries as in European history’ (CK:175). Kōsaka even goes so far as to call for revision of Japanese history books along these ‘world historical’ lines (CK:175). In terms of what should be taught in schools, if not the Shintō myths, Kōyama and Kōsaka agree, in a subsection titled National History Viewed from the Standpoint of World History, that Buddhism is the most important element in Japanese history because only Buddhism has a truly international significance.52 Any education that did not reflect the world historical ‘spirit of the present’ was, in Nishida’s terms, a form of tyranny that would prevent the people from pursuing their self-actualization. The delegates also had things to say about the Japanists’ calls for the abandonment of rationality and individuality as alien concepts. Suzuki and Kōyama were reluctant to concede this, and they agreed that Japanese

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intellectual tradition was not devoid of rationality per se, but only of ‘positivist’ rationality. Japan ‘has a metaphysical rationalism’ which emerges from its concerns with pure experience rather than with the abstract experience at the root European thought (Kōyama CK:159). In a section titled On the Issue of Individualist Consciousness, the participants reformulate Nishida’s arguments that Japanese tradition embraces individualism. Implicitly referring to Watsuji’s concept of ningen (humanity),53 Kōsaka argues that individualism is not absent from Japanese history, but that it takes on a different form from that in Europe. He suggests that Japanese individualism is social in nature—‘trust and loyalty have become the basis of social relations’ —and that European individualism is legalistic or institutional because ‘the distrust one person had in another became a structural principle’, as we might see exemplified in social contract theories, such as that of Hobbes (CK:166).54 Such a tendency to eschew institutional solutions to social problems was typical of political thought in Japan’s Buddhist traditions and also in threads of the Confucian discourse. In Nishida’s terms, institutionalism, like materialism, was simply an abstract tyranny, divorced from the realities of pure experience. Individualism, however, when it reflected a proper understanding of man’s inherently social nature, was a means towards self-actualization. The delegates were not content to jettison ‘individualism’ as the Japanists demanded, but Kōyama’s description of the genuine individual loyal to a warrior state (buke shakai) pulled the linguistic conventions of the Kyoto School dangerously close to the militarist orthodoxy. The symposium took a giant step towards fascist conventions when it effectively renamed Nishida’s concept of self-actualization, using Ranke’s concept of moralische energie. Kōyama argued that France had lost the war in Europe so quickly because it lacked this moralische energie (CK:183). He suggested that a gap had opened up between French culture and French politics, such that the nation was forced to engage in international affairs in the present but with a culture from its past.55 By refusing to embrace modernity (presumably unlike the ‘pseudo-orientals’ in Germany) France was committing a tyranny— preventing its people and thus itself from self-actualizing. Here the symposium participants take Nishida’s concept in a direction he never intended. For them, as for Tanabe earlier, the moral life force generated by a selfactualizing agent actually empowers them to push the present into the future. Conflict becomes a kind of trial by fire, much as it was for Grotius in the Western tradition. The unspoken implication is that Japan, which should embrace a syncretic modernity, will win in any battles with Europe because of its superior moralische energie.56 A hollow warning is sounded by Nishitani, who, it will be remembered, had resisted this ‘revolutionist’ trend in Tanabe’s thought, when he uses his last contribution to say: ‘Historical necessity is not the same thing as fate’ (CK:192). Nishitani did not find Japan’s victory a foregone conclusion, if it went to war with Europe or the United States. Like Nishida and Kant, he suggested that historical progress was out of man’s hands. In any case, it was far from clear to him that Japan had ‘embraced modernity’, in the manner demanded

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by Tanabe’s logic. Certainly the reactionary Japanists had not, which meant that Japan may not have the moralische energie to win any conflict. In an alarmingly logical manner, the Kyoto School, who were so opposed to ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, moved on to another topic from the orthodox fascist nomenclature; they discussed the importance of race and ethnicity in a genetic rather than cultural sense. Although the delegates remain sceptical about the importance of ‘blood’, they do ‘wonder whether it’s a good idea to completely dismiss the question of the purity of blood’ (Nishitani CK:185). In general, however, the debate about race serves to reinforce their belief in the primacy of the nation. It is worth noting that the delegates embrace the orthodox term kokumin for nation, rather than employing Nishida’s preferred kokka. In reality, the subject [shutai] of moralische energie is the nation [kokumin]… ‘ethnicity’ [minzoku] is an entity with no world historical power.57 In reality, it is the ‘nation’ [kokumin] that is the key to every problem. Moralische energie is not individual ethics or personal ethics, and it had nothing to do with purity of blood. Today, is it not the case that moralische energie is concentrated at the heart of the ‘nation,’ both politically and culturally? (Kōyama CK:185) Presumably, it was to statements such as this one that Harootunian was referring when he implied that the symposium promoted militarism by concentrating ‘on the centrality of the state and its destiny as the singular subject of history’ (Harootunian 2000:43). Kōyama’s sentiments and his language are confused by the introduction of a new concept from the contemporaneous political discourse: minzoku (ethnicity). Whilst Kōyama is quick to dismiss minzoku as an impotent entity, presumably to distance himself from the Japanists, he fails adequately to distinguish between it and kokumin (nation). Following Tanabe rather than Nishida, Kōyama suggests that a nation is a construction, implying that ethnicities are naturally forming without the intervention of agency.58 For Nishida, on the other hand, true-nations (shin no kokka) were naturally forming (on cultural rather than racial or ethnic grounds) and the deliberate construction of a nation (or, by extension, a particular world) deprived it of its moral personality Neither of Kōyama’s terms succeed in encapsulating Nishida’s opposition to the ‘blood and soil’ racism of the Japanists. However, Kōyama’s emphasis on the moralische energie of constructed political entities is quite consistent with Tanabe’s model, which locates the state as ‘the singular subject of history’, much as Hegel subordinated the individual to the state as the ultimate source of morality Unlike Hegel or Nishida, however, Tanabe’s moral state did not need to be an ideal type—it was the state as constructed in the present. In these terms, whilst he is careful to distance the concept of the ‘Japanese spirit’ from simplistic appropriation by racialists and ethnic-nationalists,59 Kōyama fails to confront the really dangerous political issue—that is, the moral

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rules that govern the legitimate behaviour of states. For Nishida, the nation was not ‘the key to every problem’ arbitrarily defining its own rules, but merely a self-contradictory intermediary between the particular and the universal—as such it was constrained by moral rules, just like individuals. Hence, the symposium had mixed consequences. On the positive side, the phrase sekaishiteki tachiba entered the common parlance of the early 1940s— and, because of its public association with the term, the symposium did manage to set the evaluative-descriptive conventions of the phrase to mean ‘the standpoint of a plural world-order’, or, what Nishida would later call, the standpoint of sekaiteki sekai. In so far as such a world-order de-centred Europe, this was acceptable in most parts of the contemporaneous discourse, and even quite reasonable. However, for the ultra-nationalist Japanists, this meaning of sekaishiteki tachiba did not go far enough, because it de-centred all nations, not only Europe, including Japan. Unfortunately, there was enough ideological ‘context’ in the symposium for Japanists to manipulate the conventions governing the use of this term. The primacy of the nation as the final source of moral energy suggested that Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon could also be used to describe the capacity of a single nation to embody world history: Japan, as the ultimate construction of the present, and thus the vanguard of the future, should strive to de-centre Europe. Of course, one of the pivots between these two interpretations was the meaning and nature of history and modernity itself. The resolution of this problematic quickly became the focus of its own public symposium, which found the Kyoto School being pulled even deeper into the dangerous waters of ultranationalism. Overcoming modernity: the debate on the debate Following the publication of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s seminal essay Kindai no chōkoku (1959), the Overcoming Modernity debates were somewhat rejuvenated in the literature.60 In the atmosphere of crisis which preceded the protests over US-Japan Security Treaty revisions (May–June, 1960), Takeuchi argued that the concept of ‘modernity’ had regained its salience for Japan. He suggested that the treaty symbolized Japan’s post-war complicity in a thoroughly Western (American) modernity. Not only for Takeuchi, the sense of crisis concerning treaty revision reflected the nation’s profound need for cultural and political independence. There was a sense in which it was felt that Japan was regaining its political autonomy at the expense of its cultural traditions; the Japan which was emerging from the ashes of the war, under an American wing, was no longer Japan in any sense except the geopolitical. By drawing out the cultural issues surrounding Japan’s place in the post-war international order, Takeuchi sparked a renewed interest in the Overcoming Modernity debates, which had been explicitly concerned with the relationship between traditional Japanese culture and the currents of global change.

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Effectively, he was calling for a Japanese (or even an Asian) response to the post-war world order, which could provide a healthy and vital alternative to the capitalist visions of the United States or the socialist plans of the Soviet Union. Hashikawa Bunzō took up Takeuchi’s gauntlet in the 1960s in an attempt to liberate the Overcoming Modernity symposium from charges of ultranationalism.61 For Hashikawa, the problem of treating the symposium as thought rather than merely as a symbol was compounded by the fact that the intellectual discourse of post-war Japan had itself become so completely ‘modernised’. Echoing Takeuchi, Hashikawa argued that the symposium was a genuine attempt to come to terms with the conflicting claims of universalism by the modernists and of particularism by conservatives. In particular, he suggested that criticisms of the symposium had neglected to notice the fact that ‘overcoming modernity’ did not only refer to Japan’s attempts to overcome the West, but also to the general problems encountered by indigenous cultures everywhere when confronted with universalising forces. Modernity, for Hashikawa and Takeuchi, was culture blind, and it produced a system of international politics in which states were simply uniform units in a grand system, much as political Realists would insist today.62 It was a world order premised upon (Western) rationalism, which ignored even the possibility that international relations could be conducted on culturally specific bases.63 By reading a vision of cultural relativism and international political pluralism back into the Overcoming Modernity symposium, Takeuchi and Hashikawa made it both respectable and relevant again. However, part of the process involved the marginalization of the Chūōkōron debates, which became the sole remaining scape-goat for those who needed to pin a measure of warresponsibility onto intellectuals. Hence, as we have seen, even those scholars who have dealt seriously with the Overcoming Modernity symposium have dismissed the World Historical Standpoint and Japan. It will be seen here that Overcoming Modernity could usefully be considered as the sequel to the Chūōkōron debates. Not only did it consider many of the same themes, but it also represented a continuation in the process of politicizing and popularizing the language of the intellectual discourse into terms that the ordinary reading public could understand. Of particular interest here is the way that the symposium broadened the arena of debate to include groups other than (but in addition to) the Kyoto School.64 It will be seen that Nishida’s formulation of the indigenous, intuitive intellectual traditions of Japan had resonance with the postures of many of the participants, but that each individual and school developed these premises into slightly different conclusions. In the end, whilst there was no concrete agreement on how or even whether to overcome modernity, the debates did define the parameters within which Japan’s domestic and international conflicts could be rationalized during the 1940s.65

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The Japan Romantic School—Nihon rōmanha Although the Japan Romantic School (JRS) did not really take on an organized form until the mid-1930s, like the Kyoto School it drew its intellectual origins from the Meiji ishin, at the end of the nineteenth century, when Western ideas first entered Japan in force.66 Unlike the Kyoto School, however, the JRS was not defined around a geographic or institutional centre but merely around a distinctive approach to literature and to modernity pioneered by Yasuda Yojūrō (1910–81).67 Other prominent members included Hayashi Fusao and Kamei Katsuichirō.68 In general, members of the JRS held that modernization was the equivalent of Westernization: modernity, the modern nation state, institutional politics and the modern novel (kindai shōsetsu) were all aspects of Western cultural imperialism. Unlike the Kyoto School, the JRS did not consider the synthesis of things East and West to be a glorious modernity for a Japan at the vanguard of progressive history. In fact, modernity was seen as a pollutant that sullied a once pure Japanese culture—the very idea of progressive history was dismissed as part of the matrix of beliefs which accompanied modernity. Whilst the JRS did mainly restrict their writings to literary criticism, they did so with explicitly political intent. One of the core beliefs of the JRS thinkers was the idea that modern politics, being a product of modernity, was incapable of affecting genuine socio-cultural changes.69 Self-consciously imitating the German Romantics, such as Goethe, the JRS adopted literature, and particularly poetry, as the only truly cultural weapon in the battle against modernity. Like the Kyoto School thinkers during the Chūōkōron debates, the JRS claimed that Western societies were premised upon institutional mechanisms (Kōsaka Masaaki’s ‘urban’ society), in contrast to the cultural mechanisms at the root of Japanese society (Kōsaka’s ‘warrior family’ society). In political language, they referred to this difference in terms of the distinction between a nation or national essence (kokusui) (which was a cultural entity) and a state (kokka) (which was an institutional form).70 During the Meiji ishin, Japan had overlaid its national essence with a state, based on Western models, in order to become accepted in the Western world order. In doing so, it had not produced a nation state, in the European sense, where the institutions of the state reflected the cultural make-up of the nation, because even the very idea of an institutional state was alien to the cultural forms of the Japanese tradition. Hence, Japan was not the perfect synthesis of East and West envisioned by the Kyoto School (who argued that modernity was really a crisis for Europe, which was being left behind by Japan), but was rather in a situation of acute identity crisis prompted by modernity. For the JRS members, Japanism (which meant the embrace of modernity in the name of a special place for Japan in the present world order) was completely artificial, being premised upon what Nishida would have called ‘abstract thinking [kateiteki shisō]’ and they rejected it utterly. To a certain extent, from the point of view of the JRS, the Kyoto School had betrayed Japan in the very act of

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formulating a Japanese philosophy. Like Kuki Shūzō’s ‘Iki’ no kōzō, in the title of which there resided the tension between Japanese traditions and Western analysis, Japanese philosophy was at best oxymoronic and worst treacherous.71 On the other hand, for the Kyoto School, the JRS were seen as central to the idea of Japanism (which they defined as the reactionary conservation of Japanese traditions in opposition to the natural progress of history), which they rejected utterly.72 In this way, it can clearly be seen that the JRS and the Kyoto School had radically differing conceptions of ‘modernity’, which one rejected and the other embraced, and opposing views on the meaning of ‘Japanism’, from which both sought to dissociate themselves. However, both agreed that Japanese intellectual tradition was quite different from that in the West: the Kyoto School saw threads of intuition and rationality weaving into a modernity of ‘intellectual intuition’; the JRS saw an intermixing of Japanese muchi (non-knowledge) with Western chisei (knowledge) to produce a curdling confusion.73 For the Kyoto School, the enemy was mainly outside the nation, and for the JRS it had already got inside. One particular casualty of the JRS’s approach was the study of history. It should be remembered that Kyoto School thinkers such as Watsuji had been accomplished intellectual and cultural historians, and Nishitani Keiji had even pointed out a need to embrace European historical method. For the JRS, on the other hand, the whole idea of progressive history was seen as a construct of an alien modernity. Not only that, but modernity had effected a revolution in the objects of history: historians now traced the story of the state, but the state was an institutional product of modernity with no history in Japan before the Meiji ishin.74 For the JRS, professional historians who were in the service of the Japanese state were engaged in an invention of history which was effectively focussed on the transformation of Japan’s past into a past resonant with European states. To a certain extent, the ‘world historical standpoint’ of the Kyoto School, which emphasized the multiplicity of and mutually constructive interrelations between states, was another betrayal.75 For Hayashi and Kamei, the interrelations between nations would be characterized by battles between the ‘Black Ships of thought’ as each strived to maintain its essential purity (Kamei Katsuichirō 1939:193).76 Indeed, Kamei embraced Yasuda’s call for self-abandonment in the face of modernity and argued that only the sacrifice of self sincerely and in the name of national solidarity could demonstrate a commitment to Japan.77 The aestheticization of violence led Hayashi (during the Overcoming Modernity debates) to applaud the attack on Pearl Harbor because, he suggested, it simplified the symbolism of the war for the Japanese people, who had been confused by the complexities of war in Asia.78 It is relatively clear that the JRS represented a radically conservative, fascist strand of the political discourse in the 1940s. Nishida, and even the participants of the Chūōkōron debates, appeared moderate in comparison. However, the Kindai no chōkoku symposium served to associate the two groups in the public-

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mind, and also to further confuse the evaluative-descriptive conventions governing central political concepts in Kyoto School philosophy. Kindai no chōkoku The Kindai no chōkoku symposium was held in Kyoto, between 23 and 24 July 1942, seven months after the start of the war with the United States. Together with the supplemental essays submitted by most of the delegates, the transcripts of the round-table discussion were subsequently published in two issues of the bungakkai journal, and then later as a single volume.79 In total, there were thirteen participants from a range of backgrounds. The explicit goal of the event was to clarify the meaning of modernity and to formulate ways in which it could (if necessary) be overcome.80 The chairman of the debates, Kawakami Tetsutarō (1902–80), self-consciously modelled the format and themes of the symposium on the European conferences which had been organized by the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle between 1932 and 1938. The titles of those conferences were echoed by those of many of the essays submitted to Kindai no chōkoku, such as ‘The Formation of Modern Man’ and ‘The Future of the European Spirit’.81 There is neither the space nor the need to examine all of the essays, nor even the whole of the discussion here. A great deal of the debate was concerned with expanding the concept of modernity into different areas of culture, to satisfy the interests of the various participants. For example, Miyoshi Tatsuji was interested in poetry, Moroi Saburō was a musician and Tsumura Hideo was a film-maker.82 The academic core of the symposium was formed by historians, philosophers and literary critics, including Nishitani and Suzuki from the Kyoto School, and Kamei and Hayashi from the JRS. The discussion was woven from threads of common concern: the nature of modernity, the nature of history and the nature of war. On the nature of modernity83 From the outset, there was a clash between the Kyoto School and the JRS over an appropriate definition and evaluation of the concept of modernity, and in the end they simply returned to their original opinions (Takeuchi OM:293). Nishitani and Suzuki kept very close to the line taken in the Chūōkōron debates, arguing that Japan’s uniquely world historical (syncretic) modernity placed it at the vanguard of global history. Conversely, Kamei and Hayashi maintained that nothing good could possibly come from such pollution of the national essence. In a heated exchange between Nishitani and Hayashi, for example, Nishitani suggests that Hayashi should at least accept that the period of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) at the turn of the century, which saw the introduction of modern science and philosophy into Japan, was a useful and necessary stage in Japan’s development. Nishitani is careful to distance himself

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from those people who advocated a simplistic embrace of all things Western, and he points to the healthy dynamic of negation which produced a vibrant and synthetic Japanese modernity. Hayashi, however, will not even admit that much, and he responds to Nishitani with a resounding dismissal of all aspects of bunmei kaika (OM:242–3). Other less partisan members of the symposium also had opinions on the nature of modernity. Nakamura Mitsuo (1911–88) suggested that the call to ‘overcome’ modernity was premature, given that little consensus seemed to exist about what modernity meant. Without going as far as Nishitani, who vacillated between demanding that modernity (the embrace of the West) should be overcome in order to establish a unique syncretic culture and asserting that Japan’s modernity was already that perfect, syncretic culture, Nakamura simply stated that Japan’s modernity was a mixture of various native and foreign elements (OM:150–64). By extension, Nakamura appears to model a world order full of various distinct modernities, each existing as a mix of foreign and domestic factors, but with no sense of being on the historical road to syncretic perfection. One aspect of ‘modernity’ upon which there was broad agreement was the cultural damage caused by the functional specialization which accompanied industrialization, an idea originally associated with Max Weber. The Kyoto School had long lamented the divides between religion, philosophy and science erected in modern Europe, which Nishida had seen as artificial barriers to the proper understanding of existence. The symposium delegates saw the problem in social as well as intellectual terms, arguing that the social fragmentation evident in ‘modernity’ served to obscure the essential commonality and homogeneity of the Japanese people.84 In the same way that the Meiji ishin had overlaid the Japanese nation with an institutional state, so modernity had overlaid a natural unity with differentiation. Moroi Saburō suggested that one of the greatest ills of ‘modernity’ (whether in the form of complete Westernization or the partial assimilation of things Western) was the individual’s alienation from his/her awareness of unity in society (OM:236). In fact, Kamei Katsuichirō was the unlikely source of an admission that specialization and thus fragmentation were necessary preconditions for the development of technology and science; he goes so far as to suggest that the abandonment of technology would be a ‘regression’ for Japan, and implies that the loss of unity might have been a price worth paying for an increase in material strength (OM:235). This represents a definite step by the JRS towards Nishitani’s syncretic view of modernity, but also towards a world view premised upon power politics, in which material power constitutes a political goal in itself. Hayashi is most explicit and uncompromising in his condemnation of the condition of (Western) modernity He blames it for the fragmentation of Japanese society and for the pollution of the Japanese essence. In the final section of the roundtable debate, he says that he had hoped that the symposium might have revealed a new Japan untouched by the sullied fingers of modernity (OM:264). Although he was probably reassured by the relative consensus around the notion

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that the national essence was originally spiritual and unitary in nature, there was little solace for him in the way of discovering such a pristine Japan in the modern world. In a section dedicated to ‘Americanism’, the delegates discussed the opinion that America had replaced Europe as the most powerful source of Western culture (OM:254–63). Apparently recalling the Chūōkōron debates, Suzuki suggests that America had risen to prominence behind a veil which had been pulled over Japan’s eyes by European dismissals of America as ‘superficial’. However, in contrast to the Chūōkōron symposium, which cautioned against going to war against the United States on the basis that its superficiality may be an illusion, the delegates at Overcoming Modernity are damning in their treatment of America, with which Japan was now already at war. Tsumura Hideo was particularly violent in his treatment of American films, in which he saw an impure mix of easy morals and rampant materialism (OM:255). He suggested that American movies, like the material cultures that produced the steam-train, were overly preoccupied with speed. Speed quickly became contrasted with the slow profundity of ancient Japanese poetry, and Americanism’s superficial materialism was emphasized.85 To a certain extent, the delegates believed that whilst Japan had been infected by European rationalism (for better or worse), America (without a culture of its own) had taken European rationalism and twisted it into a shallow materialism, which now even threatened Europe. In the terms of Americanism (even if not actually in America) the idea of ‘culture’ had lost its meaning, having been replaced by material civilization.86 Americanism was not represented in Japan by ideas (as Europe had been) but simply by ‘things’, such as tall buildings and bubble gum. Tsumura was not alone in his belief that Americanism was the enemy of both Europe and Japan—that it was, in fact, a world historical enemy.87 He suggested that overcoming Americanism—which meant the creation of both a ‘new European culture’ (presumably in Germany and Italy) and a ‘new Asian culture’ — was the most important aspect of Overcoming Modernity. The tone of the discussion was ideologized still further when Kobayashi Hideo sought to reassure the delegates of Japan’s cultural victory by reaffirming the superiority of the immutable spirit over material machines: ‘spirit must create the machine’.88 On the nature of history89 Closely connected to the problem of how to define modernity was that of how it had arrived. Only an understanding of the mechanics of history could permit the formulation of a plan to overcome modernity In broad terms, the symposium demonstrated three main concerns: how to conceptualize history, how to present history, and how history functioned.

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Mirroring the previously unspoken debates between the Kyoto School and the JRS, discussion about correct conceptualization pivoted around the dilemma of whether history could be considered as ‘progressive’. Again, Hayashi was the most vocal exponent of the JRS position, and he insisted that the modern education system, modelled on those in the West, indoctrinated the Japanese with a belief in progress and change. He suggested that such beliefs were ‘superstitions of modernity’, and that they blinded people to their fundamental, unchanging existence(OM:221). Kobayashi Hideo concurred, and provided a bridge to the Kyoto School. He argued that true history should not be about learning facts about the material world of the past, but rather should be concerned with isolating those threads of ‘commonality’ (tsunenaru) which defined the unchanging essence of a people. History was not a linear progression, it was a continuous experience in the present— the whole idea of a connection between time and history was an artificial product of Western modernity.90 Here Kobayashi reveals a debt to Watsuji’s notion of fūdo (climate): he suggests that the essence of what it means to be Japanese can be found in the way a Japanese experiences aspects of historical culture, such as the art of the Kamakura period (OM:222–3). Watsuji’s notion of the multilayered individual is echoed by the conclusion: experience itself is something eternal and unchanging, and the progress of history is just a superficial overlay covering this fundamental continuity. Clearly, the notion of an underlying and eternal unity which could be revealed through pure experience resonated with the members of the Kyoto School. Suzuki and Nishitani both acknowledged that modernity promoted a historical superficiality, overly preoccupied with everyday change and progress. Both agreed with the call to recover the immutable and unchanging. For Nishitani, the eternal aspect of history (Kobayashi’s tsunenaru) approached his concept of ‘subjective nothingness’ (shutaiteki mu), which in turn resembled a location in Nishida’s ‘place of nothingness’ (mu no basho). Only by embracing the impersonal and eternal constant could people really transcend the everyday experience of linear history.91 Perhaps failing to understand the subtlety of Nishitani’s position, but in keeping with the tone of the discussion, Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko summarized the exchange: there are two worlds, the everyday and the spiritual, and in the latter ‘the philosophy of “progress” is certainly a lie’ (OM: 227–8). As was the case for most of the other delegates, for Yoshimitsu the idea of an underlying constant in the Japanese essence meant that modern Japan could escape from modernity by embracing the ways of the ancients (OM:229). This was certainly not the view of the Kyoto School, but Nishitani’s language served to blend his position into agreement with the mainstream of the debate: he called for an effort to make the spirit of the ancients at one with the spirit of the moderns. Like Nishida thirty years earlier, Nishitani explained how those men who are in touch with the eternal are liberated from the constraints of temporality and linear history; they are the great leaders.92 In the context of the Imperial War

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against the West, within a dominant discourse of Shintō-Confucian conventions, the obvious implication of such a statement was that the emperor, being of divine descent, was one such leader. Nishitani’s vain attempts to maintain his philosophical integrity, such as his Buddhist inspired statement that duplication of the ancients was not the way to truth—‘an honest grasp of the ancient road commences with a solitary journey into oneself’ —were lost in the general atmosphere of the symposium (OM:229).93 Appeals to universals were dragged into the radical particularism of Japan. Whilst there was broad agreement concerning the fact that true history should not be considered in a linear manner and that something immutable underpinned it, there was, however, some genuine conflict about how history should actually be presented to the people. While Hayashi maintained that Japan’s post-Meiji, institutional and political form was completely alien to its original essence, and therefore called for the resurrection of the Japanese classics as a source of authenticity (OM:239–40),94 even Kobayashi argued that any attempts to utilize the classics for explicitly ideological reasons would be vain, ergo contrary to the original ‘selfless’ Japanese nature that they sought to rejuvenate (OM:266–8). The tension between the JRS’s ideas of ‘fictional history’ and the Kyoto School’s notion of ‘genuine history’ were never properly resolved. On the question of how Japan had become so infected by (this superficial) modernity, the delegates broadly agreed about the mechanism, but predictably disagreed about its desireability. Nishitani raised the question of why Japan had been so keen to assimilate Western knowledge. This time, Suzuki and Hayashi locked horns: Suzuki stated that Japan’s behaviour was typical of any nation which formed part of the same world order. Global pressures from the international system and the meta-forces of history were themselves enough to promote synthesis and assimilation. Implicitly, Suzuki suggested that there was something immutable in world history, not only in national history Hayashi accepted that the international system had exercised influence on Japan, but he argued that Japan had been particularly victimized by a world order dominated by European conceptions of material power: ‘Western civilization had been forcefully imposed upon Japan out of the necessity of maintaining autonomy in a hostile social Darwinist world where colonial supremacy served as the emblem of successful survival’ (Harootunian 2000:51). On the nature of war95 The idea that ‘modernity’ was superficial and polluting also lent vocabulary to the discussion about the nature of the ongoing war. In an oft quoted passage, Kamei Katsuichirō asserts that ‘the war we are presently fighting is externally the eradication of English and American power, but, if you look at it internally, it is a fundamental cure for the spiritual sickness resulting from modern civilisation’ (Takeuchi OM:294). None of the participants seriously deviated from this formulation of the nature of the war following the attack on Pearl

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Harbor. The idea that the Pacific War was simultaneously a ‘thought war’ (shisō sensō) and an ‘actual war’ (genjitsu sensō) was universally accepted by both the Kyoto School and the JRS. However, both schools were also concerned about what they saw as the dual-nature of the war in a geopolitical and cultural sense. Kamei, for example, suggested that the war against England and America was quite different from the war in Asia. From the perspective of the JRS, the cultural battle for survival which justified the war against the West could not justify the war in China. Conversely, the Kyoto School could account for the absorbtion of Asia into a Co-Prosperity Sphere (in an ideal world), but they could not rationalize aggressive wars against the West beyond the boundaries of such a sphere. The difference came down to competing conceptions of the ideal world order. For the JRS, the international system was radically pluralist. Every nation was culturally unique and had the right to autonomy and independence. However, there was no real sense in which any obligations or connections existed between, beneath, or even prior to national boundaries. Hence, whilst the JRS did condone a Japanese war against America and Britain, whom it perceived as culturally imperialist, and to some extent it also condoned a war against the international system itself, which was perceived as an alien cultural force emanating from the Euro-American world, even Hayashi and Kamei found it hard to rationalize the war in China. It has already been seen how Hayashi welcomed Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, insofar as it simplified the symbolic meaning of Japan’s war efforts. In the symposium, Kamei also suggested that the war in China had been ‘muddled and confused’, and that its ideological justification was itself a product of (Western) modernity: Japanese imperialism in Asia could not topple Western imperialism there, because it was of the same nature. Conversely, the war against the West was a ‘pure war’ because it was not imperialist in any sense—Japan had no intention to invade England.96 Of course, underlying Hayashi and Kamei’s criticisms of the war in China was a fundamental approval of the militarist state and its aggressive policies. There is little in their language to suggest that they thought Japan should not be invasive in mainland Asia, only that they recognized that it was difficult to justify such invasiveness in (their anti-modernist) ideological terms. In the end, their message is more one of relief that the ‘muddled confusion’ had been clarified into a ‘pure war’ rather than a condemnation of the muddle itself. After this symposium, the thought of the Kyoto School, on the other hand, was understood to rationalize the war in Asia in terms of the construction of a regional ‘culturally unified sphere’, or the ‘Great East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, and the war against America was simply an act of purification. It was certainly true that the model of the international order generated by the Kyoto School incorporated such concepts, but in their original form they could only be justified as moral if Japan were a true state, acting selflessly in accordance with its genuine history, and for the genuine good of the Asian peoples (as freely defined by them). Neither Nishitani nor Suzuki showed any evidence of

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believing that these conditions had been met, but, by participating in the symposium and sharing in the manipulation of these conventions, they fed the spreading belief that the war of invasion (which was the reality of the Second World War in Asia) was the ‘ought-to-be’ (or ideal—tōi) war of liberation and natural, regional unification (Takeuchi OM:320). The atmosphere of wartime Japan, and even of the symposium itself, permitted little subtlety for philosophical expression.97 In the end, despite a lack of consensus amongst the participants regarding the nature of the Pacific War, thanks to the atmosphere of 1942, the overall conclusions of the symposium were seen to be virtually unanimous. The vision of the world order which emerged from the debates was the unholy child of a blending of the JRS and the Kyoto School’s terminology and concepts: The Great East Asian War had a dual structure. This dual structure originated in the modern Japanese war tradition that began with the idea of invading Korea. If you ask what it is: on one hand, it is the demand for leadership in East Asia, and, on the other hand, it is the goal of competing with Euro-America for world mastery (Takeuchi OM:307) In an important essay in 1944, Watsuji Tetsurō attempted to explain the origins of aggressive imperialism in Japan.98 His analysis suggests that modernity (which he characterized as the influx of Western ideas) had caused a confusion in the political discourse, at least partly because of the ‘dual-layered’ nature of the Japanese, which permitted individuals to simultaneously preserve their heritage and assimilate the new. In particular, he suggested that a traditional sense of reverence for the emperor had been confused with a Westernized (and institutionalized) sense of loyalty to the sovereign.99 He argued that the political connotations of loyalty to a state were entirely absent from the original meaning of phrases such as chūkun aikoku (loyalty and patriotism), which posited the emperor as the symbol of the sun-goddess, who was just one of many gods: ‘not being an ultimate god (kyūkyoku no kami) but rather being an intermediate god (tochū no kami) she was able to symbolize the absolute without being exclusivist (haitateki) —and in those terms she was truly absolute’ (WTZ XIV:308). Watsuji’s argument has some resonance with the process of manipulation of conventions that took place in Nishida’s shadow. For Nishida, the ‘true nation’ was rooted in Buddhist philosophical traditions, it was not a ‘nation in the modern sense of a nation’ (NKZ XII:422), but rather a self-evolving and selfcontradictory moral personality, an intermediate good (or god), continuously discontinuous. But through the process of the intellectual and socio-political discourse, and under the pressures of political demands for ideology, Nishida’s ‘true nation’ came to be understood as the modern, institutional state of Japan, its intermediate status sacrificed for particular claims to absolute truth.

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It is in this context that we should consider Nishida’s 1945 lamentations about being continuously misunderstood and quoted out of context. Nishida’s closest colleagues, variously disfigured by the pressures of intellectual life in a totalitarian polity, pushed his thought further in the direction of imperialism and ultra-nationalism. The members of the Kyoto School itself (rather than ‘being islands unto themselves’) made the leap from Nishida’s utopian political scheme into the realm of practical policy prescription, as they were increasingly challenged to do so by the political needs of the time, manipulating Nishida’s conventions as they went. By the time that Nishida’s concepts had made their way into the wider public domain, through the medium of high-profile public symposia, they had become public goods, flavoured by the atmosphere of belligerency and by association with fascist thinkers, and they acted on Nishida in return. When he tried to enter the public debate directly, in 1943, he was frustrated by his ineffectiveness— not only were the evaluative-descriptive conventions of his terms thoroughly assimilated into the orthodoxy, but the state edited his work into a form that made his dissent either invisible or ineffectual.

Conclusion The philosophical site of politics in Japan—Shisō sensō, and the defeat of Nishida tetsugaku?

In the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese intellectuals were engaged in a series of interconnected battles in a number of different contexts. Most obviously, there was the war of ideas that coincided with the brutal war of imperialist aggression waged by Japan on the continent of Asia. This war utilized ideas as weapons in the fight to control, to inspire and to subjugate. However, it was not the case that the Great East Asian War of Ideas was fought with a united front in Japan, despite the well-documented lack of political dissent amongst the Japanese academe. Indeed, the second front of the war of ideas was within the intellectual and political discourse of Japanese society, where writers, philosophers and ideologues battled for control over the evaluative-descriptive content of the orthodox terminology. In this civil sphere, internal to the state, the terminology itself (imposed and defended by a totalitarian state) comprised the theatre of war rather than its weapons, as it appeared from the exterior. The final theatre of war still echoes with the blasts of continued battle; it is the war of ideas over the meaning of modernity and the intellectual de-centring of EuroAmerica in a post-colonial world. This final theatre is not only characterized by the volleys of anti-Westernism fired during the 1930s and 1940s, but also by the serious intellectual drive for recognition of non-European traditions of thought about morality and politics. The demand (and need) for what Nishida called sekaisei—a global aspect—in political philosophy is as urgent today as it was in 1942. In this book, I have not argued that Nishida was a ‘liberal’. Neither have I attempted to deny his (reasonable) concern for the preservation of Japanese culture in the face of the ‘crisis of modernity’ experienced by many Asian societies in the early years of the twentieth century I have argued that Nishida tetsugaku was a voice of dissent in the civil sphere, in the terminological theatre of war, fighting against the vulgar ideologues of imperialism, Japanism and ultranationalism. However, Nishida’s fight was ineffectual, and the terminology he eventually employed as a backward marching revolutionary was fired out onto the Asian front, apparently unscathed by his attacks and his attempts at sabotage. From the outside, Nishida’s defeat looked like complicity, hidden within the alleged monolith of aggressive Japanese ideology, and this has hobbled the effectiveness of his efforts to fight the serious philosophical war against Euro-

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American intellectual parochialism and imperialism. The nature of Nishida’s defeat has been confused—rather than seeing Nishida tetsugaku as a victim of Japanism and the ultra-nationalist ideologues, it has simply been assumed that Nishida tetsugaku was defeated alongside Japanism by the forces of liberal democracy and the atomic bombs. By confusing the theatres of the wars of ideas, Nishida’s political legacy has been maligned: instead of seeing the defeat of Japanese imperialism as an opportunity for the liberation of Nishida tetsugaku, in the sense that a domestic résistance is liberated with the fall of the oppressive regime, the defeat of Imperial Japan in Total War has been constructed as a Total Defeat, implicating all aspects of Japanese political culture and discourse. One important effect of this confusion has been the absence of a sophisticated, philosophical Japanese voice in the current debates about world-political philosophy,1 despite the fact that the Kyoto School called for just such a debate as early as the 1940s, when they observed the global need for a sekaishiteki tachiba in history and thought. By properly contextualizing Nishida as a backward marching revolutionary in the domestic war of ideas in early twentieth century Japan, I have attempted to liberate his political thought as a valuable contribution to contemporary debates in the theory of politics and international relations. Elsewhere, I have termed his position the ‘Lost Tradition’ of intuition in political philosophy, outside the right-left dichotomy (Jones 2002b). Losing the battle: Nishida as an ineffective, dissident intellectual I have argued that Nishida was a dissenting intellectual because of the meaning and context of his speech-acts. His political thought, drawn from both indigenous traditions (Buddhism and Confucianism) and from certain currents of European philosophy, was significantly at odds with orthodox (Shintō-Confucian) ideology; he occupied the opposite extreme of a discursive place called ‘CoProsperity’. In particular, he did not believe that the individual should be subordinated to the state. He did not believe that any nation could or should define rules of conduct for other nations. He did not believe in the morality of military means, or the innate superiority of the Japanese people. And he did not believe that the Japanese Emperor should rule over the eight corners of the world. In brief, Nishida was not one of those Japanese thinkers who internalized the European model of the colonial state as ‘a social engineer, making modern peoples out of traditional peoples through the spread of [Shintō], the work ethic, and the [Japanese] family structure’ (Young 1998:434–5).2 Indeed, Nishida did not think that the state, which was for him an artificial construct, should enforce any patterns of behaviour on anyone, since to do so would be to compromise their self-reflective fulfilment of personality. For Nishida, ‘the most important thing is to make [enlightened] people rather than structures or systems’ (NKZ XIX:310–11).3

136 CONCLUSION

Hence, Nishida was not marked by the ‘metropolitan imprint of Manchukuo’, which Young suggests led thinkers to develop ‘utopian dreams…plans for the new empire’ after 1931 (Young 1998:419). He was morally opposed to the whole enterprise. We see no policy plans or blueprints for the military, economic or social reconstruction of Japan or her empire in Nishida’s work, as we do in the speech-acts of, say, Inoue Tetsujirō, Miki Kiyoshi or Rōyama Masamichi. In their place Nishida provides a damning moral critique of imperialism and authoritarianism. In the best traditions of intellectual responsibility, Nishida refused to place solidarity before criticism; rather than levelling his critique solely at Western imperialism in Asia, Nishida’s critique is of a universal character—addressed to the ‘state’ in general. Explicit criticism of the Japanese state in wartime Japan would have seen Nishida silenced by the authorities, but this criticism by inference slipped past the censors. Of course, the fact that much (although certainly not all) of Nishida’s work did slip past the censors is part of the problem: how could it have been dissenting and seen as ‘orthodox tennō-centrism’ (Lavelle 1994:163)4 at the same time? This linguistic and methodological dilemma has not really been addressed in the existing literature, and its very existence has led to a polarization of views. The dominant view has been that publication of his works in the 1940s demonstrates that his thought (in the 1940s at least) was either orthodox or orthodox enough. This view has the convenient advantage of sidestepping the necessity of actually reading Nishida’s work—it characterizes the laments of Oscar Wilde, Edward Said and Quentin Skinner that intellectuals are often held symbolically responsible for the evils of their time.5 A related view suggests that, despite the fact that Nishida’s correspondence and diaries imply that he was opposed to the regime, in practice he underwent a (false?) tenkō and wrote in support of the orthodoxy This view has enabled post-war scholars to separate Nishida’s ‘politics’ from his ‘philosophy’, arguing that the former was an ugly (albeit essentially superficial) aberration bearing the metropolitan imprint of Manchukuo,6 and that the latter, produced in Nishida’s earlier career, was essentially apolitical and thus remains untarnished by his tenkō, false or otherwise. As we have seen, Heisig, for example, asserts that Nishida’s politics were not significant for the development of his thought. This view of Nishida characterizes him as a disfigured intellectual, guilty of what Said calls ‘second thoughtism’, placing solidarity before criticism, refusing to make the attempt to speak truth to power. My position is different. I suggest that the disjunction between the dissenting meanings of Nishida’s speech-acts and his success in bypassing the censors is not, in fact, a contradiction but an essential part of Nishida’s political project. It embodies the strategy of the backward marching revolutionary who, recognizing the moral imperative to speak even in the absence of the certainty that he is speaking unassailably,7 attempts to manipulate the meaning of existing ideological and linguistic conventions.8 However, the apparent ease with which Nishida’s work was incorporated into the orthodox discourse suggests that his

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strategy was flawed; his success in finding a public vent for his work seems to have been simultaneously his failure as a dissident. All intellectuals must pick times and places in which to speak, where they think their words will be most effective. Was it simply the case that Nishida exercised poor judgment in these questions of public relations? It is certainly the case that Nishida participated in what Maruyama has called the ‘Iwanami culture’ of wartime Japan, publishing in high-brow journals and with prestigious academic publishing houses. However, it is also the case that his attempts to speak directly in other forums were manipulated by the authorities—Nishida’s work was censored, edited and even rewritten before it could be considered for an appearance in official literature. This raises an important question: was it possible for intellectuals to effectively voice dissent in the atmosphere of imperial Japan? Strict control of the media, particularly after 1931, combined with the activities of the Thought Police, would certainly have made effective dissent difficult—and the empirical absence of such dissent tends to support this conclusion.9 It is possible that Nishida’s ineffectiveness stemmed not only from where/ when he spoke, but also how he spoke. Was it the case that the studied language of philosophical inquiry was simply incapable of confronting the emotional appeal of ideological conventions? A related problem concerns the accessibility of philosophical critiques in general, particularly in an atmosphere of belligerence and nationalist fervour; could the masses or even the authorities have understood that Nishida was dissenting? Heisig suggests that the difference between Nishida’s stance and that of the orthodox ideologists was ‘too small to have bothered the ordinary reader’ —I would suggest that the gap was large, but that it was too philosophical to bother the ordinary reader. Either way, ‘the result was that the criticisms of the official ideology largely fell between the cracks, as indeed they continue to do to this day for many western readers who rush through the text the way that one can rush through an ideological tract’ (Heisig 2001:98). The contradiction, of course, is that had Nishida’s work not exhibited this kind of ambiguïté it might never have appeared in the public discourse in the first place. There is another, more fundamental, possible flaw in Nishida’s dissent: is there something inherent in Nishida’s philosophical system that lent itself to cooption and exploitation by the extreme right? Is his thought ‘intrinsically nationalistic’?10 The very fact that Nishida’s thought (or at least his name) was co-opted into the orthodoxy suggests that there was something exploitable within it. To some extent, of course, all systems of thought are open to exploitation in particular circumstances; the important question is not really whether a system can be exploited but rather how much violence must be done to it in order to effect this co-optation. The amount of work needed to swing a thinker’s dissent into complicity is inversely proportional to the amount of responsibility that thinker must bear for the unintended use to which his thought is put, and I

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suggest that a considerable amount of intellectual labour (of varying levels of sophistication) was needed to co-opt Nishida tetsugaku. At the most general levels, with the benefit of hindsight, Nishida’s approach to political philosophy contains several dangers. In the first place, his philosophy was idealist and utopian. Whilst such approaches should be critiques of the inadequacies of empirical societies, they are almost routinely exploited as justifications for violence directed at revolution. A second, but related, issue concerns Nishida’s conception of an impersonal historical meta-force guiding mankind towards his utopian ideal. This kind of teleological vision, which he shares with Kant, emphasizes evolution rather than revolution on the basis of man’s current inability to grasp absolute truth and ergo his inability to effect the changes needed to reach utopia. It is easily reconstructed into a call for revolution —even though such a call does fundamental violence to the historical schema and the conception of man found in either Nishida or Kant, neither of whom made concrete policy prescriptions.11 In the case of Nishida, however, the intellectual context of early-twentieth-century Japan helped to manipulate his conventions in this direction: there was a traditional non-dualism between religion, politics and philosophy that risked absolutizing the figure of the emperor as an individual in possession of absolute truth and thus knowledge of how to reach utopia; there was also a prominently non-dualist approach to the absolute and the particular (hongaku shisō) found in the Mahāyāna tradition which implied that the individual was instantly capable of attaining transcendental knowledge—whilst Kant argued that such knowledge would only be attained in the distant future, in the development of the species as a whole. Neither Kant nor Nishida offer specific criteria by which to falsify their philosophical schemes. Combine these intellectual traditions with a dominant discourse of Japanese exceptionalism—the context of the Co-Prosperity Sphere— and the result is a heady mix of ultra-nationalism and imperialism. In terms of the details of Nishida’s thought, there are some other lurking dangers. In particular, the embrace of nothingness in place of the primacy of the integrity of individuals might set the stage for the subordination of the individual to the state, despite the fact that Nishida himself is clear that this should not happen. By extension, Nishida’s emphasis on increasing levels of organic unity might lay a path to a justification of imperialism, again, despite the fact that Nishida was explicitly opposed to such an interpretation or extension of his work. Whilst I must concede that these potential dangers are real ones, they represent the manipulation of Nishida’s conventions and they do violence to both the spirit and content of his work. In fact, to some extent, they do not really constitute criticisms of Nishida at all, since the pre-occupations with nothingness, no-self, non-duality, meta-history and utopian modelling were common aspects of the wartime intellectual and political discourse, with long traditions in Japanese intellectual history. Ideas about harmony and Confucian principles of designation and Co-Prosperity had been hotly contested political sites for centuries. Nishida’s unique contribution as a Japanese philosopher was not to

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create these concepts but rather to define and systematize a specific location for their intersection—the Nishida Myth (that he was responsible for all of these ideas) has been generated in the Western academe by the fact that Nishida is the first Japanese philosopher to receive serious attention and, from the outside, these broad brush-strokes represent something new.12 General criticisms of Nishida for being part of Japanese traditions of thought, thereby implicating him for the dangers in those traditions, are simply irresponsible, and they reveal an ignorance of the fact that Japan had a rich and varied intellectual history before Nishida started to write. Nishida may have been the ‘father of Japanese philosophy’, but he certainly was not the first person in Japan to think or write about politics. Nishida’s political thought must be understood within the context of Japanese traditions of thought, where his dissent from the 1940s orthodoxy was clear, and I must lament (with Heisig) that so little attention has been given to Nishida and the Kyoto School by scholars of East Asian ideas (Heisig 2001: 260). Somewhat counter-intuitively, it seems to me that much of the violence to Nishida tetsugaku was done by the Kyoto School itself. Most of the philosophical and ideological steps between Nishida’s dissent and the orthodoxy were made (or at least indicated) by the more junior members of the Kyoto School, particularly those young men who were ‘stumbling about in a kind of euphoric daze, groggy with the excitement of a war and its coming adventures’ (Van Bragt 1995:239). Nishida, already a seventy-year-old retiree with a giant reputation by 1940, was probably beyond the opportunistic pull of glory and the enhancement of personal standing. Not so the young tenkōsha, Miki Kiyoshi, nor the rising star of Tanabe Hajime, struggling out of Nishida’s shadow, nor the youthful participants in the great public symposia of the early 1940s, Nishitani Keiji, Kōsaka Masaaki, Kōyama Iwao and Suzuki Shigetaka. Each of these figures explicitly attempted to deduce concrete policy prescriptions from Nishida’s work in popular locations— something that Nishida consistently refused to do, and something that his philosophy opposed. The allegiances of these men with the Kyoto School (and consequently their common concerns with some of the central themes of Nishida tetsugaku) implicated Nishida, even though they were major thinkers in their own rights, creatively manipulating the terms of his work. Because of his stature, Nishida’s students never really escaped his shadow, so he bore symbolic responsibility for their acts. Tosaka Jun commented that Nishida’s thought was neither feudal nor fascist in essence, but that it had potentials that could be variously fulfilled depending on the circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of all systems of philosophy—nothing is completely unassailable—and it is particularly true of abstract philosophy. Indeed, after the war, Tanabe Hajime suggested that it was his abstract level of reasoning that permitted his thought to be interpreted as supporting the absoluteness of the state (THZ VII:336–7).13 Given the abstract, assailable and philosophical nature of Nishida’s politics together with the circumstances of 1940s, was Nishida simply irresponsible to

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perform the speech-acts that he did? Would it have been better if Nishida had said nothing and retreated into what Soviet dissents later called ‘internal exile’? Or would such a silence have been simply another form of the trahison des clercs? This is not only a moral dilemma but also a practical one. The moral dilemma refers to the imperative for intellectuals to speak truth to power even if they cannot be sure that they can do so unassailably. In practice no thinker is completely unassailable, so each exists on a continuum between dissent that is hard to assail and dissent that is so easily co-opted that it is effectively complicity. The moral question is where the line should be drawn between assailable dissent and effective complicity, and how can an intellectual know where his/her thought will lie until he speaks? In hindsight, totalitarian imperial Japan was not the best environment for Nishida’s thought, and the state’s control over the conventions of the political discourse made their effective manipulation into dissent almost impossible, and thus made Nishida tetsugaku into effective complicity. The practical dilemma refers to the question of when Nishida should have become silent and what the consequences of that silence would have been. One of my central contentions has been that Nishida’s philosophy was political from the outset—even in 1911, Zen no kenkyū established a recognizably critical politicomoral stance in a more permissive atmosphere than the 1940s. There is no question that Nishida should have silenced himself in 1911, and yet it was this text and those that immediately followed it that established the currency of key Kyoto School concepts such as pure experience, absolute nothingness, personality as a contradictory-unity, organic nations etc. Hence, even if Nishida had gone into ‘internal exile’ in the late 1930s his fundamental concepts would still have been in the public domain, taking on a life of their own and acting on him in return. Indeed, what we see in Nishida’s later career is his attempt to defend his original meanings in an increasingly violent war of ideas—the battle to control the evaluative-descriptive conventions of his earlier thought. It is not insignificant, for example, that Nishida only started to employ orthodox terminology to discuss his own philosophy after that terminology had become associated with his work through the speech-acts of the wider Kyoto School. In other words, had Nishida withdrawn into silence in his later career, he would not have deprived the discourse of his political concepts, but he would simply have surrendered them to the ideologues. A final practical issue regarding Nishida’s possible silence is concerned with his location in the third theatre of the war of ideas mentioned above. That is, if Nishida had withdrawn into internal exile we would not be able to mine his work today as a valuable resource in the battle to de-centre Euro-American political thought. As Theodore Adorno has said, the only hope that an intellectual can realistically sustain about his work is that someday somebody will read his words and understand what he meant (Said 1994:42). In this light, our judgment about Nishida’s speech-acts must be reserved until we have explored the extent

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to which his philosophy adds something new and important to contemporary debates about political theory. Continuing the war: Nishida as a Japanese political philosopher Whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something however small from the other to make you whole and save you from the mortal sin of righteousness. (Chinua Achebe 1987:142) There have been a number of attempts to dislodge the European tradition of political philosophy from its position as the exclusive corpus of wisdom about moral and political goods, particularly in the over the last ten years. In the field of International Relations, this battle has been played out in the language of culture: ‘the global eruption of separatist nationalism set in motion by the ending of the Cold War has directly and inescapably forced the IR scholarly community to rethink the theoretical status of culture and identity in world affairs’ (Lapid 1996: 4).14 There is an increasing sense that cultures are transforming the contemporary world more profoundly than either geopolitics or economics. In 1999, Fred Dallmayr noted the ‘emergence of (what some have called) the “global village,” involving the steadily intensifying interaction among previously more or less segregated civilizations or cultures…carried forth by a seemingly inexorable momentum’ (Dallmayr 1999:1). Such sentiments are increasingly common in the literature today—globalization, however you chose to define it, and whether or not to subscribe to its desirability, is everywhere. Of course, Nishida observed this process as early as the 1930s, arguing that the world was entering a ‘compact global space’ in which previously isolated cultures would develop through their mutual interactions, fuelled by the inexorable process of history. Although there has been some resistance in the established academy to the idea that political thought (let alone political philosophy) could be detached from its European roots,15 there is a gradual (perhaps inexorable) movement beyond comparative politics and into comparative political theory. The discipline is gradually letting go of Hedley Bull’s famous assertion that Martin Wight’s ‘International Theory’, which he coined nearly thirty years ago, is an inappropriate term for the field of inquiry because ‘it is the Relations that are International, not the Theory; the enterprise is better described as Theory of International Relations’.16 The unspoken assumption that cultures and nations may vary in their understandings of politics, but that all such understandings could be encompassed within the universal logic of Euro-American theory is under increasing pressure—intellectual Fortress-Europe is being dismantled. One of the unfortunate consequences of the failure to properly contextualize the political thought of Japan’s most prestigious school of philosophy has been

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the absence of Nishida and the Kyoto School from this blossoming discourse. Their absence is particularly ironic when you consider that this is exactly the kind of discourse for which they were calling in the 1930s–1940s—arguing that increasing levels of truth would be reached only through transnational scholarship and the consequent synthesis of national cultures. It is, however, one thing to observe the injustices of omission and quite another to justify inclusion.17 The pivot between these positions lies in the content of Nishida’s political philosophy: what does it bring to the current discourse that is new, interesting or profound? I do not contend that Nishida was a political scientist in the same way as Charles-Louis de Montesquieu or Alexis de Tocqueville, who attempted to provide rational plans, constitutions, and models for the functioning of law and society. Indeed, Nishida was explicitly opposed to this very enterprise. Like the anti-modernists in nineteenth century Europe, Nishida did not believe that social behaviour could be regulated by reason alone—and, furthermore, he did not believe that it should be regulated in that way. Hence, readers looking for precise policy prescriptions will be disappointed with Nishida. Nishida’s political philosophy would sit in more comparable company with Kant, Bergson, Heidegger or even Hegel, for whom political theory was not an exercise in the formulation of policy but rather a vision of the social and political good. Kant, for example, is clear that the best form of government is the ‘republic’, but nowhere does he spell out the institutional structure of this perfect form—and he is clear that ‘democracy’ is not the answer. Rather, a Kantian republic, the prerequisite (or, perhaps, co-requisite) for the achievement of Perpetual Peace, is defined as a political system that embodies the moral imperative not to act in a way you would not wish to be made into a universal maxim. Kant even concedes that such a society could exist in a dictatorship— depending on the ruler. Hegel aspires towards the perfectly rational society in which citizens are ‘with themselves’ in the laws to which they are subject—he is not precise about what this might mean in practice, but he is uniformly disapproving of the states around him. Hugely influenced by both Kant and Hegel (but also Buddha and Confucius), Nishida shared this approach to political philosophy as a vision of ethical politics, universally critical of the imperfect world in which he lived. For Nishida, the ‘true nation’ is one in which individuals can reach satisfaction. However, satisfaction is not defined in terms of material gain or even happiness. Rather, satisfaction is concerned with the development of personality. Personality, however, is not identical with the ego—since the ego is that ‘hypothetical’ and rational agent which seeks happiness and material gain. Indeed, ‘true personality’ is revealed through the eradication of ego, in ‘pure experience’, which lies prior to the ego itself. For Nishida, the obsession with the ego as the political subject in European political thought (and the rationality engendered by the subject-object distinction arising from it) has led to a ‘misplaced pride, superficial optimism, a misconception of the true nature of

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progress… Humanity lies groaning, half buried beneath the weight of the progress it itself has made’ (Bergson 1932: 289–90, 338). The true nature of progress is in the gradual expansion of personality until it encompasses all historically generated diversity and thus returns to pure experience. Dialogue and scholarship should be the stuff of political and international relations: difference should be embraced rather than confronted. There is no ‘Clash of Civilizations’ here (Jones 2002c). Nishida’s position here is similar to that of Bergson, for whom historical progress should take the form of a movement from ‘closed societies’ to ‘open societies’. The closed society is the rational, ego-obsessed society ‘in which its members pull together, indifferent to the rest of mankind, always prepared for attack or defence, bound, in fact, to an attitude of combat’ (Bergson 1932:283). In contrast, the ‘open society’ is one in which the ego and national boundaries lose their salience as people cease to think in terms of the subject-object dichotomy: ‘the open society is that which will, in principle, embrace all humanity’ (Bergson 1932:284). Of course, the problem is how to move from one condition to the other. For Bergson and Nishida the solution is education, not the creation of an expansive society—since open societies are not imperialist, they merely contain a global aspect (sekaisei). The world will change when we learn to think about it differently—that is, from a world-historical standpoint (sekaishiteki tachiba).18 Hence, for Nishida, the nation should not be a rigid institutional structure or an artificially (or heteronomously) constructed culture, but rather a moral personality formed through the mutual self-determination of its constituents and in a dynamic relationship with other nations. International relations should be characterized by the development of greater levels of unity, as nations creatively interact with each other, producing public goods and increasing the similarities in their personalities, thus decreasing the salience of their national boundaries. In this model nationalism, like egoism, becomes a nonsense. Hence, the organizational principles of transnational groupings should not enshrine the existing state structure but rather provide an arena for its transcendence. The crucial dilemma in this model is, of course, the role of agency. Nishida refuses to grant moral legitimacy to any action that does not arise from pure experience. Prima facie, this seems to deny the possibility of legitimate selfwilled action—relegating moral acts to a state of post-enlightenment. This position allows Nishida to condemn all acts of selfishness, coercion and violence, and it points to an evolutionist (rather than revolutionist) approach to history. However, Nishida is clear that pure experience is an empirically verifiable and normal condition—indeed, it is the natural state of being, but it has been ‘half buried beneath the weight of the progress it itself has made’. For Nishida, ‘education is everything. If the people are uncritical and blind, as they are today, then nothing can be expected of them’ (NKZ XIX:311).19 The education system is the core of political renovation—it should encourage free thought, liberating students from ideas of linear history, the progress of reason

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and the heteronomous strictures of institutionally closed societies, which he identified with both Euro-American tradition and imperial Japan. In the site of political philosophy in interwar Japan Nishida tetsugaku lost the battle against the ideologues of Japanese imperialism. However, Nishida’s political ideas have much to contribute to the contemporary battle to de-centre Euro-American political thought and to establish a world-historical standpoint in political philosophy.

Notes

Introduction: political philosophy in Japan and the contradictory location of Nishida tetsugaku 1 See also, Inayatullah and Blaney (1996). The end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed many assaults on Western cultural imperialism, most of which emphasized how intuition could overcome ‘Western rationality’. In India, there was Gandhi, in China K’ang Yu-Wei and even in Europe there was a ‘crisis of reason’. On India, see Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), reprinted in Gandhi (1961, vol. 10); on China see K’ang Yu-Wei (1913), or, for an overview, Hao Chang (1987). On the crisis in Europe, see Burrow (2000). 2 Recent volumes in this debate include Chan, Mandaville and Bleiker (2001); Dallmayr (1999); Hwa Yol Jung (2002); Lapid and Kratochwil (1996). We might also include Huntington (1996), but particularly the response to him in Rashid (1997). 3 Young (1998) nicely explains the totalizing nature of Japan’s war in the Pacific. Yusa Michiko (1995a) notes the tendency for scholars to throw the baby out with the bath water, ‘Nishida or his philosophy being the baby in this case’. She observes: ‘Nishida was viewed as part of the legacy of “old Japan,” the Japan that was governed by the myth of the imperial family, the myth that had to be discarded, if Japan were to move into a new era.’ Even Takeuchi Yoshitomo remarked: ‘for me to criticise Nishida tetsugaku was for me to liberate myself from the yoke of things of the past. But I must admit that my criticism was too rash’ (pp. 294–5). 4 Maruyama Masao (1963/66b) has famously lamented the existence of only passive resistance by intellectuals in wartime Japan, and Ienaga Saburō (1968: esp. pp. 235– 54) suggests that their only resistance was simply to carry on as normal. Other influential accounts of the minimal resistance of intellectuals are Hashikawa Bunzō (1974) and, more recently, Shillony (1981/2001: esp. pp. 110–33). 5 Elsewhere I have argued that the search for Japanese philosophy (as opposed to philosophy in Japan) is tantamount to cultural essentialism. See Jones (2003b). 6 The Kyoto School is generally held to include Nishida’s successors in the chair of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–90), as well as his students, Kōyama Iwao (1905–93), Kōsaka Masaaki (1900–69), Suzuki Shigetaka (1907–88), Miki Kiyofsshi (1897–

146 NOTES

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19

1945) and Tosaka Jun (1900–45). Two important peripheral figures were Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) and Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941). In fact, Dale does not appear to list even a single essay by Nishida in the bibliography of this famous book. Tōjō’s remark was reported in the Asahi newspaper, 7 March 1943 (evening edition). Like Dale, Najita and Harootunian make this judgment without significant textual support. See, for example, the well-informed debate presented in Heisig and Maraldo (1995). For example, see various from Ueda Shizuteru, Yusa Michiko and Ōhashi Ryōsuke. In general, the term ‘liberalism’ is not problematized in the literature, where it appears to be used merely to refer to a positively evaluated political system. The heritage of ‘liberalism’ in the history of Western political thought is almost uniformly ignored, and hence the profound disjunction between liberal ideas about the atomistic and independent self and Nishida’s idea of the genuine, transindividual self are neglected. Nishida’s philosophic foundations are quite alien to the liberal tradition, at least in the conventional sense, and it is not only ahistorical to attempt to read liberalism into his work, but it is also counter-productive. Dissent and liberalism need not be seen as coterminous in early-twentieth-century Japan, and I suggest that attempting to reduce Nishida to an ‘Asian liberal’ obfuscates rather than clarifies his originality as a political philosopher. As we will see, Nishida does emphasize freedom and liberty, but he argues that the meaning of these terms in ‘Western’ thought have actually hindered their genuine development—Nishida’s position might best be termed: radical liberalism. The works of the Kyoto School were first introduced to English language readers through the Shin Buddhist journal, The Eastern Buddhist, which was studied mainly in theology departments. Subsequently, a number of high-profile publications have consolidated the impression that the Kyoto School were primarily religious thinkers: Unno and Heisig (1990); Unno (1989). A recent book that does seek to integrate Nishida’s politics in a more sophisticated way is Kōsaka Kunitsugu (2002). Yusa Michiko (1995a:295) laments what she has called the ‘Heidegger factor’ in Nishida studies. The term ‘turn’ gained common currency in Nishida studies particularly after Huh Woo-Sung (1990). Revelations about Heidegger’s role in Nazi Germany made in the early 1990s added an extra impetus. The term kyōyōshugi (culture-ism, or perhaps self-cultivationism) is sometimes connected with Nishida’s stance. Tanabe Hajime, shu no ronri to sekai zushiki (1935) THZ VI. Nishitani Keiji, sekaikan to kokkakan (1941) NKC IV. On Tanabe: Williams (2000); Heisig (1995a, b); Naoki Sakai (1995). On Nishitani: Mori Tetsurō (1995); Maraldo (1995a). Maraldo (1995b) also makes an attempt to discuss Nishida’s politics, but argues that they should be depoliticized into cultural theory. Interestingly, Heisig (2001) finds no difference between the politics of Nishitani and Tanabe (suggesting that a description of the reception of Tanabe’s politics will suffice to explain Nishitani’s as well, p. 209) which suggests to me that their politics lay in their common ground, that is, in Nishida tetsugaku. See, for example, Hardacre (1989).

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20 Williams (2000) implies that this is part of a general arrogance in the Western academy concerning the existence of ‘philosophy’ in Japan in modern times, let alone earlier. 21 Recent publications, such as Kōsaka Kunitsugu (2002), Hanazawa Hidefumi (1999) and Okami Akira (1996), include specific sections comparing Nishida’s thought with Hegel, James, Christianity and ‘French Philosophy’, but they do not focus on his political thought. 22 Sekaishiteki tachiba to nihon (The World Historical Standpoint and Japan) was sponsored by the journal Chūōhōron in 1941; kindai no chōkoku (Overcoming Modernity) was sponsored by the journal Bungakkai in 1942.

1 Theorizing dissent: intellectuals, language and political sleight-of-hand 1 Umberto Eco, cited in Moon (1996:2). 2 Isaiah Berlin (1958), cited in Hardy (2000:ix). 3 These categorizations are shared by other thinkers. See, for example, Robbins (1990). 4 See, for example, the dialogue between them, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Foucault (1980). 5 A notable exception might be Andrew Barshay (1988). However, Barshay is less interested in demarcating types of intellectuals than in establishing a new ‘public world’ in which post-Meiji intellectuals of various types could operate. 6 Said remarks, for example: if you begin to speak about intellectuals you cannot do so quite as generally as before [we had knowledge of other cultures], since for example French intellectuals are viewed as completely different in style and history to their Chinese counterparts. In other words, to speak of intellectuals today is also to speak specifically of national, religious and even continental variations on the topic, each one of which seems to require separate consideration. (Said 1994:19–20)

Said later confesses that there are some common ‘general notions’ which have more than ‘strictly local application’. 7 Said (1994:32) remarks: ‘prominent intellectuals are very often made to bear the brunt of their community’s opprobrium, either when factions within it associate the intellectual with the wrong side…or when other groups mobilize for an attack’. 8 A fine exception to this oversight is the careful exploration of the extent of state oppression in wartime Japan in Shillony (1981/2001). Barshay also expresses a more nuanced understanding when he writes ‘of public discourse in imperial Japan as being hegemonised by the state’ (1988:14). In other words, there was political pressure to conform—a pressure which presupposes some measure of dissent.

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9 The term tenkō is most commonly applied to the ideological shift from communism to ultra-nationalism in the prewar period. Recent work by Rikki Kersten (1994) has sought to establish the utility of the concept in the postwar as well. 10 In general, Maruyama seems to devote little space to the role of intellectuals (I would not go as far as Fletcher (1982:164) who suggests that he ‘virtually ignores’ them). ‘Pseudo-intellectual’ refers generally to white-collar workers (factory owners, primary school teachers, low-grade officials etc.), and he suggests that they acted as ‘small bosses’ and ‘transmitters of local opinion’ (Maruyama 1963/66a:60) much more effectively than ‘proper intellectuals’ who were relatively isolated from the masses. Barshay’s (1988) notion of the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ intellectual shows a clear debt to Maruyama. 11 Indeed, he goes as far as to suggest that in the absence of oppression there could be no authentic intelligentsia. 12 Brym (1980:14), for example, suggests: ‘there is much to recommend the widespread opinion that the intellectual’s role, by its very nature, predisposes its incumbent to adopt a critical stance vis-à-vis society’. 13 Barshay’s ‘insider’ (Maruyama’s ‘proper intellectual’) demonstrates a similar commitment to the state orthodoxy. Indeed, Barshay talks about them being ‘ideologically speaking, “on call” all the time’ (1988:15). 14 Said’s stance here is consistent with the approach of Quentin Skinner’s ‘historical pragmatics’, where the primary question is not ‘what is politically true and right?’ but rather ‘what counts as politically true and right, or as grounds for testing political claims, in different ideologies and contexts?’ (Tully 1988a:20). 15 There is a further sense in which Said’s ‘truth’ is equivalent to Foucault’s ‘subjugated knowledge’. 16 The first edition of La Trahison des clercs appeared in 1927. After the Second World War, when Benda republished his book, he extended his criticism to those who uncritically embraced Nazism and Communism. 17 Said (1994:31) does not mention any particular Japanese intellectuals in this context. 18 Later in this section (18) Adorno also identifies dangers inherent in this disregard of the familiar. 19 It is not entirely clear from this study in which direction causality is running, if indeed we could infer causality at all. 20 The Meiji government enacted a number of educational reforms in an attempt to build a modern, national system of education. Perhaps the most pivotal reform for our purposes here was the establishment of the university system, with the creation of Tokyo Imperial University in 1886 and Kyoto Imperial University in 1903—other Imperial Universities followed. A number of private universities, such as Keiō and Waseda, also date from the turn of the century Success in the examinations at these top universities was the surest route into governmental service. 21 The famous phrase belongs to Said, for whom, as we have already seen, truth need not be a monolith. 22 In this critical framework, Miki Kiyoshi was arguably guilty of a double treachery because not only did he ‘sell-out’ to the establishment, but he also committed tenkō, or what Said calls ‘second thoughtism’, which displays (confused) loyalty before criticism. 23 I note that neither Fletcher (1982) nor Barshay (1988) appear to be concerned about the ambiguous position of insiders who moved towards the outside. There

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24

25 26

27 28

29

30 31

32

33 34

35

appears to be a general consensus in the literature that movement was always from the outside-in. Said (1994:9): ‘The moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world’. In contrast, Maruyama Masao laments that the absence of ‘private intellectuals’ was a particular crisis endured by Japanese society because of a state ‘which did not distinguish between internal thought and external action and so would invade one’s spirit without restriction’. Translated in Kersten (1999). A series of Austin’s lectures were published posthumously (Austin 1962/63). For Arima, Nishida characterized the latter response, which was characterized by the development of a philosophy which turned ‘away from existing social reality’ and strove for an ‘emancipation that never came to grips with the realities of the socialized self’. In a blanket dismissal, he claims: ‘nowhere does [Nishida] urge the need for the category [of pure experience] to be applied as a social regulative principle’ (1969:6, 12). We will see later that this is an unsustainable position. Here I invert Ricoeur’s famous term ‘surplus of meaning’, which he developed in Ricoeur (1976). To some extent the ‘left-right’ dichotomy here is misleading and ahistorical, since, as we have already seen, dissent and liberalism were not identical in earlytwentieth-century Japan, and I do not suggest that Nishida was a liberal. Saussure is adamant that the meaning of language is not derived from an essential, fundamental or uncontested core of meaning, but from the contingent relationships at a particular time. Saussure (1960/74). See also, Harris (1988: esp. p. 76). Chapter 4 will directly address Lavelle’s argument. Chapter 2 will seek to elucidate this ‘context’ in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century Japan, while Chapters 3 and 4 will show that Nishida’s ‘context’ also included texts from European philosophy. There is no simple step from deducing the political meaning of a text in this way to ascertaining the intent of the intellectual who produced the text. In the case of Nishida, thankfully, the question of intent was made easier by the fact that he left an extensive diary and copious correspondence. Ueda refers explicitly to terms such as Imperial Way, Japanese Spirit and the Emperor System. ‘Mesuré à l’étalon de la philosophie, ce discours est d’un bout à l’autre d’une rare ambiguïté…Le “service de travail” et le “service d’armes” coincident avec le “service de savoir” de sorte qu’à la fin de la conference l’auditeur ne sait s’il doit ouvrir les “Présocratiques” de Diels ou s’engager dans les rangs des S.A. C’est pourquoi l’on ne peut se borner à juger ce discours selon un point de vue, ou purement politique, ou purement philosophique’ Löwith (1946) quoted in Bourdieu (1988:13). The notion that ideas become property in the public domain, ownable and malleable by any with the power to grasp hold of them is not unique to Nishida. Ryan (1984:3–4) states: Once the essay or book in which we are interested has been put before the public, it takes on a life of its own. Whatever the copyright laws, an author

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has only a limited control over his own writings…works outlive their authors, and take on lives their writers might be perturbed to see. (Ryan 1984:3–4) 36 Ueda also refers to a ‘war over words’ between Nishida and the Army (1995a:91). Unfortunately, Ueda’s approach is ultimately unconvincing. Rather than engaging in detail with Nishida’s texts (or his textual context), Ueda appears content to observe the evident disjunction between Nishida’s professed intentions in his diaries and correspondence (in which he is dissenting) and the militarists’ interpretations of Nishida’s published works. Whilst this disjunction is certainly a valuable observation, it does not in itself explain how (or even whether) Nishida’s texts (or speech-acts) were dissenting, despite Ueda’s attempts to sustain the contrary. There is little reference in Ueda to the context of Nishida’s own work. 37 Skinner suggests that the spread of Lutheranism owed something to this approach, arguing that existing adherents of humanism and Okhamism were drawn to Luther because of the resonances between his critiques of the establishment and their own. The smaller the leap of faith, the easier it is to persuade someone to make it. Skinner (1978, vol. 2:20–113). 38 ‘Iwanami’ remains a publisher of choice for ‘high-brow’ intellectuals. Maruyama suggests that the publishing house of ‘Kōdansha’ was concerned with ‘low-brow’ culture. 39 This is discussed in detail in Chapter 4. For a general discussion of the extent of governmental oppression of intellectual dissent, see Shillony (1981/2001). 40 The so-called ‘“sekai shinchitsujo no genri” jiken’ will be discussed in Chapter 4. 41 Bourdieu uses the term politique to signify ideological as opposed to philosophical readings. See, for example, Bourdieu (1988:10), where he describes them as ‘deux espaces sociaux auxquels correspondent deux espaces mentaux’. 42 For Barshay ‘the state, as it were, stood in between politics and the investigation of political-social reality’ (1988:67) and controlled the transition from one to the other. 43 ‘Rationality’ here need imply merely internal consistency, rather than any culturally specific conception of the ‘rational’. 44 An excellent recent survey is provided in Goodwin (2001); Claeys and Sargent (1999); there is also a dedicated journal, Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies. 45 See, for example, Claeys, ‘Socialism and Utopia’, Frédéric Rouvillois, ‘Utopia and Totalitarianism’, Roland Schaer, ‘Utopia and Twenieth-century Avante-gardes’, all in Schaer, Claeys and Sargent (2000). 46 This is the opening dedication of Carr (1939/95). 47 It is interesting to note that Nishida’s philosophy of the ‘place of nothingness’ (mu no basho) is actually a direct translation of ‘utopia’, which More derived from the Greek adverb ‘ou’ (not) and the Latin noun ‘topos’ (place), giving the compound meaning ‘no-place’. The confusion with the Greek ‘eutopia’ (happy place) was probably anticipated by More.

2

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The politics of harmony and awakening: Confucianism and Buddhism as political thought in Japan 1 The term was first printed as kitetsugaku (studying to seek clarity) in Nishi Amane, hyakuichi shiron, 1874. 2 There remains controversy about the extent to which the term ‘Shintō’ was in common use before the Meiji period. Brian Bocking suggests that the term replaced the vaguer taikyō at the beginning of the twentieth century (Bocking 1997:viii). 3 Any such ‘protection’ was mainly symbolic, since the subsequent history of Japan reveals a story of syncretism and interpenetration between Shintō and Buddhism. 4 Nishi was by no means alone. There was general agreement about the rational, logical or scientific character of Western ‘philosophy’. In 1900 Kuwaki Genyoku, Professor at Tokyo Imperial University, similarly defined philosophy as ‘systematic and rational, and therefore scientific’ (Kuwaki Genyoku 1900:192–3). 5 Nishida’s first book, Zen no kenkyū, was actually serialized prior to this date, from 1906. 6 The texts in question were Inoue Tetsujirō (1897/1900), Inoue (1905/18) and Inoue (1902/45). In the first Inoue contrasts the work of Idealist Confucians such as Nakae Tōju and Kumazawa Banzan with the utilitarian ethics of ‘modern philosophy’. The next two volumes tackle the rationalists, Hayashi Ranzan and the Mito School, and then the historicists, Ogyū Sorai, Itō Jinsai and Yamaga Sokō. 7 The Western academe was first introduced to Nishida and Kyoto School through The Eastern Buddhist, the journal of the Eastern Buddhist Society of Ōtani University, founded by Suzuki Daisetsu. The religious emphasis was maintained by works such as Unno and Heisig (1990) or Unno (1989). In addition, most accounts of Nishida’s early years include references to his experiences with Zen. The interested reader might look at: Viglielmo (1971); Knauth (1965); Kōsaka Masaaki (1947, 1961); Shimomura Toratarō (1947); Takeuchi Yoshitomo (1966). A general overview is provided in: Shibata Masumi(1981). 8 Whilst acknowledging the Buddhist influence on the Kyoto School, Heisig effectively draws a distinction between Buddhism and philosophy when he claims to have ‘eliminated nearly all excursions into Buddhist thought in order to keep the book within the confines of traditional philosophical thought’ (2001:25). 9 Nishida’s undoubted affection for Hōjō can be seen in his essay of remembrance: Nishida Kitarō Hōjō sensei ni hajimete oshie o uketa koro in NKZ XII:257–60. It is also noteworthy that Nishida edited a volume of Hōjō’s work: Hōjō Tokiyoshi (1931). 10 Sawada suggests that Imakita was most concerned to prevent the degradation of the conduct of monks amidst the liberalization of state laws: national ‘edict number 133, which states that the clergy are free to eat meat and marry, only serves to abolish the state law that had prohibited such activities. In no way does the law have anything to do with sectarian regulations’ (1998:127). 11 Sōen famously refused an invitation from Tolstoy to sign a petition for peace during the Russo-Japanese War, arguing that to go against the will of his emperor was tantamount to heresy. He justified Japan’s war effort in terms of its ‘good intentions’: ‘she pursues no egotistical purpose, but seeks the subjugation of evils hostile to civilization, peace and enlightenment’ (Shaku Soyen 1974:201–02). In

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12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

general, the Russo-Japanese War was a high point in the conflation of Buddhism and nationalism—with abundant reports of frontline Japanese soldiers quietly chanting namu amida butsu as the bombs rained down around them—see Humphreys (1995: esp. chapter 1). From this time through to the 1940s, Zen handbooks started to make clear connections between Zen training and bushidō. See, for example, DT Suzuki, Zen Buddhism and its Influence on Japanese Culture (1938) now reprinted as Suzuki (1970/93). Suzuki’s nationalism is well documented, but for an interesting reconsideration of his position, see Kirita Kiyojide (1995). Suzuki’s own views were published as early as 1896, just after the Sino-Japanese War, in shin shukyō ron SDZ XXVIII. The lively correspondence between Suzuki and Nishida is collected in Mutai Risaku (1950). Watanabe Kaigyoku (1872–1933), lecturer and Jōdo priest, was a leading Buddhist intellectual in the Taishō period. He studied Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan at the University of Strasbourg (then in Germany) for ten years (1900–10), before returning to Japan, where he lamented the relatively retarded state of Buddhist studies in the nation he held to be the true home of Buddhism. He argued that Japan should become the world’s centre of comprehensive Buddhist studies (of all traditions, not only Japanese), and that this would consolidate its position at the centre of Asia (with the scholarly respect of the West). To some extent, his movement was successful. See Serikawa Hiromichi (1978) and especially Watanabe Kaigyoku (1933a,b) and Stone (1990). Nishida’s mother, Tosa, was a devotee of Jōdo Shin Buddhism. Nishitani Keiji recalls that Nishida used to joke that ‘if all other books were to disappear, one could get by with only the Rinzairoku and the Tannishō’ (Nishitani Keiji 1991:26). The Rinzairoku is accredited to Lin-chi, founder of the Chinese Rinzai School, and the Tannishō is accredited to Shinran, one of the founders of the Japanese Pure Land School. Nishida also published on Shin Buddhism, for example, Gutoku Shinran (1911) NKZ I. Kiyozawa Manshi is usually known by his given name. Nishida did have some contact with Manshi when the two co-operated in 1897 to produce an issue of Minjuto, a Shin Buddhist journal. Wargo (1973) makes an interesting (if brief) case for Nishida’s connection to Inoue (I am indebted to Robert Wargo for this reference). Staggs (1983:259) notes that the Seikyōsha were a mid-Meiji group that opposed indiscriminate Westernization, encouraging the ‘Japanese people to find elements of their own culture and “national essence” that were typically Japanese and worthy of being retained and treasured’. Reproduced in translation in SJT (1:48–51). Quotations are taken from this source. An official translation and commentary was published by the Japanese Supreme Court: Anesaki Masaharu (1952). The text contains direct quotations from The Analects as well as calls to ‘Sincerely reverence the three treasures…Buddha, the law, and the monastic orders’ (Article 2 — SJT 1:48). Shōtoku is usually regarded as a predominantly Confucian figure, but he also set the tone for Buddhist scholarship in Japan—composing eight volumes of commentaries on a number of Mahāyāna Sūtra, including the Lotus Sūtra, the Vilmalakītri Sūtra and the Srīmālādevī Sūtra, the so-called Sangyō-gisho

NOTES 153

(Commentaries on the Three Sūtras). Hence, one important legacy of Shōtoku, other than the institutionalization of a connection between Buddhism and politics, was the primacy accorded to Mahāyāna scriptures, particularly the Lotus Sūtra. 20 Peter Dale (1986) and others have already provided a fairly devastating critique of the idea that Japanese culture is essentially harmonious in nature. 21 This is really the question of whether harmony is to be considered as an end or a means. Confucius himself is clear that harmony is the goal, but he is equally clear that the achievement of this end is contingent upon appropriate means (i.e. Confucius is no Machiavelli) —the appropriate means are the Confucian rites: Of the things brought about by the rites, harmony is the most valuable. Of the ways of the Former Kings, this is the most beautiful, and is followed alike in matters great and small, yet this will not always work: to aim at harmony without regulating it by the rites simply because one knows only about harmony will not, in fact, work. (Confucius 1979, 1:12, 61—emphasis added)

In other words, the goal and the means should not be neatly separated—the means are shaped by our understanding of the goal. 22 This phrase is usually read as a reference to Confucian ‘designations’, but it is also the case that such sentiments are found in the Lotus Sūtra, which became the staple of Japanese Buddhism after Shōtoku: the upright man ‘must occupy his [proper] sphere of action and his [proper] sphere of intimacy’ (LS:223). 23 As early as the eighth century, Saichō (the founder of Tendai Buddhism) would locate the doctrine of honji-suijaku (original thing—trace element) in the Lotus Sūtra and use it to suggest that underlying reality was unknowable by ordinary men, and that they should embrace its various ‘trace elements’ as expedient means of understanding truth. Later, this insight will come to be associated with Shinran. 24 I note that the esoteric Buddhists, such as Kūkai, also emphasized the Mahāvairocana Sūtra. 25 In fact, this kind of syncretism can be traced back into the Nara period. In 783, for example, the great Japanese kami Hachiman was appointed the title of Bodhisattva. However, it was only with the honji-suijaku vocabulary of Tendai Buddhism, which was brought to Japan by Saichō in the ninth century, that such practices became commonly accepted. Habito locates a distinct ‘ethnocentric turn’ in the Japanese consciousness later, at around the thirteenth century, but still connects it to innovations in Tendai teachings. See Habito (1997). 26 There is some debate about whether the Lotus Sūtra proclaims the superiority of the Mahāyāna tradition, or whether that school is included in the ‘three inferior vehicles’ that are unified by the superior tradition of Ekayāna (one vehicle, ichijō). Most Japanese commentators accept that Mahāyāna and Ekayāna are identical. 27 See Kūkai (1969:127–32). 28 See Tamura Yoshirō (1984). A nice account of the hongaku shisō in Tendai Buddhism is offered in Habito (1995). 29 The defining texts of the Critical Buddhist tradition are probably: Hakayama Noriaki (1989, 1990).

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30 This phrase has been variously translated: eight directions constitute one universe, eight corners under one roof etc. The sense is that myriad is unity. 31 Nonetheless, critics such as Hakayama have been quick to point out the ease with which the phrases Dai tō-a kyōeiken and hakkō ichiu were exploited by the imperial regime. See Hakayama Noriaki (1990:293–4). 32 See shugo kokka ron in Risshō Daigaku Nichiren Kyōgaku Kenkyūjo (1988, vol. 1). 33 See risshō ankoku ron in Risshō Daigaku Nichiren Kyōgaku Kenkyūjo (1988, vol. 1–2). 34 The final straw in the eyes of the military government was the arrival of the Mongol emissary in 1268, demanding that Japan become a tributary of the Mongol Empire. Nichiren saw this as evidence of the further decline of the nation, suggesting that the Mongol forces were the forces of Buddha’s retribution on a heretical people. He made a final call for the bakufu to abandon their misled practices lest Japan suffer complete destruction. The bakufu lost patience with the errant monk and banished him. However, in 1274, after two further Mongol emissaries had arrived in Kamakura, a pardon was issued and Nichiren returned. The authorities would still not change their policies, so Nichiren set up place of worship on Mount Minobu were he and his followers conducted ‘correct’ Buddhist rites for the health of the nation. The Mongol invasions ultimately failed when a ‘divine wind’ (kamikaze) destroyed the fleet in the Sea of Japan. 35 Nishida Kitarō, bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan in NKZ XI:371–463. The phrase shūkyō tachiba (religious standpoint) was also used by Nishida, reflecting the vogue in the use of tachiba particularly following the Chūōkōron debates of 1941–42. 36 Nishida grapples directly with the doctrine of hongaku shisō in his 1944 work, yoteichōwa o tebiki toshite shūkyō tetsugaku e, NKZ XI:114–46. 37 Interestingly, as we will see, Nishida’s position on this question also echoes Ōnishi Hajime’s Kantian demolition of Inoue Tetsujirō’s nationalistic interpretation of the Imperial Rescript on Education. 38 Nishida’s colleague and successor, Tanabe Hajime, would later acknowledge his debt to Shinran for his notion that all experience was necessarily ‘mediated experience’, including the much vaunted pure experience of Nishida. 39 The Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta explains the responsibilities of the perfect king. He is said to rule ‘without stick or sword, [but] by the law’ (CS:396). Ruling by the law meant to act spontaneously (without artifice) according to the advice of sages or the king’s own intuitive understanding of truth. At some point in history, the king started to rule ‘the people according to his own ideas’ (CS:398) which caused the collapse of society and the impoverishment of the people. 40 In Nishida’s later works this kind of action is referred to as kōiteki chokkan, ‘action intuition’. In bashoteki ronri to shyōteki sekaikan (1945) NKZ XI, states that ‘there is a “non-discriminating wisdom” in the sense of a dimension of knowing that transcends and yet incorporates the judgments of abstract consciousness and determines their validity in respect of the ultimate form of judgment—[this is] what I call active intuition’ (LW:102). 41 These are simply the Five Precepts. 42 Sōen also notes that by seeking the destruction of this evil, Japan ‘pursues no egotisitical purpose’ (Shaku Soyen 1974:201–02).

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43 The so-called ‘Tokugawa Constitution’ —The Law Governing Military Households, the Imperial Court, and Buddhism—codified the static Tokugawa social order. It was enacted in 1615. 44 In Tokugawa Japan a rigid social hierarchy was imposed—the so-called shi-nō-kōshō, or stratification of warrior-farmer-artisan-merchant. 45 Scholars Hakayama Noriaki (1995) and Matsumoto Shirō (2000) also argue that Dōgen’s later work has been misinterpreted by scholars, and that he actually repudiates the hongaku shisō elements of earlier work by embracing a form of karmic dependent co-origination in the lesser known twelve fascicle version of his classic Shōbōgenzō. A nice survey of the literature of the Critical Buddhists can be found in Hubbard and Swanson (1997). I note that Nishida and the Kyoto School are explicitly implicated in the criticism of the Critical Buddhists—see, for example, Hakayama Noriaki (1990: esp. chapter 1 and pp. 47–92). 46 Nice accounts of this ‘doubt’ can be found in Abe (1992) and Yamauchi Shun’yu (1986). 47 This idea is found right at the start of Dōgen’s masterpiece, Shōbōgenzō, in the fascicle titled, Genjōkōan. See the modern translation in Cleary (1991:32–5). 48 A nice account of Bankei’s ideas is Waddell (1984). 49 Like Bankei, Nishida also suggests that genuine ‘intellectual intuition’ is an ‘extremely ordinary phenomenon’ (ZK: chapter 4, esp. p. 54). 50 Ives (1995:30) posits the dilemma neatly in his discussion of the complicity of some Zen rōshi (masters) during the Pacific War: If one wants to maintain the central claim that all Zen figures with the title of rōshi in an orthodox lineage are awakened, one appears compelled to sacrifice the other central claim that awakening is necessarily accompanied by wisdom and compassion… Conversely, if one wants to maintain the central claim that awakening does indeed come equipped with wisdom and compassion, one appears compelled to conclude that those imperialistic Zen rōshi were not awakened and hence also compelled to sacrifice the claim that all rōshi are awakened. 51 This argument is found in Ogyū Sorai, Seidan, in Yoshikawa Kojiro and Murayama Masao (1973); an interesting discussion of this text is McEwan (1962). 52 Sorai states that the ‘Way was constructed by the Ancient Kings. It is not natural’. Ogyū Sorai, Bendō, translated by Najita (1998:6). 53 Sorai in Najita (1998:12). 54 Nishitani remarked that such attempts would merely create ‘a frog in a well’ (CK: 174). He calls for an embrace of the ‘spirit of the present’. 55 See, for example, the discussions on the nature of history in the Overcoming Modernity debates (OM:217–32, 239–43, 264–71). 56 Sorai in Najita (1998:18). 57 In a series of famous essays, Maruyama Masao argues that Sorai advocated authoritarianism and the subordination of individualism (1952, also 1974). Najita Tetsuo (1998) attempts a systematic refutation of Maruyama’s perspective, and McMullen (2001) attempts a refutation of Najita in return. 58 Sorai in Najita (1998:10).

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59 60 61 62 63

64

65

66 67 68

69 70

Sorai in Najita (1998:10). A nice treatment of Aizawa and the Mito School is Wakabayashi (1986). A partial translation appears in SJT 2. Aizawa’s elaboration of kokutai is at the heart of Shinron. To reflect its resurging popularity, the text was reproduced during the war years in Takusa Yoshijirō (1941). Interestingly, Aizawa did not intend his kokutai to be a simple justification for authoritarian rule by the imperial family (although activists like Yoshida Shoin (1830–59) would certainly exploit it in this spirit). Indeed, Aizawa did not call for the Meiji ishin at all. Rather, Aizawa was a conservative who meant his work to be a defence of the Shōgimate against growing pressure for it to hand back power to the emperor, having clearly failed in its mission to protect Japan from foreign barbarians. He suggested that the emperor’s divine benevolence permeated the rule of the Shōgun, and that the Shōgun was the appropriate ruler of Japan in the current historical climate (thus Aizawa betrays his debt to Sorai’s historicism). The level of analysis in Shōtoku’s constitution is ambiguous—it is unclear about whether it was meant to apply strictly within the new Yamato state or whether its terms should extend without, to include all of the competing clans in the territory of Japan. Was this an intra- or inter-societal constitution? Historically, it seems likely that Shōtoku’s blend of cultural relativism and imperialism was designed to both subordinate the local clans to the Japanese imperial line within Japan and establish the basis for a more equal relationship between this line and China (the traditional home of the Mandate of Heaven) without. In other words, his intention was probably to suggest a kind of international relativism and a domestic imperialism— but the tensions and contradictions in this worldview are obvious. Interestingly, this movement was foreshadowed as early as the seventeenth century, when Yamaga Sokō (1622–85), the Confucian scholar and renowned father of the concept of bushidō (the Way of the Warrior), published an influential book called Chūchō jijitsu (The True Centre Kingdom). In it he explicitly identified the Japanese Emperor with the Confucian Heaven and stated that this confluence made Japan (not China) the true zenith of culture and justice in the world. Yamaga was a big influence on the Restoration thinkers, such as Yoshida Shōin, and his complete works were compiled and reissued during the height of the Pacific War (Yamaga Sokō 1939–42). See, for example, Hardacre (1989). The proper noun Shina was synonymous with the English term China, and thus carried with it a sense of colonial superiority Enoki describes how Chūkoku was a Confucian term of respect, but suggests that Shina communicated a more equal relationship between the two nations. Enoki goes as far as to call for the replacement of Chūkoku (which became the norm again after 1945) with Shina today, since that would be consistent with the English use of ‘China’. Tanaka suggests that Enoki’s reasoning is flawed, because historically Shina was a term of deprecation borrowed by Japan from the Western countries to symbolize its own identity as a ‘superior’ and ‘modern’ state. The actual subordination of China quickly followed in the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–95. The implication in this context is that some nations (such as China and Korea) are ‘designated’ to assist Japan in establishing a world order.

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71 Emphasis in the original. The sekaiteki sekai is a world comprised of units that have realized their own place in the international system, and thus have constructed (and behave in accordance with) an understanding of the world appropriate to their station. 72 Texts from this period include: Inoue Tetsujirō (1925, 1934/41). Inoue was also made head of the Daitō Bunka Gakuin (Great Eastern Cultural Academy) in 1925. 73 See ZK:176–83. Nishida uses the same term as Inoue, katsudōsetsu, to refer to this idea. 74 Ōnishi was briefly Nishida’s predecessor at Kyoto Imperial University, having been invited there to establish the philosophy department only a year before his death. His connections with the Kyoto School are also evidenced by the fact that his chief disciple from Waseda University, Hatano Seiichi (1877–1950), would later become a close associate of both Nishida himself and his student Miki Kiyoshi. In addition, Kōsaka Masaaki, another leading member of the Kyoto School, would later accord Ōnishi great praise, even suggesting that he was a greater thinker than Inoue Tetsujirō, and lamenting his untimely death. See Kōsaka Masaaki (1958: esp. p. 237). 75 Ōnishi’s criticisms of Inoue Enryō will later be echoed as criticisms of Nishida and the Kyoto School—in particular, Ōnishi would argue that Inoue’s radical unity of everything was simply a logical impossibility, and that his obscure language and appeals to the difficulty of his concepts or to transcendental experience as proof of his arguments were counter to the nature of philosophy. For Ōnishi, the purpose of philosophy was to clarify questions, not to mystify the solutions. 76 In some ways, this was a terminologically modern rehearsal of the argument enjoined by Nichiren and his contemporaries concerning man’s inability to understand the absolute and his life in conventional moral forms. 77 Nishida’s affection for Fukuzawa is documented in his diaries: on the occasion of his death (7 February 1901), Nishida wrote: ‘Fukuzawa sensei has died. He guarded his independence to the last. Surely, that is how a great man must be.’ There is a wealth of literature on the social and political thought of Fukuzawa. Perhaps the most established introduction is Maruyama Masao (1951–52). Other works of interest might be Ishikawa Mikiaki (1932), and in English: Blacker (1964). 78 Dewey’s Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics was translated in 1900, William James’ Principles of Psychology appeared in 1902, followed by Pragmatism in 1910. James would be very influential on Nishida’s philosophical development. Indeed, a central term in Nishida’s thought, junsui keiken (pure experience), was borrowed explicitly from the psychological term coined by James. There are also clear Buddhist resonances to Nishida’s use of this term.

3 The early Nishida and the place of Japanese political philosophy 1 Partly cited in Kant (1795:116). 2 In a similar vein, Ueda Shizuteru (1995b:29) suggests that Nishida attempted to open up a’single boundless world embracing both East and West, and informed by a principle of not simply either East or West, but transcending both East and West alike’.

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3 Tosaka Jun (1900–45) and Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) were particularly vocal critics, from the Marxist perspective. We have already seen how Tanabe Hajime questioned whether Nishida’s core concept of ‘pure experience’ was genuinely philosophical rather than religious—by extension, he was similarly doubtful that a political or social philosophy could be built upon this unphilosophical ground. 4 See, for example, Huh Woo-Sung (1990). 5 It is not uncommon for philosophers to develop political ideas under apparently apolitical headings—Kant serves as Nishida’s model for this. Even in his later works, Nishida would retain this ‘philosophical approach’. For example, the essay conventionally translated as Kokutai (1944) by Lavelle (1994) or Kokatairon (1944) by Dilworth et al. (1998) is actually simply titled: Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi (Supplement to the fourth collection of philosophical essays) (NKZ XII:397–434). 6 For example, Dilworth (1969) and others emphasize the importance of Zen no kenkyū as the source of Nishida’s philosophical system—although there is no sense in which it is considered a political text. 7 For example, in a public lecture in Nagano, 25 September 1937, Rekishiteki shintai, Nishida explains exactly this point, recommending that the audience read his first book to best understand his thought. 8 Viglielmo suggests that Nishida’s thought was already formed as early as 1906, when the first sections of Zen no kenkyū were published. Again, there is no sense in which Viglielmo sees Zen no kenkyū as a political text. 9 Nishida’s diaries are published in the annex (bekkan) to NKZ (XVIII–XIX) along with other unpublished works and letters. An interesting account of them is provided by Knauth (1965). He relates, for example, how Nishida fails to take note of the start of the First World War or the Great Earthquake of 1923. 10 Letter #1120, 29 June 1937, to Kōsaka Masaaki. A long essay bearing the title ‘The Question of the Reason of the State’ (Kokka riyū no mondai) appeared in 1941 (NKZ X). 11 Shibata Masumi (1981:121) provides a fascinating narrative concerning Nishida’s involvement in Zen Buddhist training ‘before he wrote his first work, A Study of the Good…’. 12 A great deal of the early translation work and commentary was done within the covers of The Eastern Buddhist, a journal established by DT Suzuki with the express purpose of communicating Japanese religious sentiment to the Western world. Indeed, The Eastern Buddhist has been called the unofficial vehicle of the Kyoto School. 13 Subsequently, the English-language public received only cursory and dismissive treatments of the School in historical or political contexts—Parkes (1997), for example, takes particular issue with Najita and Harootunian’s presentation of the school in their influential ‘Japanese Revolt against the West’ (1988). An interesting survey of the changing currents of attitude towards Nishida is provided by Yusa Michiko (1995a). 14 In this context, it is suprising to note the relative lack of book-length biographies in English—Yusa (2002) was the first. In Japanese we have Kōsaka Masaaki (1947); Uesugi Tomoyuki (1988) and more recently Ueda Shizuteru (1995c) and Yusa Michiko(1998). 15 Nishida is typically overlooked in accounts of the so-called ‘Meiji Generation’, such as Pyle (1969).

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16 An excellent account of this period of Nishida’s life is provided by one of Nishida’s eminent students, Kōsaka Masaaki (1947). An English-language account (which draws heavily on Kōsaka) is Viglielmo (1971). Both sources detail the list of ‘distinguished men of modern Japan’ who shared classes with Nishida in the Dai-shi kōtō chūgakkō (Fourth Higher Middle School) in Ishikawa. See also Ueyama Shunpei (1963). The Iwanami researchers for Nishida Kitarō Zenshū also collected together some correspondence from this time, and some essays of recollection written by Nishida later. 17 Nishida’s interest in Fukuzawa’s notion of dokuritsushin (the spirit of selfindependence) was symptomatic of his Meiji liberalism, and would later become quite consistent with his own ideas of self-actualization (jitsugen), which he would identify with the good (zen) in Zen no kenkyū. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 2, Nishida’s lasting respect for Fukuzawa is reflected in his diary on the occasion of Fukuzawa’s death. 18 Nishida recalls that they held up a sign which read: ‘We Stand Free at the Top of Heaven’ ( ) (NKZ XII:248). The Confucian tone to this liberal announcement reveals Nishida’s philosophical context—his position in the traditional debates of Confucianism about heteronomous and autonomous political ethics. 19 Nishida’s 1942 essay, ‘Yamamoto Chōsui-kun no omoide’, which he wrote after hearing of the death of his longstanding friend, is reproduced in NKZ XII:245–51. Together with his correspondence with Yamamoto, this essay contain much of the early biographical information. This passage is also cited in Viglielmo (1971:518– 19). 20 The problems of being a ‘special student’ did not end with graduation—his search for work was long and hard, and he was continuously passed over in favour of people with ‘normal’ degrees. Each of Nishida’s biographers suggests that this only fuelled his motivation to become a great philosopher. However, I might suggest that it also served to fan his suspicion of institutions and to promote a form of antiestablishmentarianism. Nishida was effectively an exiled intellectual. 21 Nishida’s diary and correspondence reflect the fact that the eradication of clan rule (Satchō) and military style governance remained one of the few issues of practical politics which consistently attracted his interest. According to Viglielmo (1971:525) such views were even evident after Nishida’s retirement from Kyōdai in 1928. 22 A notable exception is Dilworth (1969), who concentrates on section four. 23 For Kant as well ‘a theory of politics…is inevitably a part of a metaphysics of morality. This is so because politics deals with the question of what we ought to do in our social and political context, or in other words, it is concerned with establishing criteria by which we can settle public conflicts of interests’. Morality itself goes beyond public politics to govern internal decisions of individuals (Reiss 1970/96:20). 24 Nishida happily acknowledged his debt to James (1904), see ZK:25 and James (1890, vol. 1, chapter 9, ‘The Stream of Thought’), see ZK:22, 55, 80; and to Henri Bergson’s (1896) ideas of pure duration and direct experience, see, for example, the comparison between pure experience (junsui keiken) and direct experience (chokusetsu keiken), ZK:13. 25 This absolute abstraction of the ego is one of the crucial points of divergence between Nishida’s pure experience and Bergson’s direct experience.

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26 Takuan Sōhō famously expresses this problem: ‘even by separating oneself from things as they exist, one is still left with non-existence, non-ens, and this in itself becomes a view. Even if you then negate nothingness (mu), then non-nothingness becomes your view’. Sūnyatā is the absolute negation that lies outside this apparently infinite regression. Takuan Sōhō, Anjin Hōmon, in Ichikawa Hakugen (1978:165). 27 It was this perspective that led critics of Nishida’s early work to claim that it was ahistorical (or lacked a sense of the historical). In some respects, Nishida is held to parallel Dōgen, when the latter rejected the concept of mappō because it implied that absolute truth was historically relative. 28 See the first and second propositions of Kant (1784a:42). 29 Nishida uses the will to kill as an example. 30 See Nishida Kitarō, Gutoku shinran in NKZ I: esp. pp. 407–8, translated in Hirota (1995:242–3). 31 Nishida’s distance from Shinran on this front is illustrated by his choice of term to describe the mind when it acts morally. For Shinran the term is shinjin (believing mind), whilst Nishida employs anjin (peaceful mind), mujin (no mind), or more usually shinjin (true mind) as used by Rennyo and Takuan. 32 It is interesting to note here that Nishida appears to construct Confucianism as a straw-man. He disregards the more liberalist/pluralist traditions of Confucianism and treats it as a strictly heteronomous system, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that his own moral philosophy, as we have already suggested, actually resonates quite clearly with the pluralism of Buddhist-influenced Confucianism. Nishida’s demonisation of heteronomous Confucianism is reflected later in his opposition to Kokutai no hongi. 33 Interestingly, Nishida’s conception of the clash of nations is already evident at this early stage. Perhaps reflecting the social discourse of the Meiji period, Nishida is keen to point out that even the nature of power is determined by the cultural makeup of nations, and not according to some universal principle. Nishida seems to be alluding to the contemporaneous discourse which suggested that Japan may be materially less powerful than the West but that it was spiritually stronger —‘Whether we think Jesus or Napoleon is stronger is determined by our ideals. If it is the case that we’re calling people who have worldly power “powerful” (jūryoku), then the most powerful are those people possessing physical power (wanryoku)’ (ZK:160). It is interesting that Nishida uses two Western figures as examples. 34 In keeping with the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition and the ‘relativist’ trend of Confucianism, Nishida is reluctant to abandon the absolute when he embraces the particular, and vice versa. 35 Although even Rousseau concedes that whilst the state can force people to behave correctly, it suits human dignity better if people freely chose to behave well: ‘Truly human dignity emerges in the conscious choice of the general will over the private.’ Allan Bloom, ‘Jean-Jacque Rousseau’, in Strauss and Cropsey (1987: 570). 36 We might presume that a society governed by a genuinely self-actualized ruler would manifest rules which were all consistent with genuine morality—assuming that genuine morality is static. There are resonances here of Hegel, who argues that

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37

38

39

40

41

42

43 44

a state with rational laws permits individuals to obey their own reason and thus to realize themselves perfectly. Of course, it is not unusual for political thinkers to emphasize the importance of education—Locke, Rousseau and JS Mill serve as exemplars in the European tradition. However, whilst Mill emphasized the importance of correct educational content, even going so far as to suggest that those with the best education should be awarded more than one vote in elections, Nishida emphasized correct educational form; education should prepare people to engage in ‘willed-action’, not simply socially accepted action. It is important to note that Kant’s ‘enlightenment’ was rather different from that of Nishida. Nonetheless, Nishida and Kant agree that there is an important distinction between moral and political duties: true morality exists only in freely willed action (i.e. it cannot be enforced); political duties, on the other hand, are only imperfect duties (i.e. they are duties to others and not to oneself) and thus they can be enforced. For both Nishida and Kant, obeying the law is not necessarily moral. For Kant, however, breaking the law is always wrong (i.e. there are no rights of rebellion). Nishida, as we will see, is not so clear about the immorality of breaking state-laws. In keeping with the Mahāyāna tradition, Nishida seems to suggest that there is a way to withdraw from a society which coerces you to behave badly (in terms of his absolute morality) without actually rebelling in a violent or destabilizing way Nishida’s youthful withdrawal from the Shikō is, perhaps, early evidence of this. Such withdrawals do not necessarily discount the possibility of violent uprisings, as we saw in Chapter 2. A high profile Meiji Zen abbot, Imakita Kōsen, was very vocal about the fact that the Zen institutions should not get directly involved with politics unless political rules began to be applied to the sangha. Clearly such statements were, in themselves, of political importance. For a nice treatment of Imakita, see Suzuki Daisetsu (1992). Some of his works have been collected by Morinaga Sōkō (1987). See Rousseau (1782: esp. pp. 75–86). In his last work, bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan (1945), Nishida refers to this distinction as one between morality and religion (LW:122). Rennyo (1415–99) is known as the restorer of Pure Land Buddhism—he advocated obedience to the Confucian principles of secular governance as a way to morality but the maintenance of faith in Amida Buddha as the only way to genuine goodness. A nice study of Rennyo is Rogers and Rogers (1991). At best, the Mahāyāna tradition suggests that heteronomous systems can provide ‘training rules’ that condition people’s minds, helping them to form good intentions. As with previous quotations, there is some suggestion of an underlying political statement here. Not only does Nishida reveal his affinity for Zen sages and the tradition in which they exist, but he also seems to suggest that technical knowledge of the world (which was heavily associated with the West during the Meiji period) does not necessarily constitute superiority over those who lack such knowledge (i.e. Japan). Nishida first uses the term kateiteki shisō (hypothetical thought) to describe rational thought on ZK:66. Later in Zen no kenkyū, Nishida broadens this point: ‘knowledge, morality, and aesthetic taste all have social significance. Even the most universal learning does not escape social convention…this is why each nation has its own academic

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tradition now’ (ZK:197). Only pure experience, which is prior to ‘academic traditions’ can escape social convention—Tanabe Hajime will later use this argument to suggest that pure experience is really a religious rather than a philosophical category Nishida develops the idea of distinct intellectual traditions in a number of later essays, including Nihon bunka no mondai, and even in his wartime writings, where he writes ‘even the moral theory of the age of the Enlightenment was based in a particular time and race of people (particularly the French people)’ Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi (1944) NKZ XII:408. 45 The term ‘with themselves’ has the following meaning: Because our social life is in harmony with our individuality, the duties of ethical life do not limit our freedom but actualize it. When we become conscious of this, we come to be ‘with ourselves’ in our ethical duties. Such duties…do not restrict us, but liberate us. (Hegel 1821:xiii) 46 We have already seen similar sentiments in the work of Henri Bergson, where rationality and the ‘progress’ wrought from it constitutes a ‘great weight under which mankind lies groaning’ (Bergson 1932:338). 47 Nishida contends that the differences in pleasure relate to quality as well as quantity (ZK:169). 48 To some extent this reading of Plato and Aristotle is anachronistic—whilst they spoke of volitions and desires, the idea of the ‘will’ is not explicitly discussed. This anachronism is Nishida’s. Its use in the European discourse of 1930s fascism, where it drew on Nietzsche and Heidegger, was rather different, primarily because of the differing conception of self. However, in the context of 1930s Europe (or of the scholarship of European history today) Nishida’s language seems very dangerous. 49 Of course, harmony (wa) in Japanese intellectual tradition is very important. The Book of the Mean by Tzu-ssu, was one of the most influential of the Confucian classics in Japan, and Prince Shōtoku famously based his seventh century Seventeen Article Constitution on the principles of wa. However, Plato and Aristotle were also advocates of the belief that harmony/mean was good—Aristotle’s ethics, for example, suggest that courage is a virtue because it is the mean of violence and timidity. 50 See Plato (378 BC). This viewpoint is carried to its extreme in Hegel, who suggests that the perfectly rational society should require no laws. The reason is the synchronization of our individual morality (moralität) with the social duties of ethical life (sittlichkeit), both of which are ideally expressions of rationality. In other words, once the institutions of the state and individuals become perfectly rational, laws and individual desires will become identical: we become ‘with ourselves’ in social institutions. State intervention, at this point, does not restrict us, it liberates us. 51 Whilst there are some clear dangers involved with the standpoint that morality is not the subject of reason, in so far as reason is usually held to be an objective and impersonal standard, it should not be forgotten here that Nishida did not simply tie morality to the whims of individual egos—his conception of true intuition is also an

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objective and impersonal standard (i.e. it is prior to objectivity, subjectivity and personality). 52 This is a rather idealistic defence against the standard criticism of Zen ethics—that it is easily exploited by people seeking to escape the confines of social morality. 53 For Kant this imperative is the ‘Universal Principle of Right’, effectively the political formulation of his categorical imperative: every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual’s will to coexists with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right. See Kant (1797:133). 54 There is a parallel here with Kant’s notion of the perfect constitutional order: A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws which ensure that the freedom of each can co-exist with the freedom of all the others (not one designed to provide the greatest possible happiness, as this will in any case follow automatically), is at all events a necessary idea which must be made the basis not only of the first outline of a political constitution but of all laws as well. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, in Reiss 1970/96:191) 55 Again, there are resonances between this view and Nishida’s opposition to the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890. 56 Nishida notes that standard categories of social good (wealth, honour, health, skill, knowledge etc.) are only goods to the extent that they accord with the demands of individual (and collective) personalities. Otherwise they become evils. In other words, there is nothing intrinsically good in a socially constructed category. 57 ZK:188—‘personality is simply not found [in individual] reason or desire, and certainly not in unconscious impulses…it is an infinite unifying power acting directly and spontaneously from within each individual’. Nishida relates this to a passage from the Zen text Mumonkan (case 19) (Sekida Katsuki 1977/95:73–5). 58 Later, even in his wartime work, Nishida maintains the emphasis on selfactualization even within the image on the organic state: ‘Just as in the case of an organism [yūkitai], the unity of the whole requires that each part become truly itself [kakuji ga kakuji jishin to naru], and each part becoming truly itself requires the unity of the whole’ (Sekai shinchitsujo no genri (1943) NKZ XII:430). 59 The converse of this is that Nishida views the individual as essentially social— although he cites Aristotle (people are social animals, shakaiteki dōbutsu, ZK:197) approvingly, his perspective is closer to the fundamental concept of ningen in the work of Watsuji Tetsurō. 60 Kant made similar observations: ‘The human beings who make up a nation can, as natives of the country, be represented as analogous to descendents from a common ancestry (congeniti) even if this is not in fact the case’ (Kant 1797:164). 61 It is possible that Nishida is borrowing the idea of social consciousness from Durkheim here. The idea of increasing levels of sociocultural unity is not unique to Nishida, recently Samuel Huntington has also been keen to emphasize the functional equivalence of various scales of cultural unity—‘villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels…

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62

63 64 65

People have different levels of identity, (Huntington 1993:2–3). For a comparison of Huntington and Nishida see Jones (2002c). Tanabe Hajime and Rousseau both shared Nishida’s sense of the state as ‘derivative’. For Tanabe, the state was the location of mediation between the absolute and the individual, expressed in the logic of the specific (see Chapter 5). For Rousseau, the state was the intermediary between the individual citizen and the general will (which was genuinely sovereign) —see The Social Contract, I:viii and III:i. Nishida compares this destination to the development of what Hegel called a ‘world spirit’ (sekaiteki seishin). Interestingly, Nishida himself would consistently omit the prefix dai- (Greater) from this phrase. Elsewhere, Kant is just as explicit: If we now ask what means there are of maintaining and indeed accelerating this constant progress toward a better state, we soon realise that the success of this immeasurably long undertaking will depend not so very much upon what we do (e.g. the education that we impart to younger generations) and upon what methods we use to further it; it will rather depend upon what human nature may do in and through us, to compel us to follow a course which we would not readily adopt by choice. (Kant 1792:90)

66 For Kant (1784a:45): ‘Man wishes concord, but nature, knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord.’ For Buddha, the experience of suffering is the root cause of (the need for) enlightenment. 67 In Heidegger’s terms, science and rationality progressively de-experience our experience of authentic existence. 68 In Nishida’s case, this condition has been almost universally neglected—as noted in Chapter 2. The case of Kant has been revisited in the last few years. See, for example Cavallar (2001). The standard reading of Kant in the literature of International Relations has been by Martin Wight, who suggested that Kant was the archetype of the ‘Revolutionist’ tradition of international relations. See the lectures collected as Wight (1991). Subsequendy, Michael Doyle employed Kant as the philosophical padding for his theory of the democratic peace—which was a thinly veiled attempt to justify American democratic evangelism in the ‘New Cold War’ of the 1980s. See Doyle (1983). 69 ‘Right’ here is Recht, which corresponds with Nishida’s zen. It is interesting to note that Kant directs our enthusiasm towards an ideal of selflessness, in a way that might have been familiar to Dōgen and certainly to Nishida. 70 Terms from Choay (2000:348). 71 Kant notes that such consultation can take place in secret in order to save political rulers from humiliation. 72 Cavallar (2001) and others have criticized Michael Doyle for assuming that Kant’s republic can be verified empirically, and thus for dangerously conflating modern Western democracies with the Kantian republic. In fact, Kant is explicitly antiinstitutional in his formulation of the ideal republic, suggesting that democracies

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are not necessarily the best forms of government and that the ‘spirit of republicanism’ could just as easily (if not more easily) be sustained in authoritarian states. See, for example, the ‘First Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace: The Civil Constitution of Every State shall be Republican’ (Kant 1795:99–102). For Kant, we are simply unable to understand the best institutional arrangements for achieving an ideal that is as yet beyond our comprehension. There are some clear resonances here with the anti-institutionalism of Buddha, for whom the ‘spirit’ of the ruler is more important than any institutional arrangements, and with the vagueness of Nishida concerning institutional prescriptions. 73 Carr (1939/95). This quotation is from the opening dedication.

4 (Re)locating the later Nishida: ideology and philosophy in wartime Japan 1 Nishida’s diaries are rather meagre in their attention to detail. Some entries are merely lists of visitors, authors or books. Others simply state the weather or the amount of time Nishida sat in zazen that day. We should certainly be cautious about inferring too much from such entries. 2 See letter #239, 26 December 1918, to Yamamoto Chōsui, NKZ XVIII:206–7. 3 Indeed, Nishida was at least partly responsible for the journeys to Germany of a number of his students and colleagues: Nishitani Keiji (1936–38), Tanabe Hajime (1922–24), Miki Kiyoshi (1922–25) and Kuki Shūzō (1921–24 and 1927–29). Watsuji Tetsurō also spent some time in Europe, including a brief spell at the University of Berlin (1927–28). 4 Republished and enlarged to 12 volumes, Frazer (1922). 5 A comprehensive study of this law in English is Mitchell (1973). 6 For example, Shillony (1986:771) places Kyōdai fourth, behind the Tokyo based institutions of Tōdai, Keiō and Waseda, when it came to the number of students arrested for violating the Peace Preservation Law between 1937 and 1942. I note that dissent in Tokyo peaked in the late 1930s and in Kyoto in the 1940s. 7 Nishida taught at his alma mater, the Fourth Higher School (Shikō) in Yamaguchi, from 1897–1909 (becoming a professor in 1899). The standard biography of Kawakami in English is Bernstein (1976/90). 8 Kawakami’s most famous (and original) contribution to Japanese Marxism was probably Bimbō monogatari (1916): this ‘Tale of Poverty’ was serialized in the Osaka Asahi Newspaper. 9 Indeed, Kawakami was arrested in 1933. He remained in jail until 1937. Another of Nishida’s students, Miki Kiyoshi, was also arrested (in March 1945) on allegations of communist sympathies. He died in prison (nearly two months after the end of the war). 10 A nice account of the oppression of intellectuals in Japan during this period is offered by Shillony (1981/2001: esp. chapters 4–5). Shillony suggests that thought control in Japan was not as strict as it was in wartime Germany—or, at least, that thought crimes were not punished so severely in Japan. 11 A subsection of the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu, or tokkō) which was established in 1911, following the execution of Kōtoku Shūsui, with the

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12

13

14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23

24

charge to capture thought criminals (shisō hanzaisha). A nice account is given in Tipton (1990). The Kokumin seishin bunka kenkyūjo was established by the Ministry of Education on 23 August 1932, with the express purpose of combating Marxism through research into the ‘genuine nature’ of the kokutai, Japanese spiritual culture (seishin bunka), history, law, economics, traditional arts and philosophy. Takikawa suggested that the cause of a crime should be taken into account when deciding the sentence for a criminal, and that it was unfair to punish only women in adultery cases. Abe Yoshishige (1957:348) records Iwanami Shigeo’s disappointment about Nishida’s luke-warm response to this incident. Letter #758, 8 November, to Yamamoto, translated in Yusa Michiko (1995b:112). See Ienaga Saburō (1964), for details of Minobe’s thought. Also, Miller (1965). Bix suggests that Hirohito allowed Minobe to be purged from public life because he felt as though his ideas undermined his position of absolute power in Japan (2000:294), whereas Large quotes Hirohito as saying ‘I think that Minobe is not at all disloyal… To bury such a scholar would be lamentable’ (Large 1992:61). Letter #911, 21 March 1935, to Hori Koretaka. Seiyūkai president, Suzuki Kisaburō, played an important role in the persecution of Minobe, and it was he who eventually made the call to ‘clarify the national polity’. The Seiyūkai were not anti-Minobe only because his interpretation of the constitution was (allegedly) disrespectful of the emperor, but also because Minobe had been severely critical of party politics, especially since the Manchuria Incident and his appointment to the Peers in 1932. Minobe suggested that, especially in times of crisis, the petty squabbles of party cabinets should be eliminated by the establishment of ‘national unity’ cabinets, comprising politicians from all sides, businessmen, military leaders etc. To some extent, the allegiance of the Seiyūkai with various right-wing leagues was as much a result of their desire to oust the Okada government as it was a result of genuine ideological leanings. An extended account of the Minobe incident is Miyazawa Toshiyoshi (1970). Shimizu, a law professor from Tokyo Imperial University, was tutor in constitutional law to Emperor Hirohito from 1915. Letter #971, 10 November 1935, to Yamamoto. Letter #978, 1 December 1935, to Watsuji. Letter #985. Such pronouncements were also common in Nishida’s public works, even during the war years. In Sekai shinchitsujo no genri (1943), for example, Nishida would refer to the ‘past’ (to which we must not return) as the abstract world of the eighteenth century or the ethnic-nationalist (minzokushugi) world of the nineteenth. In such texts, as in his correspondence, Nishida suggests that ‘today’s nationalism must be grounded in such a principle of making of world-ofworlds [lit. world-of-worlds-formationism (sekaiteki sekaikeiseishugi)’] (NKZ XII: 430). The precise date of letter #985 is unclear. It is dated in 1935 but the month and day are obscured. There is a reference to the resolution of the ‘Ethiopia problem’, which suggests a date at the very end of 1935 or beginning of 1936, since the Italians finally took the Ethiopian capital in May 1936. Letter #978, 1 December 1935, to Watsuji.

NOTES 167

25 It is also interesting to reflect that Imakita Kōsen, abbot of the Engaku-ji before Nishida started his training there, extended his political influence only as far as to insist on the independence of the sangha. 26 An excellent account of the incident is Shillony (1973). 27 Letters #1005, 27 February 1936, to Hori Koretaka; #1009, 2 March 1936, to Hori. 28 Nishida taught German and Philosophy at the Peers’ School, or Gakushuin, in Tokyo in 1909 before taking up his position at the University of Kyoto. A group of three Gakushuin students, including Konoe, Kido and Harada Kumao would later transfer from Tokyo Imperial University to the Law Faculty of Kyoto Imperial University, where they would again come into contact with Nishida. 29 Nishida discussed Kido fairly regularly in his correspondence during late 1937 and 1938. In two letters, one to Harada and the other to Yamamoto written within two days of each other, Nishida expresses his relief and happiness that Kido had become Minister of Education. He tells Harada that Kido is a more reasonable man than the last Minister, and he tells Yamamoto that he is both intelligent and independent minded, ‘twice as good’ as the last man. Nishida expresses his desire to visit Kido and to ‘talk frankly’ about his own views of the Ministry and particularly of the people currently working there. Letters #1153, 22 October 1937, to Harada, NKZ XVIII:622–3; #1157, 24 October 1937, to Yamamoto, NKZ XVIII:624. Nishida’s faith that Kido could effect some changes is reflected in his willingness to get involved with the Ministry during the first few months of 1938, however, he is gradually disenchanted by the inability of Kido to make substantive changes in a Ministry with such powerful ‘undercurrents’ (Nishida uses the English term). Subsequently, he suspects that neither he nor Tanabe nor Watsuji can make a difference. Letter #1302, 19 November 1938, to Watsuji, NKZ XIX:54–5. 30 The idea that every culture expresses a unique aspect of the absolute can be traced back to Zen no kenkyū and the ongoing debates within Buddhism and Confucianism (see Chapter 2). Nishida is, perhaps, most explicit in Rekishiteki shintai (1937, NKX XIV) and Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai (1934, NKZ VII). Nishida’s use of the body as an image for the state in the former is particularly brave in the wake of the Minobe Incident. We will see in the next section that Nishida’s emphasis on the fact that other nations (not only Japan) also have ‘historical bodies’ with their own unique characteristics and historical roles can be seen as an attempt to reintroduce the pluralist side of the Confucian dialogue about the make-up of society, as seen in Chapter 2. The late 1930s were dominated by the absolutist or hierarchical interpretations of Confucianism, as codified in Kokutai no hongi. 31 The language here is rather obscure, and conceivably ambiguous to audiences unversed in Nishida’s philosophy. Such phrases are clarified in his work, even in his wartime work: the nationalisms of independent nations should not be ‘opposed to my idea of world-of-worlds-formationism. In world-of-worlds-formationism each people must become the foundations [of world order]’ (Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, NKZ XII:433). 32 Letter #1078, 13 March 1937, to Harada. Takagi Shōkichi (1985) provides an interesting account of his relationship with the Kyoto School. 34 14 December 1939. Nishida spoke on the philosophy of history. (In 1940, Nishida received the Cultural Medal of Honour from the emperor.) In 1939 Nishida also

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35

36

37

38

39

participated in the running of Gotō Ryūnosuke’s (1888–1984) ill-fated private school, the Shōwa juku, which operated from the end of 1938 until 1941, with the express purpose of countering the influence of the Ministry of Education by providing a private education that would encourage students to think for themselves. Nishida’s initial reservations about becoming involved with this are recorded in letter #1295, 29 October 1938, to Hori Koretaka, NKZ XIX:51–2. The school was nominally attached to the Shōwa kenkyūkai, Konoe’s burēn shūdan (brain group), which Gotō also helped to establish in 1933, although there were no institutional ties. As we will see in Chapter 5, Nishida’s former student Miki Kiyoshi was active in this political think tank. Nihon bunka no mondai (1940), Kokka riyū no mondai (1941). Actually, Nihon bunka no mondai was originally presented as a lecture series at Kyoto Imperial University in 1938 and then, despite a series of attacks on Nishida’s colleague, Amano Teiyu, by ultra-rightest groups in 1939, Nishida later published the series as a book, amidst protests that he too was being too pro-Western. Quotation is from Jacinto Zavala (1995:134). Nishida passes no comment on the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Knauth (1965:348) suggests that Nishida’s rheumatism prevented him from writing at all between October 1941 and May 1942. However, there is occasional correspondence from between these dates. Letter #1631, 21 December 1941, to Hori Koretaka, NKZ XIX:184, does indicate that Nishida had been hospitalized for fifty days by that time. In fact, Nishida’s rheumatism seems to get worse. His diary entries in 1942 are full of ‘massage’, presumably to ease the pain. On 15 July, Nishida complains that, despite the massage, ‘my rheumatism troubles me more than it did last year’. Yatsugi began his career as an activist in the labour movement. Following the Manchuria Incident in 1931, however, he began to develop close ties with the military, particularly with the army. In October 1933 he established the kokusaku kenkyū dōshikai (nation strategy research comradery), which was reoragnized into the kokusaku kenkyūkai in 1937. For a short period he was also a director of the Imperial Rule Assistance Political Association (yokusan seijikai). His approach was not quite the same as the common assertion that ‘the leaders of the Army approached Nishida to write his ideas about Japan’s role in East Asia’ (Ueda Shizuteru 1995a:87). Furuta Hikaru (1979, 1980) (also Furuta Hikaru, Sakuta Keichi and Ikimatsu Keizō (1971:276–8)) suggests that Yatsugi approached Nishida as a favour to Kanai Shōji, an admirer of Nishida’s work, who was worried that Nishida was about to be arrested by the military police. Kanai and Yatsugi reasoned that involvement with the kokusaku kenkyūkai might ease suspicions on Nishida. To some extent, the incident suggests that Nishida was coerced into participating. Yatsugi himself seems to confirm parts of this story when he reports that, at the next meeting in May, he warned Nishida about the rumours regarding his possible arrest and reassured him that the kokusaku kenkyūkai would do what it could to protect him. Yatsugi insists that Nishida participated of his own free will and that there was no coercion. See Yatsugi Kazuo (1973:358–82). An excellent overview of this incident in English is Yusa Michiko (1989). I am grateful to Yusa’s work for pointing me towards a number of the sources used in this section. Letter #1784, 23 June 1943, to Watsuji Tetsurō.

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40 Tanabe Juri was a sociologist and a mutual acquaintance of both Nishida and Yatsugi. His oft quoted first hand account of Nishida’s anti-army patriotism was delivered as a speech in the post-war period, and then published (Tanabe Juri 1962). 41 Contact was at least occasional. For example, Nishida records visits on 18 September 1943 and then 13 February, 21 April 1944. 42 Letter #1781, 14 June 1943, to Watsuji Tetsurō. 43 Letter #1784, 23 June 1943, to Watsuji. 44 Letter #1783 (postcard), 18 June 1943, to Hori Koretaka. 45 See, for example, Shillony (1981/2001:112). 46 See, for example, Arisaka Yōko (1996:88). Arisaka does note that Nishida himself did not seem to object to Tanabe’s draft. See also Yusa Michiko (1989). 47 Nishida’s original draft is no longer extant, but in 1944 he wrote another version of the text with the hope that it would appear in Iwanami’s Shisō magazine, for dissemination to a wider public. Interestingly, this essay had a slightly different title from the earlier Tanabe draft, Sekaishintaisei no genri. (See letter #1862, 14 December 1943, to Iwanami Shigeo, NKZ XIX:275.) It appeared in September 1944 as the third appendix of Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi, under the heading ‘sekai shinchitsujo no genri’, and was incorporated into NKZ XII in 1966. This is now the standard text. 48 This parallels Löwith’s confusion concerning some speeches by Heidegger, which apparently left him unsure whether to read Greek philosophy or to join the Nazi Storm-Troopers. Löwith (1946) quoted in Bourdieu (1988:13). 49 By extension, even if Tanabe had not removed the philosophy, it is likely that it would have been absent from the context of the everyday reader. A larger problem here is whether the philosopher can ever really be an effective revolutionary. Even if we are willing to accept that revolutionaries are sometimes ‘forced to march backwards into battle’, philosophers not only make linguistic but also intellectual demands on their audiences. 50 The Tanabe Juri draft is reproduced in Yatsugi (TD 1973:366–70). Yatsugi explains how only a limited number of copies were made, and distributed to the Prime Minister, the Army and Navy Ministers etc., and he relates how Tanabe Juri himself took twenty copies to Nishida on 9 June 1943. Yatsuji attributed the piece to Nishida, although he appears to concede that this draft was edited by Tanabe after Nishida submitted it to him on 25 May—sidestepping the controversies that this concession raises, Yatsugi describes Tanabe as a ‘disciple’ (monka) of Nishida, which he was not. 51 The preceding lines explain that ‘the tireless imperialism of the Anglo-American powers has endlessly violated each of the East Asian peoples, and obstructed their prosperity’. In other words, the problem is one of the suppression of material wellbeing. In this materialist context, the extermination of American imperialism is tantamount to the extermination of Americans in Asia. This is in contrast with the position in Nishida’s draft where the imperialism of the European peoples has robbed the peoples of Asia ‘of their world-historical missions’. In this context, European imperialism has an ideational or cultural meaning which is tied as much to the influence of European culture as it is to the concrete presence of European people or troops; this must be overcome by ‘each East Asian people self-awakening to their world-historical missions’ (ND:429).

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52 This is quite consistent with his valuation of culture (bunka) over material power, which we have seen in a number of his earlier works, and his stance that Europe represents a cultural entity whilst the United States does not. This view will be echoed in the statements of the Kyoto School participants in the Chūōkōron and Bungakkai symposia of 1941–42, in Chapter 5. 53 This is the very last sentence. Nishida makes one concession to the differences between the Anglo-American powers and the Axis powers: the former must ‘obey’ (fukujū suru) whilst the latter need to ‘imitate’ (narau). In both cases, however, the implication is that none of the parties involved are conducting their wars in an acceptable way and, therefore, that Japan’s participation in the Axis Alliance is of dubious morality. Germany and Italy, after all, are ‘European powers’. 54 The full significance of the term kensetsu will be explored in Chapter 5, where it will be seen that Tanabe Hajime introduces it to describe the deliberate actions of human agents designed to bring the moral future into the concrete present— something that Nishida always opposed. 55 Nishida also employs the term keisei (formation), with similar connotations. 56 Given all of the differences (in both content and style) between the introduction of TD (the yōshi) and ND, and given the fact that none of it appeared in ND at all, I suspect that it was almost completely written by Tanabe. 57 Again, just as in the case of kensetsu, there are the echoes of other members of the Kyoto School in TD here. Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji debated about whether the present world could be considered to be identical with the ideal condition of the present age. For Tanabe ‘it is the direction of reality (genjitsu no hōkō) which makes possible particular constructions’ and so the present is always the manifestation of progress (THZ VIII:161—see Chapter 5). Nishida never agreed with this stance, since his philosophy permits a gap between the empirical world and its genuine form (although he unites them in contradictory unity), but Tanabe’s stance is clearly reflected in TD. 58 The distinction here echoes the previous distinctions between the nature of ‘imperialism’ in TD (which was largely a material concept) and in ND (where it was essentially ideational or cultural). 59 Seru is an alternative form of saseru, the causative/permissive form of suru. It is technically possible, then, that this sentence could be translated as: each nation must cause the creation of a new world. This might then seem very similar to the simple imperative of TD. However, to reduce the permissive-imperative to a simple imperative in this way does violence to the integrity of Nishida’s work as philosophy (Nishida chose senakerebanaranai over shinakerebanaranai for a reason). In fact, because of the de-emphasis in Nishida’s philosophy on ‘striving’, and because the use of kokka in this passage refers us back to his wider philosophy, it is clear that the permissive form is appropriate. There is a sense in which the (missing) ‘causee’ in this sentence is ‘us’: when nations setf-actualize as true nations (kokka) they will come to permit us to form a world-of-worlds, rather than enforcing the statist or ethnic interests of specific nations (minzoku/kokumin). 60 This is an example of Nishida as a backward marching revolutionary: changing the description of an orthodox, positively evaluated term. 61 ‘Particular subjective principle’ (tokuyū no shutaiteki genri) echoes the ‘special features’ (tokushoku) of Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai (1934).

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62 Letter #1967, 28 July 1944, to Kōsaka Masaaski—Nishida and the Kyoto School were eventually cleared of these charges, perhaps thanks to the intervention of navy captain Takagi Sōkichi. Some of this letter is illegible. 63 Revisionist scholars such as Ueda Shizuteru (various); Yusa Michiko (various); and Ōhashi Ryōsuke tend to focus on Nishida’s biographical details. 64 Arisaka suggests that existing Nishida apologists stretch the value of his universalism too far in this regard. 65 The title is confusing because, as Lavelle himself later points out, the subject is ‘not the relation of Nishida’s thought and public commitment to his philosophy and personal development’ but rather the reception of his ideas in 1940s Japan (1994: 139). 66 Lavelle also points to the importance of Shimmin no michi (1941), but indicates that it was of a far lower intellectual level than the earlier Kokutai no hongi. 67 Lavelle does make passing reference to the existence of earlier works, but makes no attempt to analyze or describe them. His main focus appears to be the 1940 version of Nihon bunka no mondai (NKZ XII). This booklet was originally delivered as lectures in 1938 (NKZ XIV). 68 There is a sense in which Lavelle is correct, since Kokutai does represent a popular distillation of Nishida’s earlier (and considerably more extensive) essay, Kokka riyū no mondai (1941). However, Lavelle makes no mention of this and neither does he attempt to inform the latter essay with the content of the earlier one. Lavelle also fails to mention that the real title of this 1944 essay is Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi, and that he has taken the liberty of altering it himself. 69 Lavelle concedes a ‘traditional’ conception of law, and an only ‘semi-orthodox’ position on Shintō. 70 A brief history of the term kokutai is provided by Brownlee (2000). Brownlee suggests that the usage of kokutai as employed in Kokutai no hongi is the fourth (and final) stage of the concept’s development. He does not mention Nishida or the Kyoto School. 71 Interestingly, we will see that the contested and dynamic nature of the kokutai is encompassed within Nishida’s historicized idea of the concept, whilst the authors of Kokutai no hongi insist that the kokutai is ‘eternal and unchanging’. 72 One oft observed aspect of wartime Japanese society (in common with other totalitarian regimes) was the effectiveness of institutional and social censorship, producing an absence of explicit political dissent or heterodoxy in published works. 73 Although Watsuji had previously been at Kyoto Imperial University, in fact, only one out the fourteen members of this committee were from Kyoto, the others being Tokyo based (five of them at Tōdai). The one was Sakuda Sōichi. This is further evidence that Kyoto was hardly the ‘theoretical hotbed of ultranationalism’ that it has been painted as by scholars. 74 This was the same use to which the Kojiki was put when it was first written, in 712, when it was employed as an imperial history, justifying the reign of the imperial family. Amaterasu is the sun-goddess who brought light/life to the world. 75 KH:50–62, book 1, chapter 4, ‘Wa to “makoto”’. 76 The implication appears to be that in the distant past, all cultures were equally in touch with their sources. However, following the Kojiki creation myth, all the

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77

78

79 80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

world began with Amaterasu, and thus any nation separated from Japan and the imperial line is instantly separated from its true source. Interestingly, the editors of the English translation imply that the text is primarily motivated by Confucian and Shintō ideas, but that Zen ‘is implicit in many of the concepts of self-denial and sacrifice for the Imperial Family which are basic to the theme of the Kokutai no hongi’ (Hall 1949:27). Heisig (2001:20) claims that all references to Zen in Nishida’s diaries stop in 1907. This is simply untrue. In 1943, for example, Nishida records numerous visits from (and to) Suzuki Daisetsu, who would bring with him books such as Zen no shisō (27 September 1943). Nishida’s final work, Bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan (1945), was so riddled with Zen and Pure Land references that it is impossible to believe that Nishida was unconcerned with Buddhism during the 1940s. A number were collected into Monbushō (1944). In his diary, Nishida records that these lectures were given on the mornings of 25–6 September, at the Shimano Society for the Promotion of Science (gakujutsu shinkō kai) (see 21 September). The inclusion of a translation of these lectures (as The Historical Body) in a recent anthology draws some welcome attention to them: see Dilworth, Viglielmo and Jacinto Zavala (1998). The editors make no comment about political importance or timing of these texts, and they include them as a ‘very accessible, non-technical formulation of [Nishida’s] basic philosophy’ (1998:12). Dilworth et al. concur that these lectures are a distillation of Nishida’s earlier philosophy, suggesting that they are ‘both a primer and a thesaurus of its persistent themes’ (Dilworth et al. 1998:12). In the context of Western political thought, the term historical species seems more dangerous than historical bodily society because of its associations with organicism and fascism. However, so soon after the Minobe Incident, and immediately following the publication of Kokutai no hongi, Nishida’s unorthodox use of the latter, a body image as an analogy for the nation, in a public lecture was very brave. It should be remembered here that the ‘China Incident’ that sparked full-scale war with China had occurred only two months earlier, in July 1937. Indeed, Nishida uses the disparaging term shina for China, whilst advocating its equality with Japan. As we will see, there is an important difference, however, between an identity which is the product of the ‘genuine history’ of a nation and one that has simply been arbitrarily imposed on a people (heteronomously) through coercion or the use of power. As we have seen, this is quite consistent with his presentation of universalism in his correspondence. In Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, Nishida refers to the nineteenth century as an age of national self-awakening, in juxtaposition to the twentieth, which he suggests should be characterized by global self-awakening (NKZ XII:427). See Sekai shinchitsujo no genri (1943), NKZ XII:428. ‘Today, as a result of scientific, technological, and economic development, all nations and peoples have entered into one compact global space.’ As in the case of Rousseau, there are some clear dangers revolving around the issue of who is capable of judging the ‘truth’ of any political units.

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89 Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi (1944). This essay is basically a distillation of the longer and rather more inaccessible essay of 1941 Kokka no riyū mondai, in which Nishida sets out the logic of his ‘ethical nation’. 90 Kant also recognized this dilemma, when he noted the contradiction that the perfectly peaceful republic could not form in an international system characterized by violence, yet only an international system comprised of perfectly peaceful republics could be free from violence. 91 As Cox (2001:113) points out, citing Braudel, this territorially unrooted concept of civilization is not completely alien to the Western tradition. See also, Braudel (1987/94). 92 Nishida’s discussion of the ‘unique’ or ‘special’ features of cultures is best presented in Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai, NKZ VII. 93 Nishida does concede that because nations are the generating power behind cultures, then the death of a nation means that a culture ‘loses its generating force’. This means that its contribution to the world is the role it plays as an unrooted public good. The reverse of this is that Nishida appears to believe that nations which have lost their generating force have died out—Greece and India ‘died’ when the locus of cultural development moved to other nations, even though their cultures have been eternalized through their incorporation into the other national cultures of Europe and Asia respectively. 94 In Rekishiteki shintai, Nishida talks about the nation as a ‘continuous discontinuity’, which would characterize his conservatism in contradistinction to the conservative ‘continuous continuity’ in Kokutai no hongi. 95 In Nihon bunka no mondai and elsewhere Nishida would call Japanese culture one of ‘pure emotion’ (junjō). 96 For Nishida, loyalty and even filial piety are not fixed, but rather differ from person to person and are, consequently, never consistent. He explains that such things as loyalty and filial piety ‘certainly are natural duties’, but that we can never really know what is truly loyal or pious in practice. He goes even further: even if we consider the meaning of wisdom, courage, humanity and justice [chiyū jingi], we cannot say what kind of wisdom or what kind of courage is true wisdom or courage [shin no chiyū], so we cannot say that all wisdom and courage is good. On the contrary, wisdom and courage can be used towards evil. (ZK:152–3) 97 Nishida’s stance on the particularism of morality is in stark contrast with the universalism of Kokutai no hongi, in which ‘the national entity forms the foundation of all morality’. Nishida terms such a view ‘medieval’. Indeed, in his last essay, Bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan, completed in the closing months of the war but published posthumously after the war in 1949, Nishida distances himself from the language of morality altogether, since it had become so enmeshed in nationalist discourse. In this last work, as in earlier pieces, Nishida concedes that morality is the product of national cultures—the internal dimension of a kokutai— but here he makes it clear that there is nothing universal or absolute about such

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moralities. Instead, Nishida reverts to the language of religion to describe the ineffable universal in the place of absolute nothingness: The historical world realizes itself in the form of nations. Yet I do not say that the nation itself is the absolute. The nation is fountainhead of morality, but not of religion. As the nation is a form of the absolute’s own selfformation, our moral actions must reflect a national character; but the nation does not save our souls. The true nation has its ground in the religious [i.e. it is the contradictory self-identity of the absolute present]. A religious person, in his moral behavior, must naturally be a citizen of a nation as something historically formative. And yet the two standpoints must be distinguished as well. If they are not, the pure development of each, religion and morality, will be obstructed, regressing into the ‘medieval’ identity of the two. This is the reason that modern nations have come to recognise freedom of religious belief over against the authority of the political state. (LW:122) 98 Lavelle is quoting Nishida in Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi NKZ XII:409. Indeed, I would not be the first to point out that Nishida reserved the expression ‘absolute self-determination of the absolute present’ or ‘absolute self-identity of contradictories’ for less substantive entities, such as the ineffable unity at the root of Buddhism, or the place of nothingness (mu no basho). See, Ueda Shizuteru (1995a: 95). There is, however, a sense in which all identities are simultaneously absolute and particular, in the hongaku shisō model. 99 Jitte is written in katakana, and reizoku (subordination) is written with unusual characters denoting ceremonial customs ( ). 100 Nishida is not even completely idealistic about the features of Japan’s culture, even if it were in its ideal form: ‘its strong points are at once its weak points’ (NKZ VII: 453). 101 For Kant: If it is now asked whether we live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment. As things are at present, we still have a long way to go before men as a whole can be in a position (or can even be put into a position) of using their own understanding confidently and well…without outside guidance. (Kant 1784b:58—emphasis in the original) 102 I note that Nishida uses the term tōa kyōeiken (East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere) rather than the orthodox dai tōa kyōeiken (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere) here (and elsewhere), presumably to reflect the fact that there is nothing particularly ‘great’ about a particular world that is just one of many in a world-ofworlds. 103 Later in the same essay, Nishida suggests that Japan would be the natural leader of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, presumably because it was never colonized by a Western power and because it possessed the material means to prevent further colonizations. Whilst there are obvious dangers to this view, particularly in the

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context of imperial Japan, the idea of a powerful, core nation is not alien to other respectable political philosophies. Even Kant suggests that such a nation would be essential to the formation of the foedus pacificum. 104 It is interesting that Nishida uses the term fuhenteki (universal) to refer to Western conceptions of morality. When he talks of what he considers to be ‘genuine’ or ‘concrete’ universalism within his own thought, he always uses the term sekaishugi (worldism). In terms of his intellectual consistency, we have already seen Nishida criticize the Japanists for misunderstanding the nature of universalism, in his correspondence. 105 Remember that the racial equality clause requested by Japan as a victorious power at the Versailles Peace Conference was refused. Although Nishida makes no direct reference to this, he is clear that Western culture fails to take a truly worldhistorical perspective, and he is equally clear that a culture which thinks of the world only from its own perspective, centring only on its own people and not containing any global aspects [sekaisei] is nothing but a racialist egoism [minzokujikoshugi]; what emerges from that can only be invasionism [shinryakushugi] or imperialism. Today, it is obvious that the imperialism of the Anglo-American powers is based in such racialist egoism… Nationalism and mere racialism must not be confused. (NKZ XII:432–3) 106 This language is clearly very similar to that of the imperialist ideologues, who attempted to argue that this was a description of what the empirical Co-Prosperity Sphere was. For Nishida, on the other hand, this is a description of what the ideal or true Co-Prosperity should be. We have already seen how the moral conditional in Nishida’s work has been ignored by commentators who have not read his earlier work. 107 However, the fact that the Versailles Peace Treaty that inaugurated the League was imposed upon the vanquished nations suggests that Nishida would have objected. 108 Scheiffele (1991:43) suggests that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is metaphorical and thus ‘can by no means be equated with relativism’. 109 Heisig (2001:47) notes dryly: ‘The only way to confirm such an intuition was to achieve it oneself. Nishida all but asks his readers to assume that he had and to take his world for it that they could as well. As he surely realized, this is not a very good argument.’

5 Nishida’s shadow: the Kyoto School and the manipulation of nothingness 1 Such pleadings would, of course, be ahistorical, since Nishida died before the end of the war. 2 Nishida was certainly not the only thinker to observe this problem in 1940s Japan. In particular, some lamented the process of vulgarization that transformed delicate poetic or philosophical terms into blunt weapons of the ultra-nationalists. Ironically, it was Kamei Katsuichirō who cautioned the Overcoming Modernity symposium about the dangers of language in modern Japan. (In May 1942, Kamei

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3

4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11

had been named secretary of the Japan Literary Patriotic Society (nihon bungaku hōkokukai), effectively Prime Minister Tōjō’s propaganda brain-trust.) In his supplemental article to the symposium, Kamei (1979) lamented the way that modernity had impoverished language by emphasizing speed rather than beauty. Delicate concepts, particularly poetry but we should include philosophy as well, had been reduced to cliché and slogan. Whilst Tosaka is clear that there are important differences between the two systems, finding Tanabe’s thought rather rnore fascist than Nishida’s (e.g. TJZ III: 170–84), which he characterized as bourgeois idealism, even Tosaka found it hard to separate the two men completely because Tanabe tetsugaku was a development of the Kyoto School, which was itself premised on Nishida tetsugaku: ‘the differences between the two systems of philosophy remains a subject for more investigation’ (TJZ II:340). Nishida speaking to Aihara Shinsaku in 1940. See Aihara Shinsaku, Omoide no ittan THZ XII. Heisig (2001:137) notes Nishida’s concern about Tanabe’s ‘turn’, especially ‘because Tanabe was still encasing his views in the language of the ongoing battle with him’. It should be recalled that Nishida was also invited to join this committee, but that he resigned after only one meeting. See Tanabe’s notorious essay of 1943, Iku gakusei niokuru hanamuke no kotoba: nyūtai no shingi o jikaku seyo, THZ XIV:414–16. This is partially translated in Heisig (1995:270). Ives (1995:39) remarks that the symposium participants (and Tanabe) demonstrated a ‘more enthusiastic attititude toward Japanese imperialism than Nishida’, but he laments having no space in his essay to explore this. The symposia in question are commonly known as the Chūōkōron and the Kindai no chōkoku debates. In fact there were three debates in the former, held in November 1941, March 1942, November 1942. They were published in Chūōkōron as they were held, and then later in a single volume Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon (Tokyo: Chūōkōron, 1943). The Kindai no chōkoku symposium was held in Kyoto, 23–24 July 1942, published in Bungakkai, September and October 1942, then later as a single volume in July 1943. Tosaka Jun, ‘Mu no ronri’ wa ronri de aru ka—Nishida tetsugaku no hōhō ni tsuite, in TJZ II. Tosaka’s charge is effectively that Nishida was a utopian thinker. I will limit my attention to the two central players, Tanabe and Nishitani, as well as two of the peripheral members (and critics) Miki and Tosaka. Other marginal members, such as Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō, are dealt with less systematically. Watsuji and Kuki were associated with Nishida less directly than the others, and were certainly never seen as representative of the Kyoto School. Kuki is well served by Pincus (1996). On Watsuji, see Yuasa Yasuo (1995). Less eminent figures, such as Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki and Suzuki Shigetaka make appearances where they are specifically relevant. On the make-up of the Kyoto School, Kōyama Iwao (1996). More extensive biographical information can be found in Tsujimura Kōichi (1965); an insiders view is Takeuchi Yoshinori, Mutō Kazuo and Tsujimura Kōichi (1991); a more critical view is Ienaga Saburō (1974); Sasaki Tōru (1986). Heisig (2001:209) goes so far as to suggests that his own discussion of the reception of Tanabe’s political ideas will ‘suffice as a general picture of how

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12

13 14

15

16

17

18

19 20

21

22

23

24 25

Nishitani’s political philosophy was received’. In general Heisig under-emphasizes political thought in his otherwise excellent book, and it will be seen below that Tanabe and Nishitani certainly deserve separate political analyses. A fascinating discussion of the relationships between Heidegger, Nishitani and Tanabe is provided by Parkes (1996). For a more general picture see Parkes (1987/ 90). Nishitani was honoured in 1982 and Tanabe in 1950. This is comparable with Nishida’s assertion that the twentieth century ushered in an ‘age of global self-awakening.’ See Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, NKZ XII: esp. pp. 426–8. Nishitani’s relationship with Nishida here parallel’s Michael Doyle’s with Kant. Both Nishitani and Doyle invert the logic of their muses, suggesting that the empirical fact of a transnational grouping demonstrates historical progress and thus legitimizing the grouping. For Nishida and Kant, however, the grouping is only legitimate if history has progressed to the point where such groupings are made ethically. Huntington attempts to reformulate realist theories of multipolarity into cultural terms, effectively arguing that the interests of ‘civilizations’ have come to replace the interests of ‘states’ in the new world order. Nishitani clearly had a similar idea in the 1940s. Nishitani here utilizes the term fuhenteki (universal) in a positive sense. Nishida, as we have seen, employed it conventionally to represent the hollow universality of ‘Western abstract logic’. Shūketsu (‘bloc formation’) literally means concentration or bringing together, and it thus better communicates Nishitani’s philosophical loyalties to Nishida than does the more politicized translation ‘bloc’. The final chapter, Kokka to shūkyō, is dedicated to this relationship. See esp. NKC IV:368–75. Nishitani here uses sekaiteki seikaku in place of Nishida’s favoured sekaisei, indicating the difference between the universalizing of the particular (which is imperialist) and the global aspect of the particular (which Nishida saw as cosmopolitan). Simultaneously, European countries developed intra-European syntheses of knowledge, reflecting the ‘world order’ as it was perceived in Europe (as Europe) in earlier times. The history of such a synthesis would be the story of rationalism. This essay, reprinted in THZ XIV:415–16, is often cited as demonstrating both Tanabe’s fascist leanings and the orientation of the Kyoto School in general. See Mori Kōichi (1947) and, for a more generous interpretation, Heisig (1995:269–71), who also includes a partial translation of the speech. In fact, Tanabe withdrew from the social sphere late in the 1944, as it became increasingly clear that Japan would lose the war. At that time, he began his seminal ‘philosophy of repentance’ with zangedō toshite no tetsugaku (1946) reprinted in THZ IX:1–270. See Tanabe Hajime(1986). Even Nishitani, who was chiefly responsible for the Chūōkōron debates, received warnings from the military authorities. Shakai sonzai no ronri (1935), THZ VI:51–168; Shu no ronri to sekai zushiki (1935), THZ VI:169–264; Shu no ronri ni taisuru hihyō ni kotau (1937), THZ VI: 397–446; Shu no ronri no imi o akiraka ni suru (1937), THZ VI:447–522.

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26 Again, there is a sense in which this could easily have been read back into Nishida’s assertion that cultures go on living even after the death of the nations that formed them (NKZ XII:424). 27 That is to say, they offered the most visible critique of Nishida’s thought in philosophical terms. 28 Standard biographies include: Kunio Osamu (1966); Miyakawa Tōru (1958); Yamada Kō (1990); Hirabayashi Yasuyuki (1960); and a slightly idiosyncratic Tanabe Hajime (1976). 29 Nishitani Keiji and Tanabe Hajime also attended these seminars. 30 Kyōdai jiken refers to a number of incidents involving Kyoto Imperial University, 1913–33 (three incidents also occurred during the post-war purges, 1949–55). The 1913, Sawayanagi Incident saw faculty protests about the arbitrary powers of dismissal held by the university president (Sawayanagi). The 1924–26, Gakuren Incident refers to a police raid on a number of universities to capture ‘communist sympathisers’. It was the first large scale use of the 1925 Peace Preservation Law. Despite protests, there was a second such raid in January 1926. The 1933, Takikawa Incident refers to the dismissal of liberal Kyōdai law professor, Takikawa Yukitoki. He was dismissed by the Cabinet (in breach of academic autonomy laws) after the Education Minister (post-war Prime Minister, 1954–56, Hatoyama Ichirō) had tried to dismiss him personally but had met with stiff opposition from the Kyōdai faculty members. 31 Such roundtables were sponsored by major daily newspapers throughout the 1930s. Perhaps the most famous was also the first, hosted by the Yomiuri Shinbun in June and July 1932: ‘Shūkyō, tetsugaku to bunka no mondai’. 32 As we saw in Chapter 1, by abandoning critique for power, Miki ‘disfigured’ himself as an intellectual. An account of Miki’s role in the Shōwa kenkyūkai is provided in Fletcher (1982). A contrasting account is Goto-Jones (2005). See also Shimizu Ikutarō (1974). 33 Miki’s ‘world order’ remained regional in scope, demonstrating that he was matching his expression to the political needs of the time. He makes no mention, for example, of how Japan’s identity as ‘East and West together’ makes it an intermediate stage which would be replaced by a truly global world order—as Nishitani and Nishida emphasized. 34 The text of this announcement is reproduced in Yabe Teiji (1952:165–8). See also, Fletcher (1982). 35 The last sentence quoted appears at the start of the section in the original. I note that Tosaka does not use Nishida’s favoured term, tokushoku (special feature). 36 Dale’s (1986) critique of Japanism, which argues that Japan invented a tradition of difference during the pre-war period and then sustained it into the present, has become a landmark in post-war intellectual history. A more recent volume inspired by him is Vlastos (1998). Harootunian (2000) also draws significantly on Tosaka. 37 Kawakami’s Marxism was an unusual blend of Neo-Kantian Marxism which tended to move Marx away from material dialectics and towards humanism—Peter Duus and Irwin Scheiner call it ‘ideological dialectics’. See Duus and Scheiner (1998:204–6). On the intellectual make-up of the left in interwar Japan, see GotoJones (2005). 38 The fact that the League of Nations’ Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle (founded by the Japanese Undersecretary-General, Nitobe Inazō

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(1862–1933), with Henry Bergson as the first President) held symposia with similar themes (‘The Future of the European Spirit’ and ‘The Formation of Modern Man’) between 1932 and 1938 is uniformly ignored. Transcripts can be found in the League of Nations archives, Geneva: vol. 889, CICI/LA 1931–38, boxes R3971–R3973 and R3984. Treatment of the content of the Chūōkōron symposia can be found in: Hiromatsu Wataru (1980: esp. p. 86) provides a description of the contents of the symposium. See also Oketani Hideaki (1992: esp. p. 429). However, the most influential attempts to rejuvenate the symposium came from Takeuchi Yoshimi (1959) and especially from Tanabe Hajime’s student Oshima Yasumasa (1965). One of the best (and only) accounts in English is Horio Tsutomu (1995). 39 The tension between the Navy and the Army throughout the interwar and war period is well documented. In particular, the Navy is noted as being much more moderate than the Army. Beasley notes: Although the navy was an effective instrument of empire, its senior officers seem not to have been preoccupied with using it in that way. In matters of foreign policy they had the reputation of being moderates, that is, less concerned than their army colleagues with territorial acquisition, more interested than them in trade and emigration. (Beasley 1987/91:36–7)

Indeed, Beasley notes that even after the war was underway, Navy records reflect a genuine concern for peaceable and cultural integration of the empire, along the lines of the Kyoto School’s kyōdōtai. 40 An interesting discussion of this question is Ōhashi 2001. 41 Horio cites the Mainichi and Asahi. 42 Inoue Tetsujirō’s influential book, Nihon seihin no honshitsu (The Essence of the Japanese Spirit, 1934) was reissued in an enlarged form at about the same time at the first Chūōkōron debate was published in 1941. 43 The following analysis is based on the text of the first symposium, held on 16 November 1941 and published in Chūōkōron (January 1942:150–92). Quotations are from the original printing, hereafter denoted CK in the references. Although the second and third symposia differed slightly in tone from the first, they coincided with the Kindai no chōkoku symposium—hence, in order to preserve the integrity of the linguistic chronology of this chapter, the latter two are not considered in detail here. 44 Nishitani was easily the most eminent and original of the group. Kōyama and Kōsaka would become leading figures in the post-war Kyoto School, but in the interwar years their major publications were concerned with interpreting their teachers: Kōsaka Masaaki (1947, 1949); more recently Kōyama Iwao (1996). Kōyama (1941) attempted to place Japanese culture into a world historical perspective, along the lines of Nishida’s Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai (1934, NKZ VII), but the language resonates well with this symposium. It was severely criticized for its argument that Japan was just one of

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45

46

47

48

49

50 51

52

53

54 55

many cultures in the world. Similarly, Kōyama (1943) took up the themes of the symposium in an extended form after the event. Suzuki is not clear about which particular thinkers he is referring to, but we can guess from the Kyoto School’s contact with Heidegger and Bergson that these two eminent thinkers would be counted amongst the psuedo-orientals. The influence of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–22), and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–61), was evident in Japan at this time. Toynbee’s epic work was only partly available in the early 1940s, but his position was clear even in his earlier pieces. As noted above, the League of Nations responded to this crisis by sponsoring a series of symposia concerned with the Future of the European Spirit etc. between 1932 and 1938. Indeed, the concern carried into the post-war. See, for example, Jaspers (1948). Kōyama uses the term ‘Middle Kingdom’ (CK:156) to evoke parallels between the mindset of Europe and that of ancient China, which referred to itself as the ‘Middle Kingdom’. In fact, Japan changed the characters it used to refer to China from chūkoku or chūka, meaning ‘Middle Kingdom’, to a phonetic rendering of the Western name shina in the nineteenth century, in order to suggest that China was lost in its own past and no longer a modern nation. See Tanaka (1995:4). It should be remembered that this symposium took place amidst heightening tensions with the United States but before war actually broke out. It will be interesting, in the next section, to compare the treatment America receives in the Kindai no chōkoku debates, after war is underway. Whilst in 1941, the Kyoto School are prepared to accept the idea that the United States is of a different (more properly modern) nature from Europe, by mid-1942 delegates suggest that America had absorbed the worst elements of European culture, and they even suggest that it now formed a threat to European culture itself. Suzuki refers explicitly to this view as the global aspect (sekaisei) of European culture, hence manipulating Nishida’s conventional use of this important term. Watsuji Tetsurō utilized the term jūsō sei (multilayered character) to describe the nature of the Japanese spirit, as able to both sustain continuities and assimilate changes. See, for example, Watsuji Tetsurō, Nihon seishin, WTZ IV:314. This conforms with the conventions of Nishida’s work, especially in contradistinction to the Shintō-Confucian conventions of such ultra-nationalist texts as Kokutai no hongi. In an important philological essay in 1937, Watsuji argued that the Japanese term for person (ningen) expressed the essentially social nature of (Japanese) people much better than the atomized terms used in Europe, such as ‘man’, ‘anthropos’ or ‘homme’, because the characters used to write it included both person (nin) and relation/space (gen). Watsuji Tetsurō, Ningen no gaku tishite no rinrigaku no igi, WTZ X:10–31. Kōsaka terms European societies ‘urban’ (shimin shakai or chōnin shakai) and Japanese societies ‘warrior’ (buke shakai—lit. ‘warrior family societies’). In Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi, Nishida also suggests that gaps can appear between cultures and their political manifestations:

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while the historical world is constructed by nations, it is cultures that determine its eternal content…so political history and cultural history are in opposition. From the political standpoint, culture is a tool, but a politics devoid of cultural content is just a self-serving convenience—in fact, in a word, it is ephemeral [fuyūteki]. (NKZ XII:412) 56 There is also an implicit doubt about whether or not this would also be true of conflict with America, or, indeed, with Germany—the use of Ranke’s term implies that the delegates thought Germany had this moralische energie. 57 In this context Kōyama suggests that ethnic-nation (minzoku) is a nineteenth century ideology, suggesting that it is replaced by the civil-nation (kokumin) in the twentieth century. It should be remembered that Nishida argued that national-selfconsciousness (as well as racism) was also an anachronism in the ‘compact global world’ of 1940s. 58 Kōsaka responds by suggesting that minzoku only become historically significant when they construct nations. He wonders out loud whether this has spelt the end of the Ainu and the Jews (CK:185). 59 Kōsaka’s suggestion that minzoku can construct their own nation and thus become historically significant serves to cloud this issue—because it suggests that nations can be ethnically based in some circumstances. 60 Reprinted in Kawakami Tetsutarō and Takeuchi Yoshimi (1979). 61 Hashikawa Bunzō (1965). The debate was not, however, one-sided. See also Hanada Kiyoteru (1964). 62 Realism states that the international system is characterized by anarchy (the dormant or expressed war of all against all), and that the only significant actor is the national state. All states are functionally identical, and all act on rational principles in order to maximize their power resources. 63 For a discussion of whether recent attempts to theorize cultures as ‘civilizations’ succeed in overcoming this realist bias, see Jones (2002c). 64 Nishitani Keiji and Suzuki Shigetaka attended both of the symposia. 65 Although Takeuchi identified three main schools within the symposium (the Kyoto School, the Japan Romantic School, and the Literary World Group), it is difficult to define the latter as a school in any meaningful sense. The Literary World Group was a loose collection of scholars who published in the journal, bungakkai, which sponsored the symposium. However, Takeuchi lists both Kamei Katsuichirō (1907– 66) and Hayashi Fusao (1903–75) as members, even though they were also the core members of the Japan Romantic School. Indeed, the bungakkai was founded by Hayashi Fusao in 1933 with the express intention of making it the vehicle for his ‘cultural renaissance’ (bungei fukkō ki)—other members included Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), Takeda Rintarō (1904–46) and Kobayashi Hideo (1902– 83). The views of the Japan Romantic School and those of the wider Literary World Group tended to differ more in terms of their passion than their content. Hence, the next sections will deal mainly with the history and thought members of the Japan Romantic School, commenting on the individual views of the Literary World Group where they were different.

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66 An influential collection of essays in Japanese is Nihon bungaku kenkyū shiryō kankōkai (1977), and an excellent, recent account of the Japan Romantic School in English is Doak (1994). 67 In fact, Hayashi Fusao was the author of the JRS manifesto: Hayashi Fusao (1935). Invaluable sources on Yasuda are: Doak (1994); Hashikawa Bunzō (1965); Oketani Hideaki (1983); Kamiya Tadataka (1979, 1989); Saegusa Yusataka (1964, 1967). Yasuda Yojūrō Zenshū, in 45 volumes, was published by Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1985–89. 68 Sources on Kamei and Hayashi are less extensive than those on Yasuda, but useful ones include: Doak (1994); Hashikawa Bunzō (1965); Saegusa Yusataka (1964, 1967); Kobayashi Hideo, ‘Hayashi Fusao no seinen’, in Kobayashi Hideo (1967). The Hayashi Fusao Chosakushū was published in 3 volumes, Tokyo: Yokushoin, 1968–69, and the Kamei Katsuichirō Zenshū in 24 volumes, Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971–75. 69 Yasuda argued that political tools (after the Meiji ishin), and particularly military tools, were themselves part of modernity and hence could not be used to overthrow it. He offered no hope for a political revolution back to a utopian past, and argued that the embrace of a ‘fictional consciousness’ (kyokō no ishiki) was the only way to overcome modernity. (In the post-war, Yasuda used similar arguments to voice support for the peace-clause, Article 9, of the new constitution. Yasuda Tojūrō saigunbiron hihan (YYZ XXVII: esp. p. 591).) Kamei and Hayashi did not entirely share Yasuda’s dark resignation; they believed that a return to utopia was possible—the genuine Japanese spirit could be isolated and resurrected through literature. 70 Kokusui throws yet another term into the mix, competing for the same meanings as kokutai, but with an even less material/institutional connotation. The JRS’s use of kokka in institutional terms clearly competes with Nishida’s formulation. Yasuda was more cosmopolitan than Kamei or Hayashi; he suggested that all nations had their own national essences which should each be preserved. Hence, Yasuda approaches (and utilizes) Nishida’s concept of sekaisei—Yasuda Yojūrō ‘nihonteki na mono’ hihyō nit-suite, (1937) YYZ IV:190–21 1. Doak (1994:13) translates sekaisei as ‘cosmopolitanism’, but its meaning on YYZ IV:204 is close to the ‘global aspect’ that Nishida and the Kyoto School used to signify a world-historical or pluralist perspective. 71 Pincus (1996:56) points out a tension in the title of ‘iki’ no kōzjō: iki is a traditional, spiritual term drawing its roots from the native aesthetics of Japan: kōzō on the other hand, is a dry, analytical and rational term, bespeaking modernity 72 Unlike the Kyoto School, which argued that the world was composed of ‘culturally unified spheres’, which could be nations or regions, and who suggested that progress was achieved through the admixture of these spheres into greater synthetic unities, the JRS asserted that culturally unified spheres should always remain pure (junsui). 73 Terms from Yasuda Yojūrō nihon no jōtai ni oite YYZ VII:200–1. 74 In another formulation, Yasuda suggests that the state might find its origins in Japanese history as early as 784, but continues to argue that, therefore, pure Japanese history only existed before the eighth century. Kamei argued that Japan was a ‘spiritual civilization’, not an institutional one. Kamei Katsuichirō bunmei to dōtoku KKZ III: esp. p.13.

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75 The Kyoto School condemned certain historians as ‘Japanists’ for embracing mythology and the Shintō religion as fact. For an elegant account of the activities and acquiescence of the most eminent historians of the 1930s-1940s, see Brownlee (1997). Brownlee describes how historians embraced European historiography even when required to ‘prove’ the existence of previous emperors they did not believe in. In particular, the most eminent historians of the day were involved with the jinmu tennō seiseki chōsa iinkai (Commission of Inquiry into Historical Sites Related to Emperor Jinmu) in 1940, which strove to authenticate the history of this semilegendary emperor. A special concern of the historians of the time was to establish a long history of Japan as a state, in order to increase its standing in the international system of states dominated by Europe. Brownlee is keen to point out that all of the historians at the Tokyo Imperial University were civil servants, and that their reins were held increasingly tightly as the 1930s turned into the 1940s. 76 Kamei is drawing a parallel between the Black Ships of Commodore Perry which lay siege to Tokyo Bay in the nineteenth century, effectively ending Japan’s policy of sakoku (isolation). 77 In the essay Kamei submitted to the Overcoming Modernity symposium, he warns that self sacrifice in the name of victory is not a pure act, since it reveals the pride of the modern man. Only sacrifice in the name of national solidarity would be truly a Japanese act (Kamei Katsuichirō 1979). 78 Hayashi (1975) notoriously restated this belief after the war. 79 In the September 1942 issue of bungakkai appeared essays by Nishitani Keiji, Moroi Saburō, Tsumura Hideo and Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko. The next issue contained essays by Kamei Katsuichirō, Hayashi Fusao, Miyoshi Tatsuji, Suzuki Shigetaka and Nakamura Mitsuo, together with the transcripts. The single volume publication appeared under the title Kindai no chōkoku, in July 1943, in which essays by Shimomura Toratarō, Kikuichi Masahito and Kawakami Ketsutaro were added. Only Kobayashi Hideo, who was so vocal during the discussions did not submit an essay. 80 Takeuchi Yoshimi (1959) has suggested that the title of the symposium was badly chosen since it presupposed that the participants would be anti-modern in their essays. 81 Records of these conferences are kept in the League of Nations archives, Geneva: vol. 889, CICI/LA 1931–38, boxes R3971–R3973 and R3984. 82 In fact, a whole section of the symposium was dedicated to music: Kindai nihon no ongaku OM:206–15. 83 The nature of modernity in Japan is discussed mainly in the subsections: Ware ware no kindai, OM:200–6; Bunmei to senmonka no mondai, OM:233–9; Ware ware no naka ni aru seiyō, OM:243–54; and Gendai nihonjin no kanosei, OM:264– 71. More specific discussion about the Western sources of modernity and particularly science are in: Runesansu no kindaiteki imi, OM:175–86; Kagaku ni okeru kindaisei, OM:196–4; and Kagaku to kami to no tsunagari, OM:194–200. 84 In the atmosphere of 1942, it would have been foolish for any of the delegates to pursue the Marxist heritage of this idea. 85 In section 4 of his supplementary essay, Kamei also contrasts the effects of speed in the West to those of slowness in Japan. He suggests that ancient poets, such as Bashō, created such perfect travel poetry because they were not in a hurry—they never took shortcuts. Indeed, Kamei laments the effects of speed on the Japanese

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86

87

88

89

90 91

92

93 94 95 96

97

98 99

language, which he felt had been reduced to sloganism by the privileging of speed in modern society (OM:12–15). This was also reflected in the American world view, which, according to this view, privileged the institutional state over the cultural nation to the point of the utter exclusion of the latter—American social scientists would crystalize this view into the Realist perspective on International Relations in the post-war period. See Tsumura’s supplemental essay nani o yaburu beki ka, OM:118–36. The problems of Americanization were also a concern of the sister symposiums held by the League of Nations in Europe, 1932–38. This was an idea prevalent in Japan since the Russo-Japanese War, when Japan triumphed over a technologically superior army allegedly because of superior spiritual purity (OM:261). A nice account of this is in Humphreys (1995). The nature of history is discussed mainly in subsections: Utsuriyuku mono to yasuranu mono, OM:217–32; Meiji no bunmei kaika no honshitsu, OM:239–43; and Gendai nihonjin no kanosei, OM:264–71. The idea of the dissociation of time from history had entered the intellectual discourse in Japan many years before in Nishida’s discussions of Bergson. This idea can be traced all the way to the foundation of the Kyoto School in Nishida’s Zen no kenkyū, not to mention in Mahāyāna interpretations of the ‘fall of man’ in early sūtra such as Cahkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta and Aggañña Sutta, where the ‘fall’ (i.e. the progress of rational history) was only apparent rather than substantive. In Nishida tetsugaku and Mahāyāna Buddhism, however, this contradictory dual existence was universal—not the special preserve of Japan. Nishida, in Zen no kenkyū, had limited such men to Jesus and Buddha (ZK:117). His stance was consistent with Zen Buddhism’s presentation of the sage who lives outside social conventions—acting morally if/when in enlightened accord with truth. This statement echoes earlier ones by Nishida which called for personal selfactualization, not political servitude. Here Hayashi’s position is consistent with Kokutai no hongi orthodoxy, exploiting the historicist stance of Ogyū Sorai’s kogakuha. Interestingly, there was no subsection of the symposium explicitly dedicated to analysing the nature of the war. The phrase konton antan taru heiwa (muddled and confused/obscure peace) is used to describe the war in China, in contrast with the phrase sensō no junitsu (purity of war), which is used to describe war with the West (Takeuchi OM:301). Kamei conveniently overlooks Japan’s alliance with Germany here. Kamei’s condemnation of imperialism in Asia is OM:306—it is a surprising example of intellectual consistency. It is in the context of this radically particularizing discourse that we must understand Nishida’s famous 1943 essay, sekaishichitsujo no genri, which attempts to de-particularize the linguistic and ideological conventions by refusing to append the prefix dai to kyōei ken, and by re-associating the concept with the philosophical concept of tokushuteki sekai. Watsuji Tetsurō, Nihon no shindō, WTZ XIV:296–312. In Chapter 4, we also saw how Nishida’s conception of loyalty was different from the orthodox use of the term in ultra-nationalist texts such as Kokutai no hongi.

NOTES 185

Conclusion: the philosophical site of politics in Japan—Shisō sensō, and the defeat of Nishida tetsugaku? 1 It is ironic, for example, that Chan, Mandaville and Bleiker (2001) make little mention of Buddhism, no mention of Zen, and no mention of either Nishida or any other Japanese thinkers. Two recent volumes have attempted to bring Nishida into the debates: Hwa Yol Jung (2002) includes a translation of Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tōzai kodai no bunka keitai; and Fred Dallmayr (1999) includes an excellent essay on Nishida by Arisaka Yōko. 2 I have elsewhere explored the idea that the imposition of behavioural norms from one culture onto another was justified by currents of thought in the European Enlightenment, particularly in the work of Montesquieu on climatic determinations of behaviour. In Nishida and especially in Watsuji, man’s relationship with his climate is fundamentally different, and there in no sense in which a colonial power can be a’social engineer’. See Jones (2002a). 3 Letter #1952, 3 July 1944, to Kimura Motomori. 4 Interestingly, in this footnote (154) Lavelle argues that Nishida’s orthodox position contrasts with the stance of Miki Kiyoshi, whose fascist standpoint apparently made him a reformer. To some extent it is true that Miki’s fascist standpoint was more informed by European than Japanese traditions of thought, but Miki’s emphasis on shidō genri (the principle of guidance by a great leader) was an explicit rationalization of the kind of authoritarian rule that Nishida opposed. To suggest that Nishida was more orthodox (whatever that means) than Miki seems to me to be nonsense. 5 As we saw in the Introduction, this criticism has been levelled at prominent scholars in the field, such as Najita and Harootunian (1988), by Graham Parkes (1997). 6 Heisig (2001:6) calls ultra-nationalism an aberration from the intellectual goals of the Kyoto School. 7 As we saw in Chapter 1, Berlin (2000b:34) observes that it is not possible for a thinker to produce work that is completely immune to perversion, but he suggests that it is the duty of the philosopher to make his work as unpervertable as possible. 8 We have seen how this is similar to what Ueda Shizuteru (1995:90) has called a ‘tug-of-war over meaning’. 9 Under similar conditions in the 1960s–1980s, dissenting Soviet intellectuals withdrew into silence and ‘internal exile’. 10 Van Bragt (1995) concludes in the affirmative. 11 Wight (1991) is an influential case in point—he locates Kant at the foundations of the ‘revolutionist’ tradition of International Relations Theory. I presume that he would also have placed Nishida in that category, had he known of Nishida’s work. 12 Dale (1986:207–10), for example, appears to suggest that ‘Nishidan’ means any system of thought that expresses a ‘pre-modern…fictive unity of subject and object’, inevitably leading to fascism. 13 In fact, as we have seen, Tanabe’s thought was far less abstract than that of Nishida and whilst ‘abstractness’ may have permitted the co-optation of Nishida tetsugaku it was the step out of abstractness into the specific needs of the Japanese nation in the work of thinkers like Tanabe that effected this co-option. Elsewhere, I have

186 NOTES

14 15 16

17 18

19

sought to demonstrate that Nishida’s intuitivist politics also hold potentials for liberalist interpretations in the context of the European discourse around Henri Bergson (Jones 2002b). Similar sentiments can be found in other collections, such as Katzenstein (1996). In a flourish of rhetoric, Bleiker (1998:59) refers to the existence of ‘fire-fighters… holding off the blaze’ of ‘un-orthodox’ or ‘non-European’ insights into IR Theory. Wight’s lectures are now collected together, Wight (1991). The quotation is from Bull’s ‘Martin Wight Memorial Lecture’ at the LSE, 29 January 1976, in Wight (1991:xxii). The ‘injustice of omission’ is, of course, at the core of Nishida’s system of international ethics. In fact, Bergson became president of the League of Nations’ Commission for Intellectual Co-operation in 1923, hoping to influence the development of an open society. Letter #1952, 3 July 1944, to Kimura Motomori.

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Index

Abe Masao 49 Abe Yoshishige 153 absolute nothingness (zettai mu) 52, 95, 108, 132, 159 Adorno, Theodore 13, 132, 139 Aizawa Seishisai 29, 41, 43, 44, 145 Amaterasu Omikami 82 Americanism 120–1 antinomianism 32, 37, 53 apologists 4, 99 Arisaka Yōko 4, 80, 94, 157 Aristotle 58, 59, 150, 151 Aristotle Society (Kyoto) 105 Austin, John Longshaw 14, 16 authority theory (kenryokusetsu/ken’isetsu) 30, 54–5, 56, 83 autonomous theories (jiritsuteki ronri gakusetsu) 53, 56–8

Buddhism 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 44, 112, 141, 151; in Heian period 31; influence on Kokutai no hongi on 84; in Japanese politics 30–3; and war 35–6 Buddhist brotherhood (sangha) 27 Buddhist law (buppō) 31, 33 Bull, Hedley 133 Bungakkai 137, 165, 166 Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta 34, 35, 57, 63, 66, 143, 167 Carr, EH 24, 67 Cassirer, Ernst 69 Centre for National Spiritual Culture (kokumin seishin bunka kenkyūjo) 70 Charter Oath (Seitaisho) 28, 43 chingo kokka kyō (nation-protecting sūtra) see Lotus Sūtra Chokugo engi (The Meaning of the Imperial Rescript) 44; see also Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo) Chūchō jijitsu (The True Centre Kingdom) 145 Chūkoku 145 Chūōkōron debates 75, 100, 109, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 161 civilization 158, 165; Atlantic 101, 104; Mediterranean 101, 104 closed society 134 Cohen, Hermann 69

backward marching revolutionary approach 20–1, 61, 82, 126, 128, 157 Bankei Yōtaku 38 Barshay, Andrew 13, 22, 23, 138, 139, 140 Benda, Julien 9, 12, 138 Bentham, Jeremy 57, 59 Bergson, Henri 53, 69, 133, 134, 148, 150, 163, 164, 169 Berlin, Isaiah 11, 12, 23, 24, 137, 168 Bimbō monogatari (Tale of Poverty) 152 Bix, Herbert 71 blind subservience (mōmokuteki fukujū) 56 Book of the Mean, The 150 Bourdieu, Pierre 15, 23, 140 Brym, Robert J 13, 21, 138

205

206 INDEX

Committee for the Renewal of Education and Scholarship (Kyōgaku sasshin hyōgikai) 72 communalism 61 Confucianism 25, 26, 28, 36, 41, 44, 90, 148 Confucian-Shintō Renaissance 43 Confucian Way of Heaven 44 Confucius 54, 142 convention 16–17 conventional (secular) law (sehō/ōbō) 31 co-operativism (kyōdōshugi) 5; principles 106 Co-Prosperity 7, 19, 29, 127 Co-Prosperity Sphere (kyōeiken) 4, 32, 44, 62, 63, 108, 130, 160 Co-Prosperity Sphere, Greater East Asia (dai tōa kyōeiken) 36, 63, 92, 93–4, 160 Critical Buddhism (hihan bukkyō) 32 culturally unified spheres (bunkateki tōitsu ken) 101 culture 132–3, 158–9, 162, 164–5; Japanese 88–9, 159, 164 Dale, Peter 3, 69, 107, 136, 142, 163, 168 Dallmayr, Fred 133 deities, Japanese (kami) 31 designations, Confucian principle of 29, 34, 38, 40, 42, 43, 130 Dewey, John 45, 146 divine heteronomous theory (shinkenteki kenryoku setsu) see authority theory (kenryokusetsu or ken’isetsu) Dōgen 37–8, 60, 64, 69, 144, 148 Dōshun see Hayashi Ranzan Doyle, Michael 152, 161 dystopia 24 Eastern Buddhist, The 137, 141, 147 Eco, Umberto 24, 82, 137 education 139, 149 Educational Reform Thing (Monbushō no kyōgaku sasshin toiu mono) 72 Eliade, Mircea 9 Emperor Organ Theory (tennō kikan setsu) 70, 71 energetism (katsudōsetsu) 44, 58

Enoki Kazuo 42, 145 Epicurus 57 evaluative-descriptive term 17–18, 24 existential realization (taitoku) 52 expansionism 91 films, American: criticism 120 Fletcher, William Miles 13, 14, 139 ‘The Formation of Modern Man’ 119 Foucault, Alfred 9, 12, 19, 23 Frazer, Sir James 69 Freeden, Michael 22–3 Fukuzawa Yukichi 45, 49, 50, 107, 146, 147 Furuta Hikaru 155 ‘The Future of the European Spirit’ 119 Gakumon no susume (The Advancement of Learning, 1872) 45 Gakuren Incident (1924–26) 162 Gempei War (1180–85) 32 genuine globalism (sekaishugi) 63 genuine syncretism (shin no shosetsukongō) 87 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 117 Golden Bough, The 69 good, the 51, 58–9, 60 Gotō Ryūnosuke 154 Gramsci, Antonio 9, 11, 16 Great Treason Incident (taigyaku jiken) 69 Hakayama Noriaki 143, 144 Hamann, Johann Georg 62 Harada Kumao 72, 74, 80, 154 harmony 29–30, 142, 150 Harootunian, Harry D 3, 4, 114, 136, 147 Hashikawa Bunzō 115–16, 136 Hatano Seiichi 145–6 Hatoyama Ichirō 70, 162 Hayashi Fusao 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 165 Hayashi Ranzan 36, 141 hedonism 57–8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 10, 44, 45, 56, 57, 66, 69, 103, 114, 133, 134, 149, 150

INDEX 207

Heidegger, Martin 5, 9, 10, 19, 22, 69, 99, 105, 108, 133, 137, 150, 151, 161, 164 ‘Heidegger factor’ 10, 137 Heisig, James 4, 5, 6, 26, 47, 97, 129, 137, 141, 158, 160, 161, 168 Hekiganroku (The Blue Cliff Records) 69 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 62 heteronomous ethics/theories (taritsuteki ronri gakusetsu) 54–6 Hirohito, Emperor 71, 73, 153 historical-bodily society (rekishiteki shintaiteki shakai) 86, 158 history, nature of 121–3, 167 Hobbes, Thomas 54, 55, 62, 113 Hōchibō Shōshin 32 Hōjō Tokiyoshi 27, 141 Hōnen 32 hongaku shisō 32, 37, 59, 65, 144 honji suijaku (original thing—trace manifestation) 31, 32, 42, 62, 142, 143 Hori Koretaka 75, 154 Horio Tsutomu 110 Hozumi Yatsuka 70, 72 Huntington, Samuel 101, 151, 162 Husserl, Edmund 69 ichinen sanzen (one thought, three thousand worlds) 32, 89 Idealist Confucianism 43 ideas 1–2, 5, 126, 140 ideological dialectics 163 ideological mode 22–3 ‘Iki’ no kōzō 117 Iku gakusei niokuru hanamuke no kotoba (Farewell Words to Students on the Way to War) 103 illocutionary force 16 Imakita Kōsen 27, 149, 153 imperialism: Japanese 2, 3, 4, 73, 75, 89, 95, 123, 124, 126–7, 130; Western 77, 79, 92, 94, 136, 160 Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo) 28, 44, 45, 50, 54, 61, 68, 95, 150 Imperial Way Zen 27 individualism 40, 45, 61, 83, 113

Inoue Enryō 27, 44, 45, 142, 146 Inoue Tetsujirō 11, 26, 27, 44, 45, 128, 141, 145 Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle 118, 163 intellectuals 9, 10–15, 19, 20–4, 136, 138, 152; bureaucratic 13; civil 13; professional 9, 13; in Russia 11 intermediate god (tochk no kami) 31 international relations 62–5, 88, 90–1, 133, 134–5, 167; problems of 41–3 International Theory 133 intuitive ethics (chokkakusetsu) 53–4 isolationism (sakoku) 36, 41 Itō Enkichi 82 Itō Jinsai 141 Iwanami culture 21, 128, 140 Iwanami Shigeo 153 James, William 45, 146, 148 Japan-centricism 31 Japan Communist Party (JCP) 105 Japanese Rice Riots (1918) 70 Japanese spirit (nihon seishin) 75, 80, 89, 106, 107, 114 Japanism (nihonshugi) 102–3, 106–7, 114, 117 Japan Romantic School (Nihon rōmanha) 7, 116–18, 165 Jūg yūzu (Ten 0xherding Pictures) 69 Jūjū shinron 31 Kamei Katsuichirō 102, 116, 118, 119, 120, 123, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168 Kanai Shōji 155 Kanmu, Emperor 30 Kant, Immanuel 7, 45, 46, 53, 56, 60, 69, 90, 129–30, 133–4, 146, 149, 150, 151– 2, 158, 160, 161, 162, 168; philosophy 63–5, 66 Kapital, Das 69, 70 kateiteki shisō (hypothetical thought) 149 Katō Hiroyuki 27, 45

208 INDEX

katsudōsetsu 145 Kawakami Hajime 70, 100, 105, 107, 152, 163 Kawakami Tetsutaro 118 Keene, David 10 Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tozai kodai no bunka keitai 31, 86, 89, 91–2 Kempō kōwa 71 Kido Kōichi 74, 80, 154 Kikuchi Takeo 71 Kindai no Chōkoku Symposium (Kyoto: 1942) 7, 109, 115, 118–25, 161, 164, 166 Kita Ikki 11, 73 Kiyozawa Manchi 27, 44, 142 Knauth, Lothar 48, 147 knowledge: absolute (paramārthasatya) 31; conventional (samvrtisatya) 31 Kobayashi Hideo 121, 122 Kōdansha culture 21 kogakuha (Ancient Learning School) 38 kōiteki chokkan (action intuition) 143–4 Kokka riyū no mondai 78, 88 Kokumin seishin bunka kenkyūjo 153 kokusuishugi (national essence-ism) 27 Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Polity) 7, 28, 29, 46, 54, 55, 72, 74–5, 82–5, 95, 101, 157; commentaries on 85–7; inter-relations 91–4; intra-relations 87–91; and Nishida Kitarō 80–2 Konoe Fumimaro 14, 21, 23, 74, 80, 98, 105, 108, 110 Kōsaka Masaaki 48, 98, 110, 111–12, 113, 131, 136, 146, 147, 164, 165 Kōtoku Shūsui 69, 153 Kōyama Iwao 43, 49, 74, 98, 110, 112, 114, 131, 136, 164, 165 Kūkai 31, 33, 142 Kuki Shūzō 117, 136, 152, 161 Kumazawa Banzan 39, 141 Kyoto Imperial University 139, 145, 162 Kyoto School of Philosophy (Kyoto tetsugaku-ha) 3–4, 5–6, 7, 40, 42–3, 47, 49, 97, 109–10, 117, 123, 136, 137, 141, 161, 162, 164, 166;

and Nishida tetsugaku 98–9, 131; and religious thought 26 Kyoto University Incident (1933) see Takikawa Incident (1933) Large, Stephen S 71 Lavelle, Pierre 4, 9, 10, 16, 73, 80, 81–2, 84, 85, 90, 91, 157, 159, 168 League for Academic Freedom 105 lecture double (double reading) 23 Leslie, Margaret 16 liberalism (jiyūshugi) 7, 106, 137 Lin-chi 142 Literary World Group 165 living Buddhism (gyōbutsuigi) 37 Locke, John 16 locutionary meaning 16 ‘Lost Tradition’ of intuition 5, 127 Lotus Sūtra 30, 31, 32, 33, 42, 62, 66, 142, 143 Löwith, Karl 19 Lutheranism 140 Machiavelli, Niccolò 16, 17 Mahāyāna tradition 2, 5, 51, 52, 53, 55, 130, 149 Malinowski, Bronislaw 69 Manchuria Incident (1931) 70, 71, 100, 109 Maruyama Masao 10, 11, 21, 128, 136, 138, 139, 140, 144, 146 Marx, Karl 69 Matsumoto Shirō 144 Meiji, Emperor 38 Meiji Constitution (Dai-Nihon Teikoku Kempō) 28, 44 middle kingdom 42–3, 111 Miki Kiyoshi 5, 13, 22, 23, 80, 98, 99, 104– 6, 107–8, 128, 131, 136, 139, 146, 152, 154, 163, 168 Mill, JS 46, 149 Mills, C Wright 14 Minamoto Yoritomo 32 Minobe, Tatsukichi 70, 71, 72, 73, 153 Minobe Incident (1935) 21, 71–2, 73, 153 Minoda Muneki 71 Mito School 29, 41, 42, 141 Miyoshi Tatsuji 119

INDEX 209

modernity 115, 116–18, 119–21, 123, 124, 137, 165–6, 167 monarchical heteronomous theories (kunkenteki kenryoku setsu) 54–5 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de 133, 168 moral energy (moralische energie) 110, 113, 165 More, Thomas 24, 140 Moroi Saburō 119, 120 Najita Tetsuo 3, 4, 136, 144 Nakae Tōju 38, 39, 141 Nakamura Mitsuo 119 nation (kokumin) 62–3, 78, 87–8, 96, 114, 125, 158–9, 160, 165 nationalist conservatism 61 national polity (kokutai) 41, 62; see also Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Polity) National Strategy Research Centre (Kokusaku kenkyukai) 75 Neo-Confucianism 36, 39 Neo-Confucian-Shintō syncretism 46, 61 Neo-Kantianism 45 New Order Movement 98 Nichiren 32, 33, 37, 143, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 150, 160 Nishi Amane 25, 27, 140 Nishida Kitarō 1, 49, 146; as an ineffective dissident intellectual 127– 32, 147; internal exile 131, 132; and Kokutai no hongi 80–2; political philosophy 2–3, 97, 126–7, 132–5, 136, 137; politics after 1911 68; politics before 1911 49–51 Nishida Enigma 4 Nishitani Keiji 5, 6, 40, 49, 50, 97, 98, 99– 103, 104, 108, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119, 121–2, 131, 136, 137, 152, 156, 161, 162, 164 Nitobe Inazō 163 nothingness (mu no basho) 95, 100, 122, 140 Okada Keisuke 71, 73

Ōnishi Hajime 44, 45, 143, 145 open society 134 orthodox tenno-centrism 4, 81, 128 Ōshima Yasumasa 109, 110 Ostwald, FH 44 Overcoming Modernity debates 115–16, 120, 121 Oyōmei gakuha 39 Pacific War 123, 124, 136 Parkes, Graham 4 particular world (tokushuteki sekai) 19, 63, 64, 93, 101 peace federation (foedus pacificum) 64 Peace Preservation Law (chian iji hō) 69, 70, 72, 76, 107, 162 Pearl Harbor attack (1941) 118, 123, 154 perfect society 24 perpetual peace 64–5, 66, 134 personality (jinkaku) 52, 58, 60, 132 philosophical mode 22 Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Die (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) 69 philosophy (tetsugaku) 25 Plato 58, 59–60, 86, 150 pleasure (kairaku) 58 pluralism 32, 61 political philosophy: in early-twentieth-century Japan 43–6 Political Teachings Society (Seikyōsha) 27 political text 20 ‘The Political Thought of Nishida Kitarō’ 80 politics, Japanese: influence of Buddhism on 30–3 positivism 45 pragmatism 45 Prince, The 16 pseudo-intellectuals 10 pseudo-orientalism (giji tōyōshugi) 111 psychologism 52 pure experience (junsui keiken) 51, 52, 54, 60, 95, 108, 113, 132, 134, 135, 146, 148, 149 ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School’ 4

210 INDEX

rationalism 56–7, 140, 162 reality (jitsuzai) 51, 52 Rechtsphilosophie 69 Rekishiteki genjitsu 100, 103 Rekishiteki shintai 74, 85, 86, 100, 109, 146, 154 religion (shūkyō) 51; and state 33 Rennyo 56, 149 republic 66, 133–4, 152, 158 Republic, The 60 Research Group on Materialism (Yuiken) 105 Rickert, Heinrich 69, 105 Rinzairoku 142 Risshō ankoku ron 33 Rongo shūsetsu (Collected Commentaries on the Analects) 69 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 55, 56, 57, 62, 87, 148, 151 Rōyama Masamichi 13, 128 Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) 141, 167 Ryu Shintarō 13 Saichō 31, 32, 89, 142, 143 Said, Edward 9, 12, 13, 21, 23, 56, 128, 138, 139 Saionji Kinmochi 74 Sakuda Sōichi 157 Sanron Buddhism 30 satisfaction (manzoku) 58 Sawada, Janine Anderson 27, 141 Sawayanagi Incident (1913) 162 second thoughtism 128 Seikyōsha 142 Sekaikan to kokkakan (World-view and Nation-view) 6, 100, 110 Sekai shinchitsujo no genri 5, 7, 32, 92, 153; differences between Tanabe’s and Nishida’s draft 76–80, 156 sekai shinchitsujo no genri’ jiken (Principles of the New World Order Incident) 75 Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon Symposium 7, 103, 104, 109, 110–15 self-actualization 57, 60–1, 113, 151

self-cultivation (kyōyōshugi) 36, 37, 38, 137 Seventeen Article Constitution see Shōtoku’s constitution Shaku Sōen 27, 35 Shidō, Munan 38 shikan taza (just sitting) 37, 64 Shillony, Ben-Ami 3, 136, 138, 152 Shimizu Tōru 72, 153 Shin Buddhism 27, 142 Shingon Buddhism 31 Shin-Nihon no shisō genri 105 Shinran 32, 34, 37, 54, 60, 142, 143, 148 Shinron (New Proposals) 41 Shintō 6, 25, 140; Imperial Way 44; mythology 28, 29, 41, 42 Shōbōgenzō 144 Shōgun 36–7, 42 Shōtoku’s constitution 28–30, 34, 39, 40, 41, 44, 61, 145, 150 Shōwa Research Association (Shōwa kenkyukai) 14, 23, 105 Shōwa Restoration movement 71, 73 Shugo kokka ron 32 shūketsu (bloc formation) 162 shūkyō tachiba (religious standpoint) 143 Shu no ronri to sekai zushiki 100 shushō-ittō (unity of practice and realization) 37 Skinner, Quentin 10, 16, 17, 18–19, 128, 140 social Darwinism 45 Socrates 56 Sorai (Ogyū Sorai) 38, 39, 40, 41, 141, 144 Sōtō Zen sect 37 speech-acts 14, 15, 16–17, 19, 20, 21–2, 23 Spencer, Herbert 45 Spengler, Oswald 164 Stroup, Alice 24 subjective nothingness (shutaiteki mu) 122 subjugated knowledges 14, 138 Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Substance and Function) 69 Sung Confucianism see Neo-Confucianism Superior Special Police Force 70, 76, 129 Suzuki Daisetsu 27, 50, 141, 158 Suzuki Kisaburō 153

INDEX 211

Suzuki Shigetaka 98, 110, 111, 112, 119, 120, 121, 122, 136, 164 syncretic Buddhism (kenmitsu bukkyō) 31 taikyō 140 Takagi Sōkichi 74, 154, 157 Takakura Teru 108 Takeuchi Yoshimi 115, 116, 165 Takeyama Michio 10, 24 Takikawa Yukitoki 70, 153, 162 Takikawa Incident(1933) 70, 162 Takuan Sōhō 148 Tanabe Hajime 5, 6, 14, 72, 95, 97, 98, 99– 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 114, 131, 136, 137, 143, 146, 149, 151, 152, 156, 161, 162, 168–9 Tanabe Juri 75, 76, 155–6 Tanaka, Stefan 42 Tannishō 142 Tendai Buddhism 31, 32, 143 tenkō 138, 139 Tetsugaku ronbunshū dai-yon hoi [Kokutai] 79, 81, 88 ‘text only’ approach 15, 16 Theory of International Relations 133, 168 Thought Police see Superior Special Police Force Tocqueville, Alexis de 133 Tōjō Hideki 75, 76, 80, 110, 136, 161 Tokugawa Constitution 144 Tokugawa Ieyasu 36 Tokugawa Shogunate 37 Tokyo Imperial University 139 Tosaka Jun 22, 97, 98, 100, 104, 105–8, 131, 136, 146, 161 Toynbee, Arnold 164 Tōyō bunka to Shina no shōrai (East Asian Culture and the Future of China) 44 Trahison des clercs, La 138 true nation 91, 96, 114, 125, 134 Tsumura Hideo 119, 120, 121 Tsurumi Shunsuke 10 Tully, James 16, 17 turnabout (honshin ikkai) 34–5, 37, 54, 60 Tzu-ssu 150 Ueda Shizuteru 4, 19, 94, 139, 146, 168

Uesugi Shinkichi 70, 72 ultra-nationalism 10, 15, 81, 102, 103, 157, 168 universalism (fuhenshugi) 12, 80, 90, 91– 2, 93, 94–5, 158, 159, 160 Upanishads 59 urban society 117 utilitarianism 57 Utopia 24 Utopianism 23–4, 35, 65–7 Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 140 Van Bragt, Jan 4 Viglielmo, Valdo Humbert 48, 146, 147 Wang Yang-Ming 39, 43 war, nature of 123–4, 167 warrior family society 117, 164 Watanabe Kaigyoku 27, 141 Watsuji Tetsurō 31, 72, 73, 75, 82, 98, 124, 125, 136, 151, 152, 157, 161, 164, 168 Weber, Max 69, 119 Westernization 111, 112, 116–17, 120, 142 Western philosophy 1, 5, 7, 27, 47, 141 Wight, Martin 133, 151, 168, 169 Wilde, Oscar 10, 98, 128 willed-action (yūiteki dōsa) 52 Windelband, Wilhelm 69 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15 world-historical standpoint (sekaishiteki tachiba) 12, 87, 110, 115, 127, 135, 137 world-historical world (sekaishiteki sekai) 78, 87, 93 world under one roof (hakkō ichiu) 32, 84, 89 world-of-worlds (sekaiteki sekai) 32, 87, 115 world-of-worlds formationism (sekaitekisekai-keiseishugi) 77, 79, 89, 95 Yamada Munemutsu 70 Yamaga Sokō 141, 145

212 INDEX

Yamamoto Chōsui 49, 50, 154 Yang Chien 35 YasudaYojūrō 116, 165–6 Yasui Sokken 69 Yatsugi Kazuo 75, 80, 155 Yoshida Shōin 42, 44, 145 Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko 122 Yoshimoto Takaaki 10 Young, Louise 127, 136 Yusa Michiko 94, 136, 137, 147 Zen Buddhism 26, 36, 37, 38, 49, 50, 141, 167 Zen no kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good) 5, 7, 20, 39, 46, 47–9, 62, 66, 74, 79, 83, 85–6, 87, 90, 91, 132, 141, 146, 149, 154; and international relations 62–5; as political criticism 53; structure and content 51–3 zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu 81