JAPANESE NATIONALISM ONCE MORE: THE KYOTO SCHOOL
The main standard bearers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida, Hajime Tanabe, and Keiji Nishitani were universalists who nevertheless supported Japanese nationalism, the Emperor system, and the Pacific War. Nishida died in 1945, but Tanabe came to regret that he had not resisted the war and that his students had been sacrificed to blind militarism. He attributed his lack of resistance to being faint-hearted and allowing himself to be swept away by the emotional torrent of the times. Nishitani, too, recognized that his optimistic belief in the spiritual strength of the Japanese people rooted in ancient traditions was based on self-deception. But these illusions about the Japanese spirit were shared by many Japanese.
What then explains the inability of these Japanese universalist philosophers to resist the nationalist wave that led them to stray from the path on which they had originally set out? Some of the responsibility should rest on their own shoulders; the Japanese government and the Japanese people played a large part as well. But considerable responsibility ought also to be given to the West. If the West had not been so racist and arrogant, would Japanese ultranationalism have taken root in the first place?
It is always possible for highly conscious people to rise above their surroundings. For the most part, though, this did not happen in the case of the Kyoto philosophers that supported the Pacific War. To their credit, they insisted that the war should be fought in a righteous manner. To their chagrin, they seriously overestimated the likelihood that the Japanese government would carry out their wishes. In their philosophy, good judgment is the product of the ability to see things as they are. And this ability to perceive reality is derived from spiritual understanding and practice that frees people from egocentrism. In light of these standards, their own actions can be considered failures of judgment about the Japanese state and the war. Tanabe recognized the nature of this failure after the war when he criticized himself for being egocentric. For him, the way out was to acknowledge his weakness, acquire humility, and come to terms with his own lack of understanding and freedom.
There is also the failure of the Japanese people and the Japanese government. Motivated by the cause of staking out a respected place for their nation in the world, Japanese achieved economic and military success. But success is no guarantee of righteousness and both the people and the government uncritically assumed that their nation’s actions were just and beyond reproach.
The responsibility of the West for setting in motion all these tragic events is clear. Western dominance over Asia was justified by notions of white racial superiority, and non-white peoples such as the Japanese were treated as second-class humans. Such racist assumptions and demeaning treatment pushed Japanese people to prove their worth. They did this by meeting the accepted world standard of wealth and power. Their means of accomplishing this goal were also conventional: imperialism and war. In this respect, their behavior was neither better nor worse than that of the leading Western nations. Therefore, honesty demands the recognition that World War II was not caused by Japanese treachery or due to the expansionist nature of Japanese fascism. It was simply the outcome of imperialist rivalry and of the desire for Japan to get its own place in the sun through the construction of an Asian empire. Building such an empire would mean keeping the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Americans out of Asia which could only be accomplished through war.
As David Williams has argued, it is a delusion to believe that the Allied cause in World War II was a totally righteous one. In the Pacific, the Allied purpose was to preserve the hegemony of the white nations in Asia. In addition, the Japanese military was not the only one guilty of criminal actions during the war. The bombings of civilian populations in the cities of Japan by the American Air Force were as much war crimes as Japanese actions in China and the treatment of Allied war prisoners. From an ethical standpoint, many of the actions of both sides were atrocious. Yet, members of the Allied nations continue to interpret the Pacific War as a battle between good and evil in which the good people won.
Ultimately, praise or blame does not need to be meted out. The issue is rather to gain sufficient understanding of what happened in order to draw the appropriate lessons for the future. With respect to the Kyoto school, it is necessary to acknowledge the positive as well as the negative side of their political philosophy. They were some of the first non-white thinkers to create a vision of a culturally plural world that would no longer be dominated by the white race. In this new world, the Western view of history would no longer be the only available story. The nonwhite nations of the world would begin to come into their own as actors on stage of history. And this is the world that we actually live in during the early part of the 21st century.
The world situation has dramatically changed since the 1930s. But this does not mean that Western racism and dominance have fully run their course. The cultural shift to a multipolar world in which people of all colors are treated with respect is still taking place and is far from complete.
