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ABSTRACT
In this review essay of Harumi Osaki’s book, Nothingness in the Heart of the Empire, about the Kyoto School’s wartime political philosophy, I examine the arguments and claims behind Osaki’s thesis that the Kyoto School tends to align itself with nationalist and imperialist formations that lead to political concerns. I focus on some of the concrete problems with her arguments, including the book’s lack of examination of the sociopolitical context behind and surrounding the philosophers’ wartime discourse. These problems result in a one-sided or unbalanced image of the Kyoto School, lacking nuance and painting complex grey areas in black and white.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Edward Said is here discussing Louis Massignon.
2 This is discussed in Ichijo and also Krummel.
3 See Williams Citation2014, 300n78.
4 In fact, the notion of a nothing grounding plurality is comparable to Jean-Luc Nancy’s more recently developed notion of nothingness as the world’s “archi-spatiality,” allowing for coexistence without a transcendent(al) other (Nancy Citation2007, 70, 71, 73).
5 Nishitani’s talk of “Japanizing” sounds controversial to our post-war ears, but he seemed to mean modernization of other Asian nations under Japanese leadership, akin to the way people often speak of Westernization, but with an East Asian key.
6 For example, Shimomura calls for a refinement, rather than “overcoming,” of modernity, and he explicitly argues against replacing it with something purely Japanese from pre-modern times (Kawakami and Takeuchi Citation1979, 112).
7 Decades after the war Takeuchi critiqued Japan’s wartime policy for its lack of awareness of how there could be distinct modes of modernization among Asian nations (Takeuchi Citation2005, 149–65, 153, 161).
8 For Fukuzawa the kokutai was to be forged through an internal civilizing project that would make Japan more Western and more modern (Fukuzawa Citation2008, 232; Josephson Citation2012, 142).
9 Ueda Shizuteru called this rhetorical strategy a “tug-of-war over the meaning of words” (Ueda Citation1995, 90).
10 This was reported in a Mainichi Newspaper article of November 1, 1945, right after the war (Hanazawa Citation2004, 44–45; 52–53).
11 Hanazawa Citation2004, 44–45, 53. Right before the war’s end in 1945, an Army officer’s speech given in preparation for the coming U.S. invasion proclaimed that all Kyoto School philosophers should be put to the spear (Horio Citation1994, 291).
12 These are memos compiled by Ōshima Yasumasa who was the editor, meeting planner, and liaison coordinator for the secret meetings with the Navy and also took minutes for the Chūōkōron sessions. David Williams has stated that there has been a “kill-with-silence” response to the Japanese publication of these memos (Williams Citation2014, 47). The only mention of these Memos that Osaki makes is a reference in a footnote to alleged discrepancies indicated in a publication by Kimoto Takeshi without discussing exactly what they are.
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John W.M. Krummel
John W.M. Krummel is Associate Professor in the Department. of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Religion from Temple University. He is author of Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place (Indiana University Press, 2015). His writings on topics, such as Heidegger, Nishida, Reiner Schürmann, imagination, and Buddhist philosophy, among others, have appeared in a variety of philosophy journals and books. He is also the editor of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader (Roman & Littlefield International, 2019) and co-translator of, and author of the introduction for, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō (Oxford University Press, 2011), and has translated other works from Japanese and German into English. He is Associate Editor of International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill), Editor of The Journal of Japanese Philosophy (SUNY Press), and the President of the International Association for Japanese Philosophy.