old hat, a Japanese importation of existentialism. In fact the European exis-
tentialist vogue did not really get going until the 1930s and especially the
1940s; the Kyoto school philosophers were much closer to the source of this
movement, and not solely because of their network contacts with the pheno-
menologists in the early 1920s.
The most renowned Japanese philosopher of the following generation,
Nishitani Keiji, was a Nishida pupil who spent three years studying with
Heidegger in the 1930s. Nishitani perpetuated Nishida’s central technique:
juxtaposing Europe and Asia, and relying heavily on Dogen, he set forth
Buddhist thought patterns as a solution to present-day cultural crisis. Nishitani
criticized Western theism for its cleavage between God and creation, subject
and object, out of which grows the twin evils of rootless science and technology
and the egocentric nihilism of the existentialists. Against this Nishitani upheld
Buddhist sunyata (emptiness) and conditioned co-production. Nishida and
Nishitani had an ecumenical as well as a nationalist side. Nishitani drew links
to the Western mystics (Plotinus, Eriugena, Eckhart, Boehme, Cusanus), but
argued that there is a better grounding in “oriental logic.”
Here we should be aware of a preemptive move by the Kyoto school
vis-à-vis all other Japanese (and indeed Chinese and Indian) philosophical
schools: it was Buddhist metaphysics, and specifically that of the Hua-yen–Zen
tradition (rooted in the classical formulation of Nagarjuna), that was elevated
to the title of “the Eastern Way of Thought.” Schools like Sorai’s worldly
pragmatism were swept from the attention space.^53 Zen philosophers allied
with nationalist self-assertion to take control of the newly imported university
base. European philosophers were enlisted either as allies or foils, serving to
shift the focus of attention to a Zen-centered agenda.
The Kyoto school coincided with the nationalist repudiation of Western
ideas and institutions in Japanese political movements more broadly in the
1920s and 1930s. Nationalist and indeed fascist political ideologues and ac-
tivists, such as Tachibana Kosaburo, formulated positions which paralleled
Nishida’s (CHJ, 1988: 711–761). In 1932 Tachibana too rejected the formal-
istic logic of the West as inapplicable to Asia; materialist domination of nature
is alien to the spirit manifested in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism,
emphasizing the non-self over the self. For Okawa Shumei in 1939, the inde-
pendence of Asia from the West was historically awakened by the victory of
Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. These ideas paralleled Nishida’s and
extended them into political activism, manifested in, among other things,
bombings and assassinations of parliamentary leaders. On their side, the
younger members of the Kyoto school (Nishitani, Koyama Iwao, Kosaka
Masaaki, Suzuki Shigetaka) interpreted Nishida’s ontological “space” as the
“world stage” where Japan would takes its place in action. Kosaka and
376 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths