Koyama went so far as to extol war as the test of moral hegemony in the world
and advocated state enforcement of discipline in intellectual as well as social
matters. Outside the militant ranks of the Kyoto school per se (while teaching
in the same university), Watsuji expounded Nietzschean denunciation of ra-
tionalism and sought a parallel to Nietzsche’s return to primordial Greek
attitudes in a return to the spirit of ancient Japan. In 1942, just as the Pacific
war was at its height, Nishitani took part in a major intellectual gathering at
Kyoto on the theme of “overcoming modernity.”
Despite the nationalist and particularist emphases of these movements, they
cannot be considered merely a continuation of the previous tradition of Na-
tional Learning or of Meiji-era Shinto. Those had arisen in a critical dialectic
with Confucianism and were principally anti-Chinese (and secondarily anti-
Buddhist). Both the Kyoto school and nationalist ideologues such as Tachibana
and Okawa, however, tended to draw heavily on Buddhism as the common
denominator of Asian culture as a whole; for Watsuji, Buddhist nothingness is
the counterweight to Western alienation between self and nature. One may see
this as an ideological stretch to legitimate Japanese imperial conquests on the
Asian mainland. But although there was convergence between the philosophi-
cal trajectory of the Kyoto school and the ideologies of Japanese fascism, the
inner community of intellectuals here did not simply resonate external political
moods. In general, the intellectual world never reduces to external politics pure
and simple; although the two spheres sometimes mesh, they have their own
dynamics. Buddhism, revived by the inner dynamics of the Japanese university
philosophers as they made their entry into the cosmopolitan networks of world
philosophy, provided the key ontological concepts for the repudiation of West-
ern rationalism. Although this provided materials for fascist propaganda as
well, it would be absurd to consider Buddhism per se fascist or militaristic.
The Kyoto school, for all its nationalist affinities, depended on cosmopoli-
tan networks and themes. Its repudiation of the West is itself a theme within
contemporary Western philosophy. The struggle over rationality and science
was a central issue in their network contacts—the Neo-Kantians, pheno-
menologists, and Heidegger. Any vigorous intellectual community derives its
energy from oppositions. These same ingredients were combined by various
members of the Japanese network to produce contending positions. Thus,
among Nishida’s pupils were the Marxist Tosaku Jun, and most famously Miki
Kiyoshi, who studied also with Rickert and Heidegger. Miki too took up
Nishida’s ontology of “place,” which he analyzed in terms of the expansion
of world capitalism into Asia; the counter-stroke of the Japanese invasion of
China in 1937 he interpreted as the movement toward Asian unification
around a new era of cooperativism. Here the theme of Marxist socialism was
blended with Shinran’s Pure Land Buddhism. Miki envisioned an “Asian
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 377