humanism” based on Buddhist compassion for all sentient beings. Despite his
naive or opportunistic dallying with militaristic sentiments, the blend was not
a politically acceptable one, and Miki died in prison. Others of the Kyoto
school, especially the luminaries Watsuji and Nishitani, emerged onto the
world philosophical scene after the war with reputations abstracted from
politics, welcomed by the modern tradition of self-questioning which had
become such a focus of attention in the West during these same generations.
Again we see in Japan broad parallels with Western intellectual develop-
ment. The era of secularism which set in with the displacement of religion
(Buddhism in one place, Christianity in the other) from monopoly over the
means of intellectual production; the rise of the marketplace for education and
for popular culture; the expansion of literacy and higher training that went
along with capitalism and the bureaucratization of society: all these were
indigenous developments in Japan, under way since the pre-Tokugawa era. By
the 1700s, Japan had more than just its “Enlightenment” rationalists and its
neoconservative traditionalists. Japanese political and intellectual movements
of the 1800s were those of a society with cosmopolitan networks holding
refined means of mobilization, facing a state whose problems were those of a
relatively autonomous capitalist economy and a modern situation of religious
and cultural action. It should not be surprising that in the early 1900s Japanese
intellectuals were fully in the swing of the complex, even tortured combinations
of intellectual lineages that are characteristic of its counterparts in the West.
For this reason it has not been only Eurocentric Westerners who harp on
“the opening of Japan.” Since the early 1900s, Japanese intellectuals and
ideologists themselves have generally adopted the view of their society as a
traditional one, suddenly beset by the pressures of the modern world imposed
from without. It has been a convenient excuse. Since the Kyoto school of phi-
losophers, it has been customary to attribute to the West the dislocating effects
of the rationalized worldview, the deadly inhumanity of market relations, and
the pressures of production. By adopting the myth that Japanese modernization
was Westernization, Japanese intellectuals and politicians evaded the problems
inherent in a dynamic that was substantially the same in every part of the
world.378 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths