Defending Japan's Pacific War

The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power

David Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134350667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years.

The decay of Pacific War orthodoxy

3 Philosophy and the Pacific War

Imperial Japan and the making of a post-White world

The future will, in all reasonable probability, be what coloured men make it.

W.E.B. du Bois¹

A people (minzoku) in itself is meaningless. When a people acquires subjectivity, it becomes a nation-state. A people without subjectivity, … that is a people that has not transformed itself into a nation (kokumin), is powerless. Masaaki Kōsaka²

Is philosophy the final home of the European spirit? After all the batterings of the old century, Europe even now retains its philosophic centrality. Thus, France may have lost the bulk of her empire, but in the kingdom of the mind, much of the world remains a suburb of Paris. This centrality has prompted Naoki Sakai to observe that Japanese writers on the intellectual history of their country are haunted by a presence that is almost always an absence: the Western reader.³ For the ambitious Japanese thinker, it is the European reader who has, by tradition, embodied the highest standards.

If knowledge is power, philosophy’s power lies in its ability to deconstruct power. It is only in this sense that today, Eurocentrism is still about power. This insight gave the wartime Kyoto philosopher his point of departure. This is why Europe was indispensable to the labours of the Kyoto School during the Pacific War and why Europe remains the last great hope of many Japanese intellectuals, because they recognise that America’s hegemony cannot be resisted without Europe and its tradition of radical criticism.

Philosophers at war

In 1941, at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbour, the challenge to the Kyoto philosopher was unambiguous. If East Asia was to master itself, to achieve effective and comprehensive subjectivity, the ability to deconstruct Western power was the one metaphysical skill that East Asians had to acquire because power lay in non-Asian hands. Without this skill, Western power could not be deflected, let alone matched. But to deconstruct power is to understand power, and to understand power is to learn how to foster power. Without the ability to foster power, any effort to achieve shared prosperity for all East Asians would necessarily end in failure. Genuine shared prosperity: this is what the Kyoto School thought the concept of a Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere had to mean. Otherwise, as the authors of The Standpoint of World History and Japan argue convincingly, the idea was doomed from the outset.

The wartime Kyoto School was a humanism. It was a subjectivist philosophy in which man and his works occupied centre stage. The Kyoto philosopher learned how to deconstruct power (that of others) in order to construct power (for oneself). This turn to the subjective may explain why Kitarō Nishida, although the father of the Kyoto School and the figure who dominated its first phase (c. 1917–c. 1927), was not the leading thinker in the wartime or middle phase of the Kyoto School (c. 1927–c. 1945). Tanabe exercised that role. Nishida’s ambivalence towards Tanabe and the second generation of the Kyoto School derives in part from his preference for objec-tivism, and we need to keep this fact in mind when we brood on the accusations of ‘ultra-nationalism’ made against him. But Nishida’s fundamental nihilism put him at odds with the central thrust of Kyoto thought between the Manchurian Incident (1931) and the fall of Saipan (July 1944), when all but the most stubborn members of the Japanese establishment, philosophical and otherwise, realised that the war was lost.

The subjectivist cast of wartime Kyoto School thought made, in essence, a philosophy of agency. Kōyama may have shared Nishida’s opposition to intellectualism (shuchishugi), his preference for ‘facts’ (koto) over ‘rationalism’ (ri) and his fundamentally anti-humanist stance, but only up to a point.⁴ The wartime Kyoto School was committed to a non-Western form of modernity. It was not a passive school of anti-Western cultural criticism. The wartime Kyoto thinker sought to change Japan, not to elaborate a defence of a primordial national identity.

The Kyoto thinker’s commitment to shutaisei, that is his metaphysical subjectivism, sets him apart from many other forms of Japanese nationalist reflection. He has no time for the Japan Romantic School’s rejection of modernisation. The Kyoto philosopher believes that ‘overcoming modernity’ means transcending Western modernity with an East Asian form of modernity that is genuinely modern. It is here that the suggestion that Nishitani introduced the idea of ‘subjectivity’ into Japanese thought comes into its own. Without close attention to the idea of shutaisei, one cannot make sense of The Standpoint of World History and Japan.

Any serious engagement with Japanese philosophy during the Great East Asian War (1931–45) requires a rubric of thought that can encompass the reality of power as well as the power of thought. Cornel West, the Black American philosopher, locates this rubric in the moment of post-modernity. For West, three historic transitions define this moment: the end of ‘the Age of Europe’, the advent of American global domination, and the decoloniali-sationof Asia and Africa.⁵ It is my thesis that no school of non-White philosophy rivals the power and potential of the Kyoto School to rethink the importance and meaning of these three transitions. The decolonialisation of Asia and Africa between 1946 and 1975 was, for example, only one of four critical hours of anti-White resistance during the twentieth century. The three which West neglects are the Russo-Japanese War, Imperial Japan’s Southeast Asian and Pacific offensive between 1941 and 1942 (the crucial rehearsal for the Korean and Vietnam conflicts), and the economic rise of East Asia, orchestrated and funded by Japan, between 1968 and 1997.

The influence of the Kyoto School on Japanese thought and feeling suddenly flared into notorious apogee at the precise hour when European centrality, as a geopolitical force, was fatally eclipsed in 1941. That was the year when the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan and the United States entered the Second World War. This not only transformed that conflict from a European into a global struggle, it also marked the beginning of the end of Europe’s mastery of its own affairs as America began to expand the reach of its empire by preparing to crush its German and Japanese rivals.

At the time, the events of 1941–42 heralded the conclusive overthrow of the Eurocentric universe that had increasingly dominated Japan’s intellectual horizon since the late eighteenth century. At first, this liberating prospect mesmerised the Japanese intelligentsia. It appeared to blunt the provocation of European rationality while offering Japan a previously undreamt of opportunity to achieve intellectual parity with Europe on Japanese terms. But if Europe was ceasing to be the power centre of the globe, it remained the indispensable arsenal of intellectual freedom, creativity and autonomy. The rejection of ‘Europe as domination’ never precluded, certainly not for the Kyoto School, Europe’s value as a vast storehouse of intellectual means to resist the emerging threat of American cultural hegemony.

In Japan, the most famous response to the shattering of Eurocentrism came almost at once in two major published debates staged in 1941–42: ‘Overcoming Modernity’ (‘Kindai no Chōkoku’) and ‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’ (‘Sekai-shi-teki Tachiba to Nippon’).⁶ The first was attended by an influential group of patriotic writers and scholars, including two Kyoto philosophers. The second was, as noted in Chapter 1, entirely the work of Kyoto thinkers.

There are ample grounds to conclude that the most history-minded members of the Kyoto School were well prepared for this moment. The key figure in setting this train of ‘post-White’ thought in motion was not Nishida but Tanabe.⁷ Whatever their disagreements, Tanabe and the ‘gang of four’ from the second generation – Kōyama, Kōsaka, Suzuki and Nishitani – collectively generated a remarkable discourse, grounded in Hegelian metaphysics, on the nature of Euro-American centrism. Only by achieving genuine subjectivity had Europe become the master of the globe. Anticipating a time after Europe, Kōyama called for a plurality of worlds. But this newly won autonomy for non-Whites was to be measured against the only standard of achievement that counts before the court of world-historical significance: European subjectivity or mature self-mastery.

Other schools of non-Western reflection may have been equally anxious for European colonial hegemony to pass, but none was more mindful than the Kyoto School of the fact that European centrality was earned and that overcoming modernity would test the political skills, the economic discipline, the intellectual verve and the moral resources of modern Asians to the limit. After the hopes of 1940–42, Japan’s defeat in 1945 demonstrated the difficulty of the immense task of overcoming the White West.

Such realism was reinforced during the 1990s. The fading of the Japanese miracle and the crises that shook the economies of Southeast Asia offer stark reminders that victory still eludes East Asians in their long struggle to match American subjectivity. Nevertheless, whenever the anti-White thinker has refused to surrender to the temptations of anger or despair, self-hate or complacency, in favour of hard truths and genuine national achievement, he will find that the Kyoto philosopher has been there before him.

The new attack on the Kyoto School

The work of the wartime Kyoto School of philosophy stands as one of the earliest and most sophisticated Asian efforts to criticise the sources of Euro- American power and to propose an East Asian remedy for it. This is where the greatness of the Kyoto School as a branch of political philosophy will be found. But this greatness will never be exposed without the death of Pacific War orthodoxy and its ruling assumption that the Allied crusade in the Pacific was, in essence, a struggle of democratic morality against the aggressive brutality of Japanese expansionism.

The Pacific War was a war of military expansion by both Imperial Japan and the United States. Japanese aggression was never the whole truth about the Pacific War, but the ideology of American exceptionalism has blinded us to any other truth. This blindness persists to this day, as the US response to the events of 11 September 2001 painfully shows. Why else are we so keen to endorse the curiously self-serving notion that any violent resistance to American hegemony is ‘fascistic’, as the expression ‘Axis of Evil’ would appear to imply. Putting the blinkers of exceptionalism to one side allows us to see that the Pacific War was a decisive chapter in the construction of America’s global hegemony.

Such sceptical probing has been indispensable since the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on Manhattan and Washington DC. Despite the natural desire to respond with patriotic indignation against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, the professional student of Asia knows that many of the assertions being made by politicians and media pundits about Asia, be they about the character of Islam or the relevance of the post-war occupation of Japan to the military conquest of Iraq, are nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. But any Orientalist worthy of the name also knows that truth-telling on such occasions may put the scholar’s reputation, even one’s career, at risk.

The fact that the Asian specialist may, from time to time, get into serious trouble at home provides a measure of reassurance that we are more than foot soldiers serving the cause of Western global hegemony. Nevertheless, Edward Said’s sweeping indictment of the contemporary heirs of European Orientalism still stands:

Orientalism [is] the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, by settling it, ruling over it; in short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.⁸

The scholarly servicing of America’s global hegemony does not exhaust the labours of the Asian specialist, but there is neither a phrase nor a comma in Said’s critique that does not apply to the Asian specialist when we render such service. More than sixty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no serious Japanese thinker argues that the Japanese Navy should be based in San Diego or that the colonisation of New South Wales should be a goal of Japanese foreign policy, but Western writings on Japan continue to treat that nation with moral disdain while observing a strict silence on the provocation of America’s empire. To the degree that Pacific War orthodoxy focuses its energies on the single-minded critique of the conduct of the Imperial Japanese Army between 1931 and 1945, it opts out of the present. It is passé in the strongest sense of the word.

This risk is most evident among the so-called neo-Marxists of Japan studies. Graham Parkes has exposed the theoretical incoherence, ethical muddles and factual dishonesty of this school of interpretation.⁹ In accord with Parkes’s criticism, Chapter 4 probes the factual foundations of Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity, a major recent statement of the neo- Marxist case.¹⁰ Outside the neo-Marxist camp, more sober approaches prevail. But it is equally true that during the past decade, Japan studies has had its sails scorched by the orthodox mindset that still dominates the mass media. The debacle over the Hiroshima atomic bomb exhibition organised by the Smithsonian in Washington DC in 1995 offered a stern warning about the dangers of our failure to combat what is most obscurant in the orthodox stance.¹¹

Rude awakenings

These dangers are painfully evident in the recent controversies among Western scholars, particularly but not exclusively in the United States, over the ethical and philosophical status of the wartime Kyoto School. Looking back now, one can only conclude that a new round of ‘Japan critique’ (from the German, ‘Japanokritik’) appeared to make sense at the time. This new attack on the Kyoto School was a delayed aftershock to the exposure of Paul de Man’s anti-Semitic editorials in 1987 and the deepening contr...