Nothingness in the Heart of Empire: The Moral and Political Philosophy of the Kyoto School in Imperial Japan by Harumi Osaki (review)

Harumi Osaki has written an important book on the relation between Nishida Kitarō's philosophy, the Kyoto school, and Japanese imperialism. It begins in part 1 by explaining in great detail and with admirable clarity the views expressed by four of Nishida's former students—Kōsaka Masaaki, Nishitani Keiji, Kōyama Iwao, and Suzuki Shigetaka—in the famous public debates in Chūō kōron from 1942 to 1943 on world history and overcoming modernity. Their contributions to these debates, which took place while Japan's military victory seemed assured, are characterized by openly imperialistic sentiments and the glorification of war.

Some scholars argue that Nishida's students were among the more cosmopolitan participants. Yet while no doubt there was a worse strain of radical ethnonationalism, it is impossible to read certain comments without a sense of dismay, for example Nishitani's hope that once fully incorporated into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Malayans might aspire to be "half-Japanese."¹ The denigration of China is also disturbing and justifies the then-prevailing policy of conquest. These four philosophers were indisputably imperialist ideologues in the mid-1940s.

Part 2 of Osaki's book then attempts to show that the imperialist ideology of the four stems from the philosophy of Nishida, their teacher and mentor. This is a much more difficult case to prove since Nishida's writings are very abstract and nowhere does one find in them an unqualified defense of Japanese militarism. On the contrary, in certain letters and passages in his work he explicitly opposes an aggressive military policy. Yet Osaki makes the case that Nishida's philosophical views on subjectivity and the state underlie his students' reactionary ideology.

The dilemma highlighted by the book's organization reminds one of the Heidegger controversy, where in contrast to the case of Nishida the reactionary interpretation of an abstract philosophical heritage was by the author himself, while his most celebrated students were liberals or even, in one instance, a Marxist. Being and Time was published in 1927, but it was only in 1933 that Heidegger publicly interpreted it as the basis for Nazi ideology. The philosophical work operates at such a high level of abstraction that Heidegger's four leading Jewish students did not detect the fascist significance he later attributed to it; Herbert Marcuse even drew on it for a revision of Marxist theory during his time as Heidegger's assistant. Yet to this day the controversy rages over whether Being and Time is an essentially Nazi work.

The similarity to Nishida's case lies in the supposed authority of a specific political interpretation of a philosophical work. Whether the interpretation is by students or the philosopher himself, closeness to the source seems a proof of validity. Yet both Nishida and Heidegger were working in theoretical fields with their own exigencies and problems that cannot necessarily be resolved into a political allegory. In the remainder of this review I will go over some points in Osaki's argument to see how it holds up in the face of this difficulty.

Osaki's most persuasive contribution is the reconstruction of the ideology of the four students in part 1. This reconstruction is simultaneously philosophical and political. The students attempt to define a specifically "Japanese national subjectivity" that explains the role of the state in Japan and of Japan in the world (p. 52). Osaki sums up that subjectivity in terms of three characteristics: the unity between the subject and the substratum of the state, the interpenetration between the national and the international, and the reciprocal determination between the virtual and the actual.

In regard to the first characteristic, the students argue that as members of the state, individuals are its "substratum," its basis and support. At the same time, individuals are independent subjects, with their own conscience and...