Zen and Philosophy

Prologue

Prologue The winter of 1944–1945 was unusually cold. On December 14, Nishida wrote a letter to Suzuki Daisetz, his friend of sixty years: It snowed yesterday morning. Snow in Kamakura in December is rare, don’t you think? You must take care of yourself, as you said you have a cold. It can easily develop into pneumonia, and for old folks like us that can be deadly. As for the wood for cooking and heating, we decided to cut the trees in the garden. You must live five, nay, ten more years, and write for posterity. A new age is dawning; I would imagine the new era will create all kinds of people, but I suspect that the kinds of people we have seen in our times will never be seen again.1 A week later he wrote a postcard to Suzuki, again, asking about his health: “How is your cold? Are you over it by now?” Nishida himself was to take the journey to eternal rest within six months of writing these letters. By the winter of 1944, the war fought over the Pacific entered its last phase, and American planes showered bombs on major industrial centers and large cities throughout Japan. Both Nishida and Suzuki, having predicted that Japan would lose the war, had their minds fixed already on postwar recovery and reconstruction. They felt that the postwar period would bring radical changes to their country. Nishida died on June 7, 1945, around four o’clock in the morning. He had fallen sick a few days earlier, and the doctor, sent by Iwanami Shigeo, had made a house call to find that there were no alarming symptoms. Nishida’s condition suddenly deteriorated, however. Because of the air raids on the Tokyo-Yokohama area, few trains were Prologue running and the doctor was unable to rush from Tokyo to the Nishidas in Ubagayatsu in time. Suzuki wrote about his departed friend for the Tokyo Shinbun: Just recently, during a leisurely conversation I said, “After the war is over, why don’t we visit the United States and Europe, the two of us together?” He didn’t say a word but wore a faint smile on his face. I find myself planning it even now! The fact is that the East does not know the West, and the West does not know the East. This is why various conflicts occur between them. I wanted Nishida to live for four or five years longer, not merely for my sake, but for our country’s, for the entire East, and ultimately for the world. But his life, which was cut short, still has enough power to cause some stir in the future. I do not believe that we will see a man like him again for a long time.2 Suzuki, who had lived in the United States in his twenties for about a decade and had subsequently traveled widely around the world, described Nishida as someone whose abundant imagination and critical eye had enabled him to be knowledgeable about other countries, despite his never having stepped out of Japan. Nishida, according to Suzuki, was well informed about the movements of the times and accurate in assessing global political and military situations.3 Nishida and Suzuki, both born in the third year of Meiji (1870), were to witness unprecedented transformations. Internationally, Japan faced the global world for the first time after following a policy of isolation from all but the Dutch and the Chinese for more than two hundred years. The Japanese were abruptly made aware that their country had to become an active member of the nineteenth-century world, which was then dominated by the European powers. On the individual level, Nishida and Suzuki grew up in times when training in Chinese literature, the honor code of bushi (samurai warriors), cultivation of an independent mind, and friendship based on honesty, were the air they breathed. As the Japanese exerted themselves to “modernize” their country, however, governmental bureaucracies were centralized; cultural, economic, and educational systems were standardized; partybased politics were created and then quickly degenerated. They experienced the rise of militarism, totalitarianism, and finally Japan’s entry into the world war. This transition from the “feudalistic” Edo period to the modern “state” decisively and permanently changed Japan. The 2 Prologue natural, cultural, and educational environment in which Nishida grew up had already become a relic of the...