{"id":625,"date":"2020-11-15T12:02:49","date_gmt":"2020-11-15T12:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/?p=625"},"modified":"2021-07-18T11:55:02","modified_gmt":"2021-07-18T11:55:02","slug":"kuki-shuzo-and-nishida-kitaro-fascists-or-subjects-of-ideological-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/2020\/11\/kuki-shuzo-and-nishida-kitaro-fascists-or-subjects-of-ideological-manipulation\/","title":{"rendered":"Kuki Sh\u016bz\u014d and Nishida Kitar\u014d – Fascists or Subjects of Ideological Manipulation?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Christopher Goto-Jones makes the convincing argument that Nishida Kitar\u014d did not promote facist ideologies, but instead that he expressed opposing political views with philosophical language. Goto-Jones argues that Nishida employed orthodox vocabulary in his political texts from the 1930s and 1940s in order to ensure that his texts would be published and also to avoid punishment from the increasingly totalitarian government.1<\/a><\/sup> Nishida is often regarded as the founder of the Kyoto School, however unlike other groups of thinkers who are unified by an academic institution or an official organization, the Kyoto School can be used to loosely group together a diverse set of thinkers who did not formally organize.2<\/a><\/sup> Although historiography on the Kyoto School is varied, the dominant view is expressed by James Heisig, who defines the school in terms of three central contributors: Nishida, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji.3<\/a><\/sup> Although these figures may all be thought of as belonging to the Kyoto School, their philosophical thought differed greatly. This had adverse effects on Nishida in particular, the oldest of the three scholars, whose words were quoted out of context, thereby \u201cmanipulating his linguistic and ideological conventions into forms that resonated much more closely with the ultra-nationalist orthodoxy.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> The language used by Nishida, necessitated by security concerns due to an overbearing government, created the possibility for ideological manipulation which resulted in Nishida\u2019s thought being viewed as fascist.

The framework that Goto-Jones uses to exonerate Nishida from claims that he supported Japan\u2019s brutal imperialism is a useful tool which can be instrumentalized in a discussion about Kuki Sh\u016bz\u014d to show how the representation of Kuki\u2019s ideas as fascist resulted from a lack of contextualization. Kuki is described as having been on the fringe of the Kyoto School, probably due to his teaching position at Kyoto Imperial University more so than due to similarities in philosophical orientation.5<\/a><\/sup> Despite the fact that Kuki is not considered a central figure in the Kyoto school, and that his philosophy was markedly different than Nishidas, his ideas were also taken out of their original context and used to support facist ideologies. Similar to the process of de-contextualization of Nishida\u2019s works which Goto-Jones describes as contributing to the false classification of this scholar as a fascist, Kuki\u2019s writings have been taken out of their original context in order to support the claim that he was an active supporter of the fascist policies of the Japanese government.

In the case of Nishida, this ideological manipulation was undertaken by his fellow Kyoto School scholars, whereas in the case of Kuki it was done by scholars such as Leslie Pincus. Pincus argues that \u201cBy the late 1930s, Kuki had enlisted the tripartite structure of iki in the service of an ultranationalist imperial state.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup> In this view, Kuki\u2019s vision of the aesthetic style of pre-Westernized Japan which he saw as a signifier of Japan’s capacity to excel in the modern world, as described in Iki no k\u014dz\u014d, provides an philosophical basis for Japanese domination in East Asia. As Yukiko Koshiro observes, Pincus\u2019s failure to include Kuki\u2019s other philosophical works in her study \u201cdilutes the overall validity of her analysis.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup> Similar to the way in which Nishida\u2019s works were taken out of the political context in which he wrote them to demonstrate his supposed support for fascist policies, Pincus uses Kuki\u2019s Iki no k\u014dz\u014d without locating the text among his other contributions to show how it was used as a tool of cultural fascism. The alternative view, that \u201cKuki was unlikely to have been a willing and active conscript in serving the ideology that fueled Japan\u2019s imperialism\u201d, is more convincing because it accounts for the scholars lack of control over the ideological manipulations that their work is subject to.8<\/a><\/sup> Goto-Jones\u2019 analysis of Nishida\u2019s works is a useful framework for an investigation into the political orientation of Kuki because it demonstrates how a philosopher’s work can be enlisted in fascist state policy, regardless of the author’s intentions.<\/p>\r\n

  1. Christopher Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (London, 2009), pp. 81-86. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Bret Davis, \u2018The Kyoto School\u2019, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2019, [accessed 14 November 2020]. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. James Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (University of Hawaii Press, 2001), p. 3-7 and 275-278 as cited in Davis, \u2018The Kyoto School.\u2019 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, p. 105. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. James Heisig, Thomas Kasulis, and John Maraldo (eds.), \u2018Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School\u2019, in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Honolulu, 2011), p. 829 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. Leslie Pincus, \u2018In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo and the Discovery of Japanese Being\u2019, Boundary, 18: 3 (1991), p. 154. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. Yukiko Koshiro, \u2018Review of Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Sh\u016bz\u014d and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley, 1996), by Leslie Pincus\u2019, The Review of Politics, 59: 3 (Summer, 1997), p. 607. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  8. Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shuzo (Honolulu, 2004), p. 6. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Christopher Goto-Jones makes the convincing argument that Nishida Kitar\u014d did not promote facist ideologies, but instead that he expressed opposing political views with philosophical language. Goto-Jones argues that Nishida employed orthodox vocabulary in his political texts from the 1930s and 1940s in order to ensure that his texts would be published and also to avoid … Continue reading “Kuki Sh\u016bz\u014d and Nishida Kitar\u014d – Fascists or Subjects of Ideological Manipulation?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[57,86,87,88],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-20th-century-japan","tag-kuki-shuzo","tag-nishida-kitaro","tag-the-kyoto-school"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":760,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}