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Nishida, Nationalism,and the War in Question
U
EDA 
Shizuteru
I
NTHEBACKGROUNDOFALL 
discussion about the Kyoto school andnationalism lies the problem of the war that ended in 1945 with Japan’sunconditional surrender. Since the two are so inextricably bound to-gether, I would like to begin with some general reµections on that war as abasis for framing the more speci³c question of nationalism.
THE WAR IN QUESTION
The naming of the war—World War II, the Fifteen-Year War, the Paci³c War—depends in part on how one views its historical context. But one thingis clear: the defeat that Japan suffered at its end marked a turning point inJapan’s history. The modern period that began in 1853 when CommodoreMatthew C. Perry, commander of the East Asia squadron of the AmericanNavy, ³rst sailed his Black Ships into Edo Bay off Uraga, was over. This rela-tionship with the outside world, which had lasted for nearly a century, cameto an abrupt halt on 2 September 1945, in the very inlet (now known as“Tokyo Bay”) that had received the Black Ships. As Japanese of³cials board-ed the USS Missouri to sign the document of surrender to the Allied Powers,it is said that the µag of Perry’s squadron was hoisted on its mast.For Japan, the appearance of Perry’s ships off Uraga was a bolt from theblue, an event in Japan’s history comparable only to the threat of the Mongolinvasion in the thirteenth century. Only ³fteen years elapsed between Perry’sarrival and the Meiji Restoration in 1868; yet so great was the shock Japanexperienced at the sight of Perry’s Black Ships that this short span of timesaw the total collapse of the Tokugawa feudal system that had been stable forsome 260 years, a duration nearly unparalleled in world history. For the West(Europe and America), however, the opening of Japan was but one morestage in the implementation of a grand design, a single step in the centuries-old march towards global colonialist expansion.77
 
The gradual push to the south of Tsarist Russia, beyond the steppes of Siberia and on to the Paci³c Ocean, and the landing of several Russian expe-ditions on the northernmost islands had already alarmed Japan from the endof the eighteenth century. Just prior to Perry’s arrival, Western powers hadinitiated the subjugation of China by military force in the Opium Wars(1840–1842), eventually reducing the country to a virtual colony in theTreaty of Nanking. The sense of impending danger had already spread toJapan by the time Perry showed up. But now the threat of gunboat diplomacy  was striking at the very heart of Japan. In the wake of Perry’s µeet, theonslaught of the West continued unabated. In 1856, English and Frenchallied forces invaded northern China and in 1860 occupied Beijing. TheTreaty of Nanking gave England possession of Hong Kong in the form of a99-year lease, and delivered the maritime provinces to Russia as a reward forhaving mediated the alliance between the Chinese and Anglo-French. Thesemi-colonial status of China was sealed. Still the Western march did notcome to a halt. In 1863 British war ships bombarded Kagoshima and in 1864the combined forces of England, France, America, and the Netherlands occu-pied Shimonoseki. As the van of Western expansionism approached the shores of the dis-tant islands of Japan, it seemed as if the grand scheme of global expansion was coming to its ³nal stage. The fall of the Tokugawa regime and the birthof the Meiji political system took place as a direct result of this challenge fromthe West. Such change was unprecedented in Japan’s history. The radical shiftfrom aristocracy to rule by a warrior class at the end of the Heian period, as well as the emergence of the Tokugawa feudal system, had both been
inter- nal 
transitions. Now, for the ³rst time, changes were being made under thepressure of tense relations with the outside world. It was under such circum-stances that modern Japan was born. With the Meiji Restoration, Japan opened up to the world and steppedon to the stage of world history. The play was already in progress and the very survival of the nation and its people depended on the role Japan wouldtake. Nearly all the countries of Asia had, with varying degrees of interven-tion, been made colonies or semicolonies of Western countries, and for theforeseeable future would remain so. Having escaped colonization, it took Japan nearly two decades of all-out effort at a national level to have theinequitable treaties imposed on it amended, and that only in part. (It wouldtake another two decades to have them revoked entirely.)The fact is, the only hope of survival for non-Western nations, caught upin the plans of Western expansion and face-to-face with the Western powers, was to forge a new “national consciousness” and make themselves as power-ful as the nations of the West. At the time there was no question of any  Western power withdrawing out of respect for any non-Western culture. The
UEDA SHIZUTERU
78
 
idea of a plurality of cultures and value-systems would not even reach thelevel of nominal recognition at the political level, let alone at the level of prac-tical policies, until a century later. In the interim world history would have to witness a good many tragedies.Behind the global expansion of the West lay “Western civilization” in thebroad sense of the term. In the main, this meant military power backed by modern industry. The ³rst problem that faced Japan, newly arrived on theset of world history, was how to secure a place for itself while it shared in theprocesses of others. The Meiji regime caught the urgency of this demand inthe motto, “Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Military” (
)
³
è
o
). Japansucceeded in its task in a relatively short time.But for a non-Western country, the acquisition of such power in so shorta time could only come at the price of a rupture whose social, cultural, andspiritual effects were bound to be traumatic. In Japan this problem erupted inthe form of a dispute over “Westernization” in the early years of the Meijiera. Rival factions led by Õkubo Toshimichi, an advocate of Europeanization,and Saigõ Takamori, a champion of the samurai ethos, went so far as to takeup arms against one other. In the end, the samurai rebels were defeated by the imperial conscript forces equipped with its Western weapons.These two problems, fortifying the country and establishing Japan’s placein the world on the one hand, and striking a balance between Western-stylemodernization and Japanese tradition on the other, were of course interre-lated, but as the direction of the “nation” began to take shape, they tended todevelop separately. The latter problem was complicated by the fact that thestrife between traditional culture on the one hand and modernizationthrough imitation of the West on the other was symptomatic of a larger pos-sibility being played out in the soul of Japan: a new synthesis of Westernand Eastern (Japanese) culture that would extend beyond the frontiers of Japan. Such a synthesis would be an immense task and require centuries tocomplete. Nishida’s intellectual engagement in history is mainly related tothis latter problem. Meantime, the imbalance created by this rapid outwarddevelopment and increasing retrocession of the internal conµicts over cultureand tradition only worsened as time went on. The war in question grew directly out of developments related to the former problem.The strengthJapan acquired originally in order to insure independence from Western pow-ers did not stop there. In order to gain recognition as a power equal to thecountries of the West, Japan began to act imperialistically towards Korea,China, and others of its Asian neighbors.The turning point came with the Russo-Japanese war waged overManchuria. It pitted a Tsarist Russia that had already obtained a lease on Port Arthur and Dairen against a Japan that perceived the Russian advances as athreat to its own lifeline. In the larger context of history, the war involved
NISHIDA, NATIONALISM, AND THE WAR IN QUESTION
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