On the Brink of Universality:

German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism

John Namjun Kim

Prefacing the word cosmopolitanism with German would be strange for a

strict Kantian. Kant’s conception of the cosmopolitan would accept this
pairing only if the adjective referred to a particular political state, not to
the culture of that state’s inhabitants.1 The cosmopolitan, on Kant’s view,
is the practical (ethical) manifestation of the theoretical (rational) concept
of the universal. It is universality with worldly, intersubjective content that
describes the fundamental ethical commitments of a political community.
Thus, if we insist that “German cosmopolitanism” refers to a particular
culture’s cosmopolitan stance toward the world, we would necessarily, if
only implicitly, raise a critique against Kant. We would criticize him for
not having a more comprehensive conception of the cosmopolitan, one that
embraces culture as the site of the cosmopolitan per se. Yet such a critique
would encounter problems. For what would it mean to speak of a univer-

positions 17:1  doi 10.1215/10679847-2008-026

Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 74

sality that manifests itself in a particular culture? How can one particular
culture embody the principle of cosmopolitan universality? What real-world
political collective would allow for such a configuration of the universal and
particular?
It should not surprise us that these questions are identical to those posed
by pre-1945 Japanese political philosophers in their attempt to justify Japan’s
imperialist project (c. 1894 – 1945). How can a particular culture (Japan)
simultaneously be an instantiation of the universal (the cosmopolitan)? The
philosophers of Japanese imperialism, most saliently those belonging to the
Kyoto School of philosophy, regarded what we today call Japanese imperial-
ism not as a system of subjugation but as a project of cosmopolitan libera-
tion from European imperialism — that is, as an alleged actualization of
the freedom that Kant’s cosmopolitan modernity promised but never deliv-
ered. However, one must pause here. Given what is known today about the
empirical realities of Japanese imperialism — the systematic sexual enslave-
ment of over two hundred thousand women across the Asia Pacific region,
the coal mines and munitions factories in which Allied POWs and colonial
subjects found death, or the medical experiments conducted on Chinese
civilians by Unit 731 — imperialism as a project of “cosmopolitan liberation”
might just as well be dismissed as a cynical joke. Nevertheless, for political
philosophers at this time, the Japanese imperialist project promised exactly
that, universal freedom.
Barring their possible disingenuousness, outright naïveté, or political op-
portunism, we have reason to ask how, or why, these philosophers thought
Japanese imperialism was a movement toward global liberation. In what
configuration of thought and practice can subjugation be justified as its pre-
sumed opposite, liberation? However, before posing this question, we must
answer why it is even posed as a question or problem requiring our address.
The occasion for this question cannot arise from mere intellectual curios-
ity alone in a set of Japanese texts as if they were mere historical artifacts
produced in a culturally and geopolitically alien sphere. Intellectual interest
alone in a thing called “Japan” and this ambiguous subject’s history does
not compel posing the question of why philosophical discourse at a particu-
lar historical moment within a particular sociopolitical matrix produced
a universalist theory in which contraries such as subjugation and libera-
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 75

tion found their (dubious) identity. This is to suggest that the problem to be
discussed here is not particular to Japan alone. Thus, rather than positing
“Japan” as the principal subject of predication and theoretical elaboration,
let us invert the order of the question. Instead of asking what happened on
an archipelago off the coast of the Korean peninsula some number of years
ago, we should ask instead how one configuration of the universal and the
particular renders “liberation” indistinguishable from “subjugation,” as well
as how one specific instance in the history of political discourse attempted to
license their identity. While the texts addressed here are written in what one
might recognize as Japanese, the scope of their own address circumscribes
political modernity in general, including those of us who might assume that
we are “past” the historical and political moment of their writing. For any
theory or rhetoric of freedom may always invert into its assumed opposite.
The problem that remains is not why this occurs but rather how, in what
conceptual configuration, through which conceptual slippage, and by what
political impetus.
In the following, I explain and critique one response to this problem of
“universal particularity” offered by the Marxian phenomenologist Miki
Kiyoshi (1897 – 1945). Simultaneously embracing and rejecting Kantian and
Hegelian models of the cosmopolitan, Miki attempts to justify Japanese
imperialism not by asserting Japan’s moral mission or cultural superiority or
by turning to any of the other familiar strategies for justifying imperial sub-
jugation. Instead, his defense of imperialism turns on a conception of Japan
as “nothingness.” On this view, it is putatively impossible for Japan to sub-
jugate its East Asian colonies. Rather, it supposedly mediates their cultural
heterogeneity into itself and thus “liberates” them. By denying the existence
of a positive essence of Japanese culture, Miki founds what we might be
tempted to call a “postmodern imperialism,” one without a discernable cen-
ter from which power radiates and toward which desire gravitates.2 How-
ever, this is not the strategy I take here. Rather, I argue that Miki’s negation
of a Japanese cultural essence is itself an assertion of an essence in the guise
of a negative substratum, one whose negativity evades direct criticism. In the
following, we shall see if an immanent critique, one that moves as slowly as
Miki moves quickly, fares any better in demonstrating how he fails in his
attempt to bring Japan beyond the brink of universality, and with it cosmo-
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 76

politan liberation. The first task is to understand his philosophical address,

the second its failures, and yet all the while, the third, keeping present the
proximity of these failures to those of today as the promise of freedom actu-
alizes itself as imperial subjugation.

East Asia as Cosmopolis

Two years into the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 – 45, Miki Kiyoshi anony-
mously authored a two-part cultural-political manifesto in the name of the
Shwa Kenkykai, an intellectual advisory board for Prime Minister Konoe
Fumimaro. Though intended for a mass audience, Shin-Nihon no shis genri
(Principles of Thought for a New Japan; hereafter, Principles I) and its com-
pendium Shin-Nihon no shis genri zoku hen: Kydshugi no tetsugaku-teki
kiso (Principles of Thought for a New Japan II: The Philosophical Founda-
tions of Cooperativism; hereafter, Principles II) offer a nuanced philosophi-
cal defense of Japan’s invasion of — or as he puts it, advance (shinshutsu)
into — continental Asia.3 Negotiating between Kant and Hegel, Miki sought
to incorporate their conceptions of the cosmopolitan in order to “overcome”
them and to propose the erection of an East Asian cosmopolis, a putatively
alternative modernity for the globe. Japan’s invasion of the continent, he
argues, was not an opportunity for the colonization of or unilateral domi-
nation over East Asia, but rather for the creation of a unified yet internally
heterogeneous cultural sphere called the East Asian Cooperative Body (Ta
kydtai) (MKZ, 17:513).
These two texts, along with others written after the start of the Sino-
Japanese war, exhibit Miki’s preoccupation with giving the concept of cul-
ture a philosophical grounding that overcomes what he perceived as the
global cultural crisis instigated by Western thought, or what he refers to
as “abstract modern cosmopolitanism” (chshteki na kindaiteki sekaishugi)
(516) — specifically, liberalism, individualism, and rationalism. Miki argues
that Western thought’s power lies in its ability to functionalize and objectify
culture itself. The role of the East Asian Cooperative Body, then, would be
to furnish the world with a new historical model founded on the principle of
cultural heterogeneity and intercultural exchange, a principle he calls coop-
erativism (kydshugi) (535). While his immediate concern is the creation of
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 77

a unified East Asia, his professed larger aim is to provide the world with a
new cosmopolitan paradigm.
Yet inasmuch as he seeks to produce this unified sphere, his argument
also rests on the assumption of its prior existence. In a related essay of 1940,
The History of Sino-Japanese Cultural Relations (Nisshi bunka kankei shi), he
intensifies the assumed opposition between West and non-West not by map-
ping them on the globe but by grafting them onto the branches of phi-
losophy: “Whereas Western culture is epistemological, East Asian culture
is ethical” (MKZ, 5:137). Unaware of his own performative iteration of this
opposition, he attempts to ground it in a grand cultural narrative:
Whereas Western humanism is grounded in the “human,” East Asian
humanism is grounded in “nothingness,” “nature” and “heaven.” The
way of heaven is simultaneously the way of nature and humans. . . . The
difference between East Asian and Western cultures can also be under-
stood by the fact that whereas science is the characteristic feature of the
West, it did not develop in East Asian culture. Science is born out of the
human struggle to conquer nature, viewing humans and nature in oppo-
sition to one another. Whereas Westerners seek to conquer nature, East
Asians attempt to live in intimacy and harmony with it. Herein lies their
difference in attitude. Science views nature objectively, attempting to cog-
nize its general laws. However, the objective perspective did not develop
in East Asia. East Asian wisdom seeks the intuition and contemplation
of a thing’s reality, which does not mean a thing’s abstract laws but rather
its concrete, real form. (139 – 40)
In other words, as he elaborates, while Western modes of knowledge are sup-
posedly grounded in the theoretical sphere of the subject as the knower of
objective truths in a stance of “mastery,” East Asian modes of social forma-
tions are grounded in the practical sphere of the subject as an agent engaged
with its milieu in a stance of “humility.” Or, as Miki continues, “Whereas
Western culture is superior as an objective culture, East Asian culture has a
profundity as a culture of practical subjectivity [shutaiteki bunka]” (141 – 42).
The opposition he forwards is one between thinking and acting.
However, for our interpretive purposes, the significance of Miki’s (dubi-
ous) cultural dualism lies in how it organizes his larger aim to create a
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 78

theory of an alternative cosmopolitanism. While he is explicitly interested

in cosmopolitanism as a desirable as well as a historically inevitable social,
political, and philosophical ideal, he is critical of its manifestation in what he
calls Western humanism, in that it putatively levels out cultural particularity
and diversity rather than founding itself on them. His justification of this
view ultimately lies in what he regards as the overly epistemological stance
of Western humanism, which allegedly objectifies rather than subjectifies
human relations in the world.
But what does this mean? More specificity is required here in order to
understand his critique of “Western abstract cosmopolitanism” and his pro-
posal for an alternative, “cooperativism.” The center of his critique of the
abstract cosmopolitanism of Western humanism is Hegelian.4 Are collective
goods reducible to the good of its individuals without remainder? Posing
this question from a different perspective: Can that which the individual
attains through his or her participation in the collective be completely, or
exhaustively, explained in terms of that individual’s interests alone? Does
the collective just serve individual goals? As with Hegel, Miki’s answer to
all of these is “no.”
In a 1941 article, “Freedom and Liberalism” (“Jiy to jiyshugi”), Miki
argues that liberalism is a form of abstract cosmopolitanism insofar as it
takes human subjects to be no more than “abstract” units whose “freedom”
preexists the social collective and is given as a “natural right.” In this sense,
liberalism is also a form of cosmopolitanism in that it universally attributes
a basic freedom to every human subject. Given this universalist conception
of human subjectivity, liberalism establishes a relation between subjects
such that each regards his or her other — wherever or whenever this other
might exist — as endowed with the same natural rights as any other subject.
Miki cites, as a prototypical form of liberalism, Kant’s conception of prac-
tical freedom as it is phenomenologically demonstrated by the categorical
imperative.5 On Miki’s reading of Kant, we can attribute practical freedom
to all finite rational subjects insofar as they, qua rational subjects, are able to
recognize that they are bound by the moral law. All “individuals” — to use
Miki’s vocabulary — are free because they are purportedly rational.
However, for Miki this is a highly impoverished, atomistic, and abstract
view of freedom that neglects to describe the intricacy with which the social
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 79

and the subjective arise and are constituted co-determinately. While he

accepts the concept of individual freedom in and of itself, he rejects the
kind of freedom that liberalism offers:
Liberalism is both individualism and cosmopolitanism. In regard to
cosmopolitanism, rather than calling cosmopolitanism a mistake, it is
more accurate to say that there is an error in cosmopolitanism’s abstract-
ness. That is to say, this cosmopolitanism is not the kind which mediates
nations [minzoku]. Liberalism as individualism places individuals at the
forefront in the relation between society and individuals, viewing soci-
ety as the mere sum total of individuals without regard to their mutual
relation. Moreover, liberalism as a simple internationalism regards the
world just in terms of the relation between states without achieving a true
totality. Liberalism contains a variety of constraints or contradictions in
regard to freedom. (MKZ, 7:476)
Miki claims that liberalism, paradoxically, undermines rather than fosters
individual freedom. He grounds his argument on the view that liberalism
wrongly assumes that society is merely the sum total of its individual par-
ticipants. Insofar as it views the individual as the basic unit of society, it
commits the fallacy of viewing it as reducible to the sum of its individual
participants. In Principles I, Miki claims that this atomistic definition of
freedom leads to the instrumentalization of human relations by promoting
“profiteerism” (MKZ, 17:524), because under the form of liberalism ques-
tioned by Miki individuals regard themselves as strictly independent of the
interests of others. At the root of liberalism’s conception of freedom is what
he calls an “egoism” (524). This is to say, in liberalism the social sphere is a
mere association of self-interest and mutual disinterest.
Contrary to liberalism, Miki argues in Principles II that the freedom of
the individual can come about only within society. In contrasting his con-
ception of cooperativism with that of liberal individualism, he claims:
For individualism, the individual comes first and society after. Apart
from the individual, the actuality of society is not taken into consider-
ation. Instead, society is thought of as being immanent to the individual.
In opposition to this, in cooperativism society is thought of as the foun-
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 80

dation of individual existence. Thus, society is transcendent in respect

to the individual. If, however, society were merely transcendent but not
simultaneously immanent, the individual’s independence could not be
recognized. Cooperativism does not negate; rather it sublates, in the
true sense of the word. In other words, the individuality held impor-
tant in individualism — character, self-expression, independence, as well
as individual responsibilities — is also important in cooperativism. Being
independent and autonomously cooperative, it is true cooperation. If each
individual does not place importance on his or her responsibility to the
totality, then cooperation cannot arise. Freedom is responsibility, and this
responsibility is twofold: responsibility toward oneself and responsibility
toward society bound into one. Humans are simultaneously individual
and social. (573 – 74)
Miki gives us not only a more elaborated critique of the liberal conception of
freedom as grounded in individualism but also a hint of what “real” freedom
is. In light of his views as represented in all the texts already cited, we can
sum up his critique of liberal individualism in five points: (1) liberalism com-
mits the fallacy of placing individual interests ahead of collective interests,
because (2) it also makes the mistake of viewing the question of freedom as
reducible to individual interests, since (3) it also wrongly assumes that indi-
vidual freedom preexists society and its formative processes; moreover, (4) if
there is indeed any form of freedom available to the individual outside the
social sphere, this freedom can be regarded only as abstract and not real; as
such, (5) liberalism actually constrains, or even contradicts, the achievement
of true individual freedom. These five points lead us then to the question of
what “real” freedom is for Miki. This question, in turn, goes to the center
of Miki’s theory of subjectivity, which structures his larger argument for a
pan-East Asian cultural sphere that supposedly moves beyond the so-called
abstraction of Western humanism.
The guiding principle of his conception of “true” freedom is captured
in the idea that humans are not atomistic individuals coming into being
independently of the social sphere but rather are subjects formed — or
gebildet, as Hegel would say — by and within the social sphere. While it is
theoretically possible to posit a form of freedom outside the social sphere,
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 81

such a conception of freedom would be not only abstract in the sense that
it describes a situation that historically has never existed — that is, human
freedom in some imagined original state of nature — but also contradictory
to the true sense of freedom in that it assumes that selfhood is possible out-
side the social realm. To cite Miki’s conceptual idiom and theoretical gram-
mar more closely than one would otherwise dare choose: Miki’s conception
of freedom as grounded in selfhood is more easily understood if freedom
is specified to mean self-determination. Freedom then is not the absence of
external constraints, as liberalism contends, but rather the capacity to place
constraints on, or determine, one’s self. Yet analytically, prior to being a free
being, one must be, as it were, a distinct being. For Miki, achieving a self for
oneself — as a dialectical moment and not as a substantive being — is pos-
sible only through social mediation or, more specifically, by experiencing
oneself as being interpenetrated by one’s addressee, one’s “other.” Or, as Miki
puts it in Principles II, “I am an I only for a Thou. The practical subject is
social as an I and Thou” (MKZ, 17:550). In other words, any conception of
freedom grounded outside social relations undermines the very notion of
freedom because the attainment of selfhood is possible only within the con-
straints that socialization places on the human subject as a subject. In being
myself, I am in my other as my other is in me. Subjectivity, or shutaisei,
can be understood only as a mediating movement toward the other. Thus
a shutai is never an individual entity with determinate contours that can be
singled out among other subjects. Rather, it is a being-with-another.
Rather than isolating subjects atomistically, the constraints of society
serve to mediate the subject with other subjects. However, this is not the
only role that the social plays in the formation of subjectivity. In detailing
his conception of cooperativist subjectivity, Miki argues:
Opposed to individualism, cooperativism values ethical relations from the
perspective of society. Namely, a practical subject is a practical subject
only in respect to another practical subject. The existence of the I cannot
be posited without positing the existence of the Thou. Ethical relations
are established neither out of convenience nor by contract; rather they are
founded by a totality that transcends the individual. The I and the Thou
can only be the I and the Thou in respect to a third “Thou” called society.
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 82

As an expression of this “Thou,” they mutually and independently point

each other out. Ethical relations are not unions for the sake of individual
profit but are social, ethical relations. Cooperativism is essentially ethical.
By negating individualist abstract freedom and by entering into ethical
relationships, the individual can become free in actuality. (574 – 75)
Freely taking from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Miki clarifies that what
he is most concerned with are ethical relations between subjects mediated
by the social sphere, a concern also appearing in the distinction he makes
between what he calls Western and East Asian humanisms.6 Yet if his views
are nearly identical to Hegel’s, as I have just suggested, how can he main-
tain that there is a difference between Western and East Asian humanisms,
given that Hegel is arguably the Western humanist par excellence?
This question relates directly to his conception of cooperativism. In the
above passage, Miki refers to a central distinction in post-Kantian Idealism — 
namely, the difference between the theoretical and the practical subject. Put
more simply than the importance of this distinction merits, the theoretical
subject (shukan) is the subject of knowledge and cognition, whereas the prac-
tical subject (shutai) is the same subject viewed in respect to its actions and
ethical relations.7 In other words, they are two aspects of one and the same
subject. However, despite the emphasis that both Kant and Hegel place on
the practical sphere, Miki’s claim is that they, and all the Western philo-
sophical tradition, ground practical subjectivity in the theoretical sphere. He
criticizes them for making what amounts to a category mistake: grounding
the primacy of the practical in the conceptual vocabulary of the theoretical.
For Miki, practical subjectivity can be described only in terms of concrete
relations between such categories — in other words, only in terms of the
mediating relation between them.8
On this view, Western humanism grounds praxis in theory, whereas
cooperativism — which is supposedly a synthesis of Western and East Asian
humanisms — founds all human and cosmological relations in an ethics
of social mediation. The term ethics here should not be understood in the
metaphysical sense of good and evil, but rather in the more mundane sense
of viewing oneself and thus one’s own freedom as dependent on a network
of relations to others. More precisely, this means viewing the self as coex-
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 83

tensive with its relations to the world at large, such that anything like a dis-
crete self could not be rigorously distinguished from the world without also
diminishing the sense of subjectivity that Miki claims for his cooperativism.
On this view, the maximum amount of mediation with otherness fosters
the maximum amount of selfhood and subjective freedom. It is in this sense
that Miki envisages a society grounded on cooperation. One relates oneself
to the other, and in so doing one cooperates with the other in the formation
of one’s subjectivity as a socially mediated being.
The concept of difference or heterogeneity is essential to his notion of
cooperativism. Without difference — for example, between Japan and its
colonial periphery — there can be no ground on which to establish a medi-
ating relation (insofar as relations presuppose difference). In this regard,
he rejects both totalitarianism and communism (even as he is a Marxist)
because they allegedly reduce rather than foster particularity. It is this prin-
ciple of difference that, as we shall soon see, lies at the center of his concep-
tion of the East Asian Cooperative Body as a “culturally heterogeneous”
space. We shall see how well Miki’s final political position holds up to his
own philosophy of mediation as the principle of cosmopolitanism freedom.

The Negative Essence of Japan

What we have seen thus far of Miki’s critique of Western liberalism and
his proposals for a new form of subjectivity is neither controversial nor, for
that matter, all that new in the history of philosophy. Despite his critique of
liberalism and Western thought in general, he clearly stands in a long Euro-
American philosophical tradition running from Rousseau to Rawls insofar
as he stresses the basic idea that society or socialization is a central facet
of human freedom. On a more everyday level, his basic claim amounts to
the banal observation that we need the differential of the social — we need
others — in order to be who we think (or hope) we are, free beings. How-
ever, the one controversial assertion that he makes is the claim that the inter-
ests of society take precedence over those of its individual participants. This
claim is directly related to his conception of a pan–East Asian culture and a
new cosmopolitanism for the world. It brings together his theory of subjec-
tivity with his geopolitical cultural views.
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 84

His justification for this claim, which would appear to reflect totalitar-
ian sympathies, is itself also not philosophically controversial, although his
political use of it is. Given that the attainment of selfhood (i.e., the first
step toward freedom) is dependent on the individual’s social relations, Miki
argues that any alternative to liberalism must place the interests of the social
ahead of those of its individual members. However, he is also careful to
argue for a relation of reciprocity between subject and society. A society can
be described as free only if its individual participants are free, but the free-
dom of its individual participants can be guaranteed only in a free society,
one that is premised on cultural mediation. In this light, to argue for the
primacy of society’s interests is nothing more than to argue that insofar as
the social sphere is the precondition for subjectivity, it should be given more
philosophical “weight.” To speak with the metaphysicians: the social stands
higher in the “great chain of being.”
However, as I argue here, this is not just a philosophical argument for
Miki; it is also a cultural one with political consequences. His argument
that society should come before its individual participants provides him with
the philosophical framework to view cultures as spiritual unities. In other
words, he regards cultures as if they were self-standing practical subjects
whose own subjectivity is mediated by their neighbors and an even larger
totality, such as pan–East Asia, the West, or more generally the world. He
transposes his argument for the relation between individual subjects and
society onto the geopolitical sphere. Each “I” culture is mediated by a “thou”
culture.
Given the principle of difference or heterogeneity subtending his concep-
tion of mediation, the conceptual apparatus for his theory of subjectivity also
stipulates some form of essential difference between peoples, an essential
cultural difference. As we have already seen, he characterizes the essence
of Western culture as “epistemological” and that of East Asia as “ethical.”
Leaving aside the question of what Naoki Sakai calls the “mimetic desire”
at work in this dualist scheme as well as the soundness of any argument
predicated on cultural essentialism, what is relevant for our concerns now is
that these cultural differences are positively defined entities for Miki.9 The
significance of this positive essentialism lies in his argument for the world-
historical role of Japan to assume a leadership position in East Asia. It is
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 85

central to his argument that other cultural realms have positively defined
essences and that Japanese culture does not. He quite literally promises
“nothing” to the colonized.
The two cultural realms of relevance here are China as the cultural center
of East Asia and the West as the putative source of science and the idea of
world history. In regard to China, Miki argues that its strong conception
of itself as a morally superior culture precluded it, from the outset, from
embracing the alleged advantages that Western science offered. Its stubborn
positive essentialism rendered China weak, unable to assimilate difference
into itself. In his History of Sino-Japanese Cultural Relations, Miki writes:
China did not really desire to recognize the excellence of Western learn-
ing even after its opening of the country, having a conservative and
retrogressive attitude even while using Western learning. Not having a
superior cultured people surrounding it, the ancient Chinese could not
learn from others. Instead, it was important for them to safeguard their
own culture from being violated by outsiders. Chinese history exhibits
an extreme care for their ancient culture. As such, a conservative and
unadventurous trait developed among them. In China, the reverence for
ancient ways is strong, idealizing the past while regarding the time there-
after as degeneration. (MKZ, 17:144)
What Miki takes as a historical fact, however, is more properly described
as his production of an idea of China as the degenerated remainder of its
own cultural “inbreeding.” In more philosophical terms, his critique against
Chinese Sino-centrism is that China views itself as an absolute subject that
does not require the mediation of other cultures (such as that of the West).
In contrast to Chinese positive essentialism, Miki regards the West as having
undergone the realization that it is not a culturally superior realm — that is
not an absolute subject — and is now in a cultural crisis of self-awareness.
Following Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Miki argues that the Euro-
pean World War I demonstrated that Western culture had already reached
its apex insofar as the war did away with the long-held Western fantasy
that its culture was synonymous with world culture.10 World War I was
for Europe a world-historical auto-critique. In Principles I, Miki writes in
response to this crisis:
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 86

Up to now, what has been called “world history” is in fact just Euro-
pean cultural history viewed from the standpoint of “Eurocentrism.” The
significance of the so-called World War of 1914 – 1918 was as an auto-
critique of this Eurocentrism, as Western thinkers have also noted. An
awareness arose that European history was not the same as world his-
tory, that European culture was not the same as world culture. The fall
of Eurocentrism meant the abandonment of a unified notion of world
history for European thought. In the wake of the self-critique of Euro-
centrism, the significance of the China Incident [i.e., the Sino-Japanese
war of 1937 – 45] must be to enable a true unification of the world by
actualizing the unification of East Asia, and to reveal a new idea of world
history. (MKZ, 17:508 – 9)
Here we have another glimpse of why Miki thinks that a new pan – East
Asian order should be created — namely, in order to furnish the world with
a new model of world history. As we shall see, this is a model based on
the principle of cultural heterogeneity under the stewardship of Japanese
culture. However, for now what is significant in Miki’s assessment of the
state of European cultural subjectivity is that its perceived positive cultural
essence — namely, Europe’s self-identification with the world — undermined
itself in the war. Yet, as Miki suggests, this did not lead to a reconceptu-
alization of its “selfhood.” Rather, it left European thought ontologically
homeless, that is, divested of its identity with world history. Implicit in his
assessment of the crisis of European culture is the suggestion that Europe
after the war lacked mediation from a global other, such as East Asia.
These characterizations of the positive essences of China and the West
as the sources of their respective declines serve his argument for Japanese
culture’s assumption of a leading role in East Asia. In contrast to these two
cultural realms, Miki suggests that Japan lacks a positive cultural essence.
More specifically, he claims that any positive essence in Japanese culture
comes from outside Japan. In History of Sino-Japanese Cultural Relations, he
writes, “Japan has developed its civilization under the influence of Chinese
culture; therefore, from one point of view, Japanese cultural history is a his-
tory of the process of the assimilation of Chinese culture” (MKZ, 17:147).
In regard to Westernization, he writes, “The amazing progress of modern
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 87

Japan is incomprehensible without taking into account its debt to Western

culture” (145), by which he means Western scientific learning. What Miki
attempts to stress is that Japanese culture is internally heterogeneous and
does not consist of a single positive substance by which it can identify itself.
It is a nonentity in the face of the cultural power of China and the West,
lacking all selfhood as conventionally defined. However, for Miki this lack
is constitutive of Japanese culture. In Principles I, he argues:
The fact that Japanese culture is inclusive means that it is also progressive.
Among the nations of East Asia, the one which first translated West-
ern culture was Japan, and it is certain that through this transplanting
it developed a scientific culture that contributed to Japan’s victory in this
present incident [i.e., the Sino-Japanese war]. Because Japanese culture
was progressive, it was able to become the leader of all the nations of East
Asia. It is important that this characteristic of Japanese culture is utilized
in the formation of a new East Asian culture. (531)
Miki emphasizes that Japanese culture consists in nothing more than the
absorption and preservation of the most “excellent” aspects of foreign cul-
tures. Steadfastly maintaining that there is no original substance or essence
into which this absorption occurs, he argues that this purely assimilative
drive of Japanese culture to increase internal cultural heterogeneity is the
source of Japan’s cultural-political power. It is this principle of heterogeneity
that Miki proposes to spread onto the East Asian continent when he also
argues that “the advance of Japanese culture onto the continent means that
Japanese culture, which from ancient times has been influenced unilaterally
by Chinese culture, will now be able to exert a positive influence on Chinese
culture, thereby enabling cultural exchange on all fronts in East Asia, and
thus providing the basis for the unification of East Asian culture” (508).
Japan’s conquest of East Asia will at once unify it and, through the mediat-
ing power of Japan, make it more culturally heterogeneous. Imperialism
and cosmopolitanism are one in multiculturalism.
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 88

A Japanese Cosmopolis — From the Mediated to the Mediating

Clearly, we have cause to wonder how much we can trust Miki’s conception
of Japan as an entity inhabited by a negativity that magnetically draws in the
most excellent aspects of the world outside it. In one respect, our doubts are
confirmed just by looking at the history of the war in the Pacific showing
how Miki’s Japan as a cosmopolitan state was anything but that. However,
merely pointing out the disparity between his theory and empirical reality
will not suffice here, for Miki’s central concern was not with what Japan
was actually doing in the war, but rather with what it ought to be doing.
His was a normative political project that looked beyond (or was stubbornly
blind to) the realities of “cosmopolitan liberation.”
Nevertheless, the problem of war responsibility forces us to reexamine
how even those with apparently little connection to what happened on the
front participated directly or indirectly in the war effort — and this includes
philosophers as they dream their “sweet dreams.”11 World War II, for each
state involved, was a total war, an enterprise enlisting the desire of each
member of the political community.12 Even if the avenue of empirical-
historical critique is not available to us, we still have Miki’s own philosophi-
cal propositions to help us understand how Kyoto School philosophy was
complicit in the Japanese imperialist project. Therefore let us reassess Miki’s
conception of mediation. This conception is not only the center of his theory
of a new cosmopolitanism called cooperativism; it is also the point at which
his theory undermines itself.
There is a disparity or contradiction between Miki’s conception of Japan
as a subject mediating the cultural differences of the world and his concep-
tion of free subjectivity as constituted through the mediation of others. As
we have seen in his theory of cooperativist subjectivity, which he transposes
onto the imagined body of national culture, true subjectivity is mediated
subjectivity. An “I” arises out of the relation to a “thou.” The greater one’s
degree of mediation, the more self-determining the subject. Social mediation
is not as it first appears — namely, as external influence and constraint — but
is that which first makes subjective self-determination possible. However,
as Miki attempts to transpose this conceptual framework onto the site of
national culture, a fissure develops within it in the course of its transpo-
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 89

sition. Whereas the cooperativist subject exists only as a mediated subject,

Miki’s description of a cooperativist East Asian culture posits Japan as the
mediating subject. It is the site of all mediations but is itself not mediated.
It acts as a substratum for the mediation of others but is itself not mediated
in his proposed new modernity. Miki leaves this conceptual leap from the
mediated to the mediating unexplained. He undermines his own metaphysi-
cal conception of cooperativism at the very moment that he attempts to give
it a meaning tied to the geopolitical-cultural world.
However, merely pointing out this inconsistency between his theory of
subjectivity and his proposal for a pan – East Asian cultural sphere would
also mistakenly dismiss the problematic that Miki presents. The problem
here is not a mere philosophical “error,” a failure of consistent thinking.
Rather than regarding his unexplained shift from the mediated to the medi-
ating as a matter of logical argumentation, let us consider it as a moment
that discloses the problem of actualizing universality in the political world.
In other words, Miki’s problem of justifying the subjugation of East Asia
is not specific to either Miki or wartime Japan alone. Instead, it is but an
expression of a problematic belonging to modern political thought in general
and to modern multiethnic empires in particular. One configuration of this
problem asks how a “multitude” can be formed into a “people.” Nineteenth-
century political projects throughout Europe to reconstitute social relations
and make political orders commensurate with the idea of an ethnos provide
one historical point of reference for just such a conversion of the multitude,
among others. The ideal of the universal in ethnic nationalism remains
within the classical Aristotelian model of specific instances subsumed under
a universal signifier. That I speak German — an already contested substan-
tive whose referential boundaries remain unknown — does not, of itself,
provide the legitimacy of my claim to be a participant of a larger politi-
cal community, in particular before the Napoleonic Wars. Yet the valence
of my speaking German can change (as it in fact did for Germans of the
early nineteenth century). By the year 1815, the fact of my speaking Ger-
man makes me a member of an ethnic community, one that speaks a cer-
tain language, engages in certain practices, and holds certain beliefs — such
as, tautologically, the belief in my belonging to an ethnic community. The
historical moment of one’s claim of belonging to a community defines the
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 90

valence of that claim, how it will “perform” within the political exigencies
of its moment of articulation. In this instance, I stand under the universal
signifier German as a specific instance just as German stands under the yet
more universal signifier humanity as one specific expression of the latter.
This logic of the particular and the universal admits only the relation of
what can be accommodated under a universal signifier.
Yet social being also stubbornly resists this configuration of the particular
and universal. A subject does not belong to an ethnic universal, or commu-
nity, in the same sense that argon belongs to a class of inert gases. Contrary
to the claims of ethnic nationalism, ethnicity is not premised on the facticity
of a communion of language, culture, or heritage but rather on interpella-
tion, performance, and recognition. For I am just as much thrown into my
ethnic identification as I am projected into it, as I perform and reconstitute it
through acts of social repetition. At any moment, I may fail to be recogniz-
able under my “given” universal signifier by violating the specific practices
identified with my ethnic community. In this sense, a universal signifier
such as a mark of ethnicity can only be known as negative. It negates the
subject by delimiting it, giving it a name to distinguish it from other modes
of social being.
Miki’s critique of abstract cosmopolitanism is premised on this resistance
of social being toward an essentialist conception of the universal: subjectivity
cannot be exhaustively described according to a static normative criterion,
for subjectivity of itself implies the ability to remake the criterion by which
a subject is recognized as such. I am a subject not because I am a thing to
which predicates are attached or because I possess specific determinate qual-
ities and meet certain criteria. Rather, I am a subject because I can change
those criteria, negate my determinate existence or otherwise add predicates
to myself. At the same time, however, that my subjectivity is not defined by
a universal criterion alone does not mean that I can do without universals,
such as my inevitable belonging to a community that enables its imagina-
tion of itself by giving itself a name — Japan. If Miki rejects an essentialist,
or static, conception of the universal for his new cosmopolitanism, what
implicit conception does he put forward with his theory of mediation? Or
rather, how might his theory of mediation itself be an attempt to articulate
this alternative conception of the universal? More specifically, how do the
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 91

terms mediation, cosmopolitan, and universal stand in relation to one another

in Miki’s conception of imperial Japan as a negative site of all cultural
mediation?
That cosmopolitanism entails universality would appear to be uncontro-
versial were it not for the conflicting configurations of universality offered
in political philosophy. Kant’s own thesis on the cosmopolitan, which Miki
rejects as much as he embraces, offers divergent views on what universal
might mean in the practical sphere. In Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant puts
forward two conceptions of cosmopolitan universality as predicated on social
mediation, one directed toward the relation between political states and
another toward one’s other in civil society. In respect to the latter, the ideal
of perpetual peace remains just that, an idea that exists principally as a tele-
ological purpose disclosed in human conflict. On Kant’s view, mutual self-
interest discloses the moral necessity (duty) for each subject “to work toward
this (not merely chimerical) end” (AK, 8:368). In other words, although I
may pursue my self-interest with little regard for morality, this pursuit at
the same time reveals the necessity of the idea of perpetual peace as an end
in itself, independent of my self-interest. My mediating relationship with my
other (in competition) demonstrates to me that my fundamental interest lies
not in my competitive destruction of my neighbor but in its preservation and
flourishing. In this sense, my interaction within civil society already suggests
a form of universality in which any of my actions entails an action on my
other, wherever and whenever this other may exist. Inasmuch as I may be an
individual subject pursuing individual interests, I am also always a universal
subject implicated in the world of others.13 Yet the universality of the idea of
perpetual peace means more than just this mutual implication of subjects.
As an “idea” in Kant’s idiom, perpetual peace is also universal in the sense
that it is an object of thought whose reality, Kant would contend, obtains for
any finite rational subject, i.e., human beings.
This conception of the particular subject as a universal stands in contrast
to that of a political state as a universal. Whereas Kant’s notion of cosmopol-
itanism, Weltbürgerlichkeit (roughly, world citizenship), specifically pertains
to the relation between subjects and the world in general, his notion of inter-
national law, Völkerrecht (law of peoples), deals with the relation between
political states. The distinction between cosmopolitanism and international
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 92

law is central to Kant’s thesis insofar as he subsumes the latter under the
former in terms of ethical priority: cosmopolitanism furnishes a vantage
point for an ethical critique of international law. In this respect, each state
is a universal only in respect to its citizenry: it subsumes its citizenry under
one political signifier, such as Japan. However, in the absence of a world
state, international law would only be conditionally binding, for its dictates
issue from a system of treaties between states, which can always choose to
ignore their legal obligations. The term universality applies to a political
state only to the (conditional) extent that it mediates its citizenry into one
political entity.14
The problem of these two conceptions of the universal — one pertain-
ing to civil society, the other to the state — on Miki’s view is that they both
exclude the mediating work of culture. Any conception of the cosmopolitan-
ism described apart from culture would be an empty concept for Miki inso-
far as culture is that which gives political principles a lived significance. For
instance, I am not just a democratic subject by virtue of my citizenship in
a (purportedly) democratic state; rather, I am one only insofar as I insist on
living as one, by resisting the politically given, exercising rights, or otherwise
creating a culture of (what I hold to be) democracy. Thus Miki’s central task
is to define culture as a politically effective concept bringing together the
social mediation of civil society with that of the state. However, insofar as
his aim is to justify Japanese imperialism as a project of cosmopolitan libera-
tion, he does not have recourse to a positive conception of Japanese culture,
for such a conception would make him appear to be just another propo-
nent of cultural nationalism. Thus his turn to a negative conception of Japa-
nese culture — one that has no positively defined features — permits him
to deny the proximity of his cooperativism to imperialism while affirming
Japan’s purported culture of nothingness as a form of cultural universality.
His strategy of defending his state’s imperial project thus shares ideological
affinities with other nationalist projects of liberation. By denying a racial,
territorial, or linguistic essence to Japanese culture, Miki effectively inten-
sifies the universalist claims of his cooperativism such that any and all of
those subjugated by imperial Japan would be able to identify with its project
of creating a space for cultural mediation. His argument thus follows an
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 93

integrationist principle producing a universal culture, evacuated of all posi-

tive content, whose very emptiness is to seduce possible participants from
throughout East Asia. Although he specifically promises cooperativism, he
could have as well promised democracy without a difference in meaning
and — one fears — in historical result.

Notes

  1. In Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant views culture as that which is a precondition for cosmo-
politanism but that cannot be “cosmopolitan” in itself. It is reason that drives us toward the
cosmopolitan. He asserts that even a “nation of devils” could organize itself into a state, for
even the morally bankrupt, according to Kant, have reason. See his Zum Ewigen Frieden:
Ein philosophischer Entwurf (Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project), ed. Königlich
Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (hereafter AK), vol. 8, Kants Gesammelte
Schriften (Kant: Collected Works) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1912), 8:366. Moreover, at Kant’s
time Germany did not exist as a state. Up to 1871, Germany was a general designation for
a more or less geographically contiguous area where German was the dominant language.
The problem of talking about German cosmopolitanism is, in other words, parallel to that
of German philosophy. For a discussion of the latter, see Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy,
1760 – 1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1 – 15.
  2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri give the name Empire to just such a postmodern impe-
rialism. See their collaborative study Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
  3. All citations of Miki’s works are from Miki Kiyoshi zensh (Complete Works of Miki Kiyoshi;
hereafter MKZ) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966 – 68). For Miki’s characterization of the
Japanese invasion of China as an advance, see MKZ, 17:508. All translations are my own.
However, I am indebted to Lewis Harrington for permitting me to consult his translations
of Principles I and II.
  4. Though Miki is critical of Western thought, he relies extensively on Hegelian principles of
the social body, history, and subject formation in order to articulate his critique of Western
thought. Only on one level is this a performative contradiction; on another it is not, because
his ultimate position is one in which he writes from a standpoint that has synthesized East
Asian and Western thought and has therefore surpassed this dualism.
  5. The categorical imperative: “Act such that the maxim of your will always simultaneously
can be valid as a principle of universal legislation.” See Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft
(Critique of Practical Reason), AK, 5:30.
  6. For the relevant section in Hegel, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenom-
enology of Spirit) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 145 – 55.
positions 17:1  Spring 2009 94

  7. For an elaboration of this central distinction in Japanese neo-Kantian philosophy, see J.

Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 2 – 3; and Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and
Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 119 – 20.
  8. Miki’s emphasis on the “between-ness” of practical subjectivity reflects his engagement with
his one-time mentor, Martin Heidegger. Just as Heidegger sometimes characterizes Dasein
as the “being of ‘between-ness’ ” (though ultimately rejecting this characterization as too
ontically inflected), Miki conceives of practical subjectivity not in terms of a polar opposi-
tion between subject and object but rather in terms of the between-ness that makes such an
opposition possible in the first place. However, his conception of between-ness also distin-
guishes itself from Heidegger’s in that Miki accepts dialectical thought whereas Heidegger
rejects it. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1993), 132.
  9. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 153 – 76.
10. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltge-
schichte (Decline of the West: Sketches of a Morphology of World History) (Munich: Beck,
1990).
11. Kant rhetorically disagrees with the contention that the “practical politician” need concern
himself or herself with the reveries of the “political theorist” in his own treatise on cosmo-
politanism, Toward Perpetual Peace (AK, 8:343). The political theorist, or philosopher, offers
claims of no consequence to this world, according to the introduction to his essay. However,
Kant quietly argues for the opposite of this assertion throughout his text, in particular in
his claim that heads of state should seek the counsel of philosophers in matters concerning
war (AK, 8:368). The highest task of philosophy, for Kant, is the deliberation of the “practi-
cal sphere,” or ethics. That Miki for his part also stresses the primacy of the practical over
the merely theoretical underscores his commitment not only to what is today called Ger-
man Idealism but also more immediately and significantly to the disjunction between the
philosophical justification of a political ideal (such as perpetual peace or cooperativism) and
empirico-historical reality (such as that of domination and death under imperialism). This
disjunction, however, deals less with the oft-cited division between theory and practice than
with resistance against social contingency. Any thought or practice can, and most likely
will, prove itself to be the opposite of what it appears to be. Domination and emancipation
are always one.
12. For more on the relationship between philosophical production and the total-war system,
see Yasushi Yamanouchi, “Total War and System Integration: A Methodological Introduc-
tion,” in Total War and “Modernization,” ed. Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann,
and Narita Ryichi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1998), 1 – 39. In the
same volume, see also Minoru Iwasaki, “Desire for a Poietic Metasubject: Miki Kiyoshi’s
Technology Theory,” 159 – 80.
Kim | German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism 95

13. My reading of Kant’s view of subjectivity here is not without controversy insofar as it (inten-
tionally) brings Kant closer to a Hegelian conception of social being. I base my reading on
Kant’s view of nature in Toward Perpetual Peace, which shares structural affinities with
Hegel’s concept of spirit. In a preliminary draft of his essay, Kant argues that we can regard
nature “as if it were determined by moral laws of right” (AK, 23:171), that is, as if it were a
self-conscious being. His argument is thus that nature arranges human communities such
that they are mutually affected by one another (usually by war). For more on his natural
teleological as well as anthropological views, see AK, 8:360 – 68.
14. This does not mean that all subjects of a state are in actuality accorded equal political value
or are otherwise regarded as endowed with equal political rights. Instead, the modern
theory of the state is itself conflicted insofar as the limits of what constitutes citizenship
are always under contestation. Inasmuch as one might hold as one’s fundamental ethical
commitment that citizenship ought to be accorded to all, the institutional history of those
who have enjoyed citizenship and those who have not shows that this is the central concept
for modern (post-1789) political theory. For more on the fundamental problems of politi-
cal philosophy, see Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing
Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 175 – 224.