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The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance

Edited by David Williams

To Be Published January 31st 2013 by Routledge – 288 pages

Series: Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia

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  • Hardback: 978-0-415-47646-1: $130.00
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Description

This is a complete translation, together with a substantial commentary and introduction, of The Standpoint of World History and Japan, by Masaaki Kosaka, Iwao Koyama, Keiji Nishitani and Shigetaka Suzuki. This important work, by leading philosophers of the Kyoto School, long regarded as one of the most notorious "fascist" texts produced in Japan during the Pacific War, is, in fact, the translator and editor argues, an act of bold public dissent from the policies of aggressive expansion pursued by the wartime Tojo regime. As the translator and editor argues, the work of the Kyoto School requires close guided reading, as the true radical meaning is often made deliberately opaque by the writers in order to avoid inviting a hostile reaction from the regime being criticised. The translator and editor provides guidance on how to extract the true meaning from this opaque work, and goes on to cotend that these Kyoto School philosophers were conspiring with the Imperial Japanese Navy to bring the Tojo cabinet down.

Contents

Section 1:The wartime Kyoto School and its horizons Part 1: Philosophy, culture and the fog of war 1. The victorious Oriental: Japanese philosophy, Oriental self-mastery and the quest for Asian subjectivity 2. The shock of the old: the Kyoto School and the advent of a Confucian world order 3. Military Orientalism from Tojo to the Taliban: the cultural strategist as Pacific War revisionist 4. Orientalism as a rigorous science: decoding of the Rosetta Stone of the Pacific War with Ethnohistory and the New Philology Part 2: The Chinese horizon 5. The world—Making war in Japanese 6. The discovery—The tyranny of China over Japan 7. The text—How East Asians argue Part 3: The German Horizon 8. The conspiracy—Plotting to bring Tojo down 9. The history—Moralische Energie as the cure for the crisis of German Historicism 10. The event—Pearl Harbour as the end of history Part 4: The American Horizon 11. The resistance—Subjectivity, Kyoto philosophy and the American Empire 12. The betrayal—Translating wartime Japanese into post-Holocaust English 13. The controversy—Dominating the Oriental and the ‘American Century’ Section 2: Commentary with translation of the complete text of ‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’ Part 5: Two weeks before Pearl Harbour—‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’ (26 November 1941) Part 6: Two weeks after the fall of the Dutch East Indies—‘The Ethical and Historical Character of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’ (4 March 1942) Part 7: Five months after Midway—‘The Philosophy of Total War/Resistance’ (24 November 1942)

Author Bio

David Williams is Lecturer in the Cardiff Japanese Studies Centre at the University of Cardiff, UK. He is the author of Japan: Beyond the End of History (1994), Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science (1996) and Defending Japan's Pacific War: The Kyoto Philosophers and Post-white Power (2004) and The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy (2006).

Name: The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance (Hardback) – Routledge 
Description: Edited by David Williams. This is a complete translation, together with a substantial commentary and introduction, of The Standpoint of World History and Japan, by Masaaki Kosaka, Iwao Koyama, Keiji Nishitani and Shigetaka Suzuki. This important work, by leading philosophers of...
Categories: Modern History 1750-1945, Asian History, Political Philosophy, Asian History, Japanese Culture & Society, Japanese History