The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance: A reading, with commentary, of the complete texts of the Kyoto School discussions of "The Standpoint of ... Studies in the Modern History of Asia)

by David Williams

The transcripts of the three Kyoto School roundtable discussions of the theme of ‘the standpoint of world history and Japan’ may now be judged to form the key source text of responsible Pacific War revisionism. Published in the pages of Chuo Koron , the influential magazine of enlightened elite Japanese opinion during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, these subversive discussions involved four of the finest minds of the second generation of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Tainted by controversy and shrouded in conspiratorial mystery, these transcripts were never republished in Japan after the war, and they have never been translated into English except in selective and often highly biased form. David Williams has now produced the first objective, balanced and close interpretative reading of these three discussions in their entirety since 1943. This version of the wartime Kyoto School transcripts is neither a translation nor a paraphrase but a fuller rendering in reader-friendly English that is convincingly faithful to the spirit of the original texts. The result is a masterpiece of interpretation and inter-cultural understanding between the Confucian East and the liberal West. Seventy years after Tojo came to power, these documents of the Japanese resistance to his wartime government and policies exercise a unique claim on students of Japanese history and thought today because of their unrivalled revelatory potential within the vast literature on the Pacific War. The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance may therefore stand as the most trenchant analysis of the political, philosophic and legal foundations of the place of the Pacific War in modern Japanese history yet to appear in any language.

450 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2009

About the author

David Williams is a leading thinker on the Orient and a preeminent expert on the wartime Kyoto School. 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).

Born in Los Angeles, he was educated in Japan and at UCLA, and contributed for many years to the Opinion Section of the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at Oxford, where he took his doctorate, Sheffield and Cardiff Universities. He has worked for the Industrial Bank of Japan, Mitsui and Co., the Iran-Japan Petrochemical Co. and Tōyō Keizai (‘The Oriental Economist’). During 12 of his 25 years in Japan, he was an editorial writer for The Japan Times before working in financial services in Tokyo, London and New York City. He is the author of Japan: Beyond the End of History, Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science, Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power, and co-editor of The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy. His work has been short-listed for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the John Whitney Hall History Award. In 2009 he delivered the inaugural Master Class on Paradigm Innovation in Interdisciplinary Research at University College Cork in the Irish Republic.