The Kyoto School's Wartime Controversy and Political Legacy

The most contested chapter in Kyoto School history centers on a set of roundtable discussions convened by the journal Chuokoron and published under the title "The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan" across three sessions between November 1941 and November 1942, later collected as Sekaishiteki Tachiba to Nihon (1943). The four participants — Kosaka Masaaki, Nishitani Keiji, Koyama Iwao, and Suzuki Shigetaka, all trained under Nishida at Kyoto — discussed Japan's role in a supposed transition from a Eurocentric "world history" to a genuinely plural, multipolar world order, in language that lent philosophical vocabulary, drawn loosely from Nishida's and Tanabe's dialectics of historical "world" and "species," to justifications of Japan's wartime expansion in East Asia and of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.