Abstract

This paper describes the situation of philosophy in Japan with respect to the question of internationalism. For more than a hundred years, Japan took Western culture as its model and European philosophy as the authentic philosophy. This tendency was paradoxically strengthened by the post‐war humanism. It gave us Japanese philosophers a clear discipline to work in but cut us off from our own native culture, history, and philosophical traditions. In wishing to recover this loss, I argue that it is necessary to distinguish between two forms of internationalism: humanistic and merely fashionable. The latter in fact derives from domestic reasons.