Abstract

Japanese foremost philosophers, the Kyoto School's commitment to the "transcendence of modernity" during the Pacific War has been recognized as the most significant, but enigmatic, page in modern Japanese intellectual history. This dissertation attempts to position this ostensively isolated wartime episode in a much broader historical context. The Kyoto School's accusation of Euro-American modernity started much earlier than the Pacific War. In the 1910s and 20s, the Kyoto School equated the rise of Japanese bourgeoisie with Taisho democracy, industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of American culture in Japanese society. Furthermore, they attributed these 'deplorable' cultural phenomena to the Anglo-American world order, symbolized by Wilsonianism and the League of Nations. Inspired by Imperial Germany's cultural war against the Anglo-Franco powers in the First World War, they attempted to develop a Japanese high culture as a cultural alternative to world-wide Americanization and technological civilization. In this context, they justified Japanese military adventurism in China during the 1930s and the Pacific War as manifestations of Japanese world historical mission for rescuing the world from American decadence. Japanese Marxists shared this culturist perspective, and they cooperated with the Japanese military. Despite Japan's defeat, both the Kyoto School and Japanese Marxists more vigorously continued their cultural war against the American occupation and presented themselves as defenders of Japanese culture. This dissertation uncovers this continuity in Japanese intellectual thought and behavior between 1913 and 1953