| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

David Williams. Defending Japan's Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power. London: RoutledgeCurzon. 2005. Pp. xxvi, 238. $34.95.
David Williams has a lot to say in this new book. His previous works (Japan: Beyond the End of History [1994]; Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science [1996]) praise postwar Japanese political economy as a model for modern development. This time he goes back to World War II for a look at the philosophy of the Kyoto School. Along the way he lashes out at the faults of Japan studies in the United States, reserving his harshest words for American imperialism in Asia.	1
The book is an extended topical essay rather than a monograph, consisting of a prologue and summary followed by twelve chapters and two essays by Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), a co-founder and major figure of the Kyoto School. How does the author propose to "defend" Japan's imperial role in the Pacific War? Strictly speaking, he doesn't, instead presenting the Kyoto School version of how Japan's empire might be justified. But Williams has to wade through a series of negative political critiques before he can assess the philosophical texts, because the postwar academic consensus on both sides of the Pacific has discredited the Kyoto School, condemning its ideas as "fascist." He attributes this to "the malign influence of Pacific War orthodoxy" (p. 101), an attitude of adulation for the Allied triumph in World War II, along with the American conviction that the war liberated Asia from Japanese imperialism.	. . .

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