ABSTRACTThis article discusses some common narratives found in discourses on national identity in Russia and Japan, and their temporal transformations reflecting the needs of a nation as it becomes a colonial empire. National identity discourse is examined from the viewpoint of national antagonism arising from an external threat. Russian and Japanese intellectuals, with their vastly different historical and cultural heritage, have dwelled upon similar issues pertaining to modernization of the state and adoption or rejection of foreign ideas and ways of (...) life. There are several themes in Russian and Japanese discourses on national identity that share a significant overlap, particularly themes of national uniqueness and a ‘special path’, deterministic worldviews, imperial cosmopolitanism/messianism and criticism of ‘Western’ philosophical systems and concepts. This article elucidates the shared aspects of these narratives and philosophical inquiries in Russia and Japan and puts them into a historical context. (shrink)

Watsuji is recognised as one Japan’s foremost philosophers. His work on ethics, Rinrigaku, is cosmopolitan in engaging the Western philosophical tradition, and in presupposing an international audience. Yet Watsuji’s ethical thought is largely of niche interest outside Japan, and it is critiqued on the ground that it ratifies totalitarianism, demanding individuals’ unquestioning subordination to communal demands. We offer a reading of Rinrigaku that, in attempting to trace the text’s intention, disputes these arguments. We argue that Rinrigaku makes individual autonomy central (...) to ethical action, despite the fact that its treatment of coercion may lead one to think otherwise; that it does not reduce ethical obligations to whatever demands any given society imposes on its members; that it draws a distinction between socio-ethical orders that are genuinely ethical and those that are not; and that, in insisting on the grounding of individuals in the Absolute, it makes adequate room for individuals’ resistance to unjustifiable socio-ethical demands. (shrink)

In the second volume of Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsurō focuses on developing his notion of betweenness through the ethical organisations of family, local commun...

Watsuji Tetsurô is famous for having constructed a systematic socio-political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought, in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory (...) of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine-tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non-duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities. (shrink)