Defending Japan's Pacific War

David Williams is one of Europe's leading thinkers about modern Japan. Born in Los Angeles, he was educated in Japan and at UCLA, and has contributed for many years to the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at Oxford, where he took his doctorate, Sheffield and Cardiff Universities. During twelve of his 25 years in Japan, he was an editorial writer for The Japan Times. He is the author of Japan: Beyond the End of History and Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science.

• Prologue: The Final Sorrows of Empire - A Vietnam Elegy The Book in Brief Acknowledgments The Doomed Fleets Sail: The Pacific War for Beginners Japanese Usage and Style Part 1 Rise and Fall 1. Roman Questions: American Empire and the Kyoto School 2. Revisionism and the End of White America in Japan Studies Part 2 The Decay of Pacific War Orthodoxy 3. Philosophy and the Pacific War: Imperial Japan and the Making of a Post-White World 4. Scholarship or Propaganda: Neo-Marxism and the Decay of Pacific War Orthodoxy 5. Wartime Japan as It Really Was: The Kyoto School's Struggle against Tojo, 1941-44 Part 3 In Defence of the Kyoto School 6. Taking Kyoto Philosophy Seriously 7. Racism and the Black Legend of the Kyoto School: Translating Tanabe's The Logic of the Species 8. When Is a Philosopher a Moral Monster?: Tanabe versus Heidegger versus Marcuse Part 4 Nazism and the Crises of the Kyoto School 9. Heidegger, Nazism and the Farías Affair: The European Origins of the Kyoto School Crises 10. Heidegger and the Wartime Kyoto School: After Farías - The First Paradigm Crisis (1987-1996) 11. Nazism Is No Excuse: After Farías - The Allied Gaze and the Second Crisis (1997-2002) Part 5 After America, Philosophy 12. Nothing Shall Be Spared: A Manifesto on the Future of Japan Studies Translations of Two Texts by Hajime Tanabe 1. The Philosophy of Crisis or a Crisis in Philosophy: Reflections on Heidegger's Rectoral Address (1933) 2. On the Logic of Co-prosperity Spheres: Towards a Philosophy of Regional Blocs (1942) Select Bibliography

'It is an unexpected thrill to pick up a book that puts Tanabe Hajime's thought in the philosophical limelight...He has presented solid translations of two seminal texts of Tanabe, one of them only recently discovered...He does not hesitate to shatter the silence on issues that many in the West have considered too risky to ask.' - Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'Defending Japan's Pacific War is a major achievement for which the author must be congratulated...It deserves a wide readership beyond Japan studies.' - International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter