 What is perhaps most controversial, from a cross-cultural political point of view, is Nishida’s and other Kyoto School thinkers’ suggestion that it is modern Japanese culture and philosophy in particular that has the potential to be developed so as to make room for the cooperative meeting of the strengths of East and West (see NKZ XIV, 416–17; also Nishida 1964, 365). What are we to make of such bold claims? There appear to be two problematical assertions involved: first, an overly generalized, if not at times hypostatized, split of cultural spheres into “East” and “West”; and second, a claim that an idea with deeper roots in the East, namely absolute nothingness, can be developed so as to provide the philosophical meeting place of both East and  West.[18]