 The second significant moment in the naming (or “labeling”) of the Kyoto School came more clearly from without, and in an even more politically charged context. As Nishitani was to recollect years later: “The name ‘Kyoto School’ is a name journalists used in connection with discussions that friends of mine and I held immediately before and during the war” (NKC XI, 207; see Heisig 2001, 277). Nishitani is referring here to a series of symposia that addressed the question of the meaning and direction of the Pacific War and another symposium on the question of “overcoming modernity.” These controversial symposia will be discussed in subsection 4.3 of this article. In his retrospective comments, penned in 1977, Nishitani goes on to say that by that time the name “Kyoto School” had come to be used by Americans and others to “indicate purely a school of thought.”