 Watsuji’s theory of the state, and his vocal support of the Emperor system, garnered considerable criticism after the Second World War. La Fleur maintains that Watsuji’s detractors were “dominant in Japanese intellectual life from 1945 to approximately 1975,” while his admirers became “newly articulate since the decade of the 1980s” (LaFleur 1994, 453). The former group considered his position to be a dangerous one. He argued that the culmination of the double negation, which he conceived of as a single movement, was the restoration of the absolute totality. In other words, while the individual negates the group in order to be an authentic and independent individual, the second negation is to abandon one’s independence as an individual in the full realization of totality. It is a ‘surrender’ to totality, moving one beyond the myriad specific groups to the one total and absolute whole. It would seem natural that this ultimate wholeness would be the home ground of nothingness, and in a way it is. But Watsuji argues that it is the state that takes on the authority of totality. It is the highest and best social structure thus far. The political implications of this position could easily result in a totalitarian state ethics. Indeed, Watsuji extolled the superiority of traditional Japanese culture because of its emphasis on self-negation, including the making of the ultimate sacrifice if required by the Emperor. In America’s National Character (1944), he contrasted this willingness to an assumed selfishness or egocentrism found in the West, together with a utilitarian ethic of expediency, which he felt was rarely able to commit to self-surrender in aid of the state. What he saw as most exemplary in the Japanese way of life was the Bushido ideal of “the absolute negativity of the subject” (Odin 1996, 67), through which the totality of the whole is able to be achieved. There is no doubt that Watsuji’s position could easily be interpreted as a totalitarian state ethics. Yet, insofar as Watsuji’s analysis of Japanese ethics is an account of how the Japanese do actually act in the world, then it is little surprise that the Japanese errors of excess which culminated in the fascism of the Second World War period should be found somehow implicit and possible in Watsuji’s acute presentation of Japanese cultural history. Perhaps the fault to be found lies not in his analysis per se, but rather in his all too sanguine collapsing of the descriptive and the prescriptive. That the Japanese way-in-the-world might include a totalitarian seed is something which demands a normative warning. Surely this is not what should be applauded as an aspect of the alleged superiority of Japanese culture, nor should Bushido in and of itself be taken as a blameless path to the highest of ethical achievements. The willingness to be loyal, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation might be, in order to remain loyal to one’s Lord, however evil or foolhardy he might be, is not an adequate or rational position, and it is surely not laudable ethically. It is, perhaps, the way the samurai saw themselves, as martial servants loyal to death. But the ‘is’ here is clearly not a moral ‘ought’. 