    He has unfortunately been excoriated on these grounds as an ultranationalist and even a fascist, notably by Leslie Pincus in her book Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics, and this deters some people from reading him. But while Pincus’s book provides a good deal of helpful historical background of the milieu in which Kuki was working in Japan, her claims that he was a fascist are groundless (see Parkes 1997, 2007). An unprejudiced reading of The Structure of Iki reveals no fascist tendencies whatsoever, and the nationalist themes are innocuous, simply calling for a remembering of what is valuable in the Japanese tradition and likely to be lost beneath the waves of modernization—in a world where connections with the past were withering and Japan was warding off the colonization of East and South Asia by the Western powers.