 From today’s vantage point, Nishida’s political writings appear highly ambivalent. On the one hand, his resistance to fascism and totalitarianism is unmistakable. Indeed it comes as no surprise that he was in danger of being arrested—and apparently only his public stature and the fact that he had influential sympathizers within the moderate ranks of the government kept this from happening—when one reads the warning given in his 1941 speech delivered directly to the emperor: “Any totalitarian system that negates outright the role of the individual is but an anachronism” (NKZ XII, 271; see Yusa 1994, 111). Even in his most compromised text, “Principles for a New World Order,” Nishida urgently claims that the “co-prosperity sphere” must not entail either ethnocentrism, expansionism, imperialism, colonialism, or totalitarianism (see NKZ XII, 432–33). Elsewhere Nishida made clear that his vision was of a multicultural world where neither the West would subsume the East nor vice versa (NKZ XIV, 404–5), where “various cultures, while maintaining their own individual standpoints, would develop themselves through the mediation of the world” (NKZ VII, 452–53).