 Their ambivalent wartime stance between supporting the nationalistic ideology and subjecting it to critique from a pluralistic and global perspective—in other words, their attempt to walk a razor’s edge of “cooperative resistance”—ironically earned the Kyoto School a suspect reputation in Japan both before and after the end of the war. As Nishitani confided later to a student: “During the war we were struck on the cheek from the right; after the war we were struck on the cheek from the left.”