 In denying the reality of the subject/object distinction, and affirming the emptiness of all things, Watsuji was able to argue that as the individual negates or rebels against society, thereby emptying society of an unchanging objective status, and as the second negation establishes the totality of society by emptying the individual, it reduces the individual ego to emptiness as well. Neither of the dual characteristics of ningen are either unchanging or ultimately real. What is ultimate is the emptiness which is revealed as their basis, for all things are empty, and yet, once this truth is realized, it is as individuals and societies that nothingness is expressed and revealed. Emptiness negates itself, or empties itself as the beings of this world. And it does this in the emptiness of betweenness, the empty space within which relations between individuals and societies form and continue to re-form. The state, as the culminating social organization thus far achieved, is the form of forms, “transcending all the other levels of social organization…giving to each of those protected forms a proper place” (LaFleur 1994, 457). The state is, ultimately, “the moral systematiser of all those organizations” (LaFleur, french, 457). However, the problem of the proper relation of the individual to society emerges, for Watsuji goes on to argue that “the state subsumes within itself all these forms of private life and continually turns them into the form of the public domain” (LaFleur 1994, 457). In attempting to move away from the selfishness of egoistic action, Watsuji has given primacy to the state over individual and group rights. As LaFleur states, “by valorizing the state as that entity that has the moral authority—in fact the moral obligation—to ‘turn private things into the public domain, Watsuji provides a smooth rationale for a totalizing state” (LaFleur 1994, 458). Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that his intent was not to advocate tyranny or fascism, but to seek out an ethical and social theory whereby human beings as human beings could interact easily and fruitfully in the space between them, creating as a result a society, and a world-wide association of societies which selflessly recognized the value of the individual and the crucial importance of the well-being of the whole. His solution may have been inadequate, and open to unwelcome misuse. His analysis of ‘betweenness’ shows it to be communality, and communality as a mutuality wherein each individual may affect every other individual and thereby affect the community or communities; and the community, as an historical expression of the whole may affect each individual. Ideally, what would result would be an enlightened sense of our interconnectedness with all human beings, regardless of race, color, religion, or creed, and a selfless, compassionate capacity to identify with others as though they were oneself. By reintroducing a vivial sense of our communitarian interconnectedness, and our spatial and bodily place in the betweenness between us, where we meet, love, and strive to live ethical lives together, Watsuji provides an ethical and political theory which might well prove to be helpful both to non-Japanese societies, and to a modern Japan itself which is torn between what it was, and what it is becoming. 