 Fighting a conceptual war simultaneously on two fronts, against Western and Japanese ethnocentrisms, Nishida wrote that “until now Westerners have thought that their own culture is the most superior human culture that exists, and that human culture inevitably develops in the direction of their own culture—hence, as Easterners and other peoples who are lagging behind advance forward, they must become the same as [Westerners].” Even some Japanese, he regrets, think this way. And yet, he objects, “there is something radically different in [the culture of] the East.” According to Nishida, the development of the West will subsume this difference no more than the East will subsume the West. Even if humanity does share a common root (what he calls, adapting an expression from Goethe, an “ur-culture” of multiple possibilities), the development of its branches and leaves is a matter of diversification, not homogenization. Globalization should thus be thought of, in Nishida’s vision, as many branches of the same tree supplementing one other on the basis of both their deep-rooted commonality and their irreducible diversity (NKZ XIV, 402–6 and 417).