 Critics may argue that Nishida’s universalism is still plagued by an exemplary  particularism,[17]  and that he succeeds in questioning Eurocentrism only by way of shifting the locus of the concrete universal to Japan. Yoko Arisaka argues that “the chief claim of the defenders—that Nishida’s philosophical ‘universalism’ is incompatible with nationalist ideology—fails because universalist discourse was used both as a tool of liberation and oppression in Japan’s case” (Arisaka 1999, 242). Arisaka critically adds, however, that “the idea that a particular nation may be the bearer of a universal principle, such as freedom or democracy, and that, therefore, its actions in history serve a higher end, should be familiar from recent American experience” (ibid., 244; also see Maraldo 1994, 355).