 The Kyoto School thinkers rarely responded directly to their critics after the war, and we can only speculate on the reasons for this (see Horio 1994, 300). They accepted suspension from their posts without comment or complaint, and continued on with their philosophizing, albeit without the overtly political element of their thought. Nishitani, for example, came into his own as a philosopher of religion in the postwar era. He continued to philosophically develop Eastern ideas, those of Zen Buddhism in particular, in dialogue with medieval Christian mysticism as well as postmodern existentialism and phenomenology and in response to what he saw as the central problem of modernity, namely, nihilism. In his mature attempts to “overcome nihilism by way of passing through nihilism” (NKC XX, 192), we find a significant thread of continuity with his pre-war and wartime attempts to overcome (Western) modernity by way of passing through it. But it is nevertheless possible to mark a crucial and self-critical “turn” in his thinking with regard to the question of the political role—or, as it turns out, the lack of one—to be played by the Japanese state in this overcoming of modernity and nihilism by way of passing through them (see Davis 2008b).