 What Watsuji adds to this picture which makes it extremely difficult to condemn him too harshly, and possibly to condemn him at all, is his adament insistence in the third volume of Rinrigaku that no one nation has charted the correct political and cultural path, and that the diversity of each is to be both encouraged and respected. He writes of unity in diversity, and rejects the idea that any nation has the right to culturally assimilate another. Each nation is shaped by its particular geography, climate, culture and history, and the resultant diversity is both to be protected and appreciated, and the notion of a universal state is, therefore, but an unwanted and dangerous delusion. We must know our own traditions, and to cherish those, but we must not extol them as superior out of our ignorance of other ways and cultural traditions. In fact, such ignorance, resulting from Japan’s unwise self-imposed isolationism, Watsuji saw as the most tragic flaw in Japan’s own history, and a cause of the Second World War. Japan knew so little of the outside world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that it exaggerated its own worth and power, and vastly underestimated the importance of political and diplomatic involvement in the happenings of the rest of the world. Nationalism must not express itself at the expense of internationalism, and internationalism must not establish itself at the expense of nationalism. Here is another pair of seeming contradictions to be held together by the unity of mutual interaction; the one modifies the other, and that tension is not to be resolved. Internationalism must be a unity of independent and distinctive nations. 