 Fujita Masakatsu suggests that the question of defining the identity of the Kyoto School has often been a more pressing issue for Western scholars than for the Japanese themselves. He speculates that there are two reasons for this. One is that the Kyoto School never really had any noteworthy competing schools of original thought within Japan with which to contrast itself, and over against which to explicitly define its own identity. The second reason is that, while Westerners tend to draw out and focus on the shared general characteristics of the School’s thinkers, usually in contrast with the general characteristics of Western thought, for Japanese scholars of the Kyoto School the differences between the various thinkers often appear in sharper relief than do their shared commonalities (Fujita 2001, ii).