 The postwar period has brought three general developments. First, with the end of censorship of liberal and leftist thought, there was often a purge of the very idea of “Japanese” philosophy as smacking of nativism, ethnocentrism, jingoism, and State Shintō ideology. This was often directed, fairly or unfairly, toward assimilative traditions like the Kyoto School. In response, the immediate postwar generation or two in most Japanese academic philosophy departments escaped into Western philosophy, often carried out with a sense of purity that rivaled the earlier ethnocentric movement. Consequently, the large majority of Japanese academic philosophers trained in the latter half of the twentieth century have pursued philosophy according to methods and themes hardly distinguishable from those of the West.