 During the war, the stance of the Kyoto School was considered too cosmopolitan and insufficiently nationalistic, even anti-war. The discussions published in The Standpoint of World History and Japan were branded by the Imperial Way ideologues as “ivory-tower speculations that risked reducing the Empire to simply one more category of world history,” and further printings of the book were reportedly stopped by the government censors (see Horio 1994, 291). After the war, the Kyoto School’s idealistic attempts to impart meaning and direction to Japan’s “world historical mission” were seen—especially by liberals and leftists that had at long last been freed from repression and persecution—as support for its de facto militaristic fascism. Nishitani and others were purged for several years from their university positions. Even when they were later reinstated, the stigma of the Kyoto School as having “cooperated in the war” was hardly erased. Their political thought in particular was dismissed in toto, and it was not until decades later that the topic of “overcoming modernity” was once again given serious critical attention (see Kawakami &amp; Takeuchi 1979; Hiromatsu 1989; and Ōhashi 1992, 143ff.).