ABSTRACT
The years when Japan was drifting to war were a time of spiritual restlessness. The nation was turning away disillusioned from the ideals it had embraced half a century before and many were searching for something of Japan’s own, something Japanese and unique, which would furnish a better philosophy of the state than the nation had developed from its nineteenthcentury borrowings. So there began a debate on the soul of Japan, the national spirit; and philosophers, patriots, the army, and the government took part in it. It arose from a belief or a hope that in their native ideas the Japanese could find a rule of life that they needed as a nation and there was also, in the earlier stages, an undertone of longing that foreign nations should understand the Japanese soul and a painful conviction that neither the Japanese publicists nor any of their interpreters had put that soul across.
