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In other words, tasting of iki is to reach the core of the true nature of the Japanese people. Kuki urges a Japnese to experience iki, let it live in the core of self, and know iki reveals the essence of the people of Japan. This firsthand experience is the only way to understand iki.
Although Kuki sees value in the conceptual analysis of iki, which involves teasing apart constituent elements of iki, in the end, Kuki advocates the practice of iki-living.
Kuki and Japanese Militarism
Now that we have some ideas about what Kuki said about iki, let us now examine how historians and art historians have dealt with this text. If one bases one's ideas on the conviction that this aesthetic sensibility of iki constitutes the core of Japanese people, and so must be held onto in order to maintain the authentic Japanese character, it is easy to see how the military mind might be interested in making use of such ideas to prop up nationalistic beliefs.
Naturally, historians have now become curious about Kuki's role in the formation of so-called Japanese national aesthetics in the 1930s, at the time when the Japanese military government was grappling with the issue of defining and asserting the national and cultural identity to the rest of the world. Some historians claim that Kuki had a very active role in the formation of "national aesthetics," the same role, some argue, Martin Heidegger played for the National Socialism in the 1930s. However, evidence to support this position is much less convincing. One can look to several places to understand why this is the case.
First, some circumstantial evidence about Kuki's personality and social skills. Kuki as a young man was both idealistic and decadent. He was active in a Christian cause of social conscience and converted to Catholicism in 1911 at age 23 like many of his peers at the First Higher School he attended. He also lived in a period when Japan came out of two major wars—one against China (1894-1895) and another against Russia (1904-1905) ten years later, both formidable military powers—with victory. These events as well as other two events that finally vindicated Japan from the biased treatment it was subjected in Meiji (e.g., Ansei Treaty of 1854 which gave favorable status to United States, Belgium, Great Britain, France, and Russia) were revoked to some degree in 1894 and completely in 1911. At the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan was drunk with the sweet taste of new international recognition and soaring nationalism. The First Higher School was also known to have had a extremely effervescent political culture among its students. No doubt the nationalism and renewed pride in Japan must have affected young Kuki. Throughout higher school and university, while Kuki enjoyed all the trappings of modern Japan-cafes, jazz halls, and the like-Kuki was very much interested in decadent, opulent world in Edo-that perfect era-richly depicted by Nagai Kafū (1879-1959), whose fiction mirrors and manifests in a literacy mode many of Kuki's convictions. Kuki himself attempted to emulate this style and wrote romantic poetry later in the 1920s. He sent his drafts from Paris for publication in the prestigious Tokyo literary magazine Myōjō.
Besides being a budding aesthete, he was also a don Juan, and lover of good times, especially apparent during his stay in Europe. There he went to best restaurants and enjoyed the most exquisite pleasure houses on the Seine. Professionally he was more of a loner—after he took the post at Kyoto, he never took a student nor engaged in much intellectual discourse with his colleagues. He would spend his "meager professor's salary" at Kyoto on nights out on the town, frequenting the Gion geisha district in that city. Kuki was a recluse. He seems to have had no political desire or acumen. Other than his pursuit as a philosopher and teacher of a few courses, his existence appeared to be irrelevant to the national discourse on any matter of significance. He may have been iki in his life but inert and inconsequential to society like a dandy.
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