in 1940, Miki became isolated and depressed. During this time he continued to collaborate with fellow academics and members of the newly formed Kokumin Gakujutsu Kyōkai (Civilian Academic Society). In 1942 he served one year in the Imperial Army as a military journalist deployed in the Philippines. His second wife Kobayashi Itoko died in 1944, after which he moved to Saitama Prefecture with his eldest son. In 1945 he was arrested again and charged with sheltering political fugitive and fellow Kyoto School thinker Takakura Teru. He was imprisoned in Sugamo Prison before being transferred to Toyotama Prison, where on September 26, 1945, he died of nephritis—40 days after the end of World War II. His death, suggested to be the result of prisoner mistreatment, caused anguish among Japanese intellectuals. Following this, the Allied Occupation pressed to have political prisoners released. Thought Satō Nobue, a leading scholar on Miki's body of work, rejects the notion that Miki was a mere follower of Nishida, Hegel or Blaise Pascal. Instead, Miki can be seen to have an independent and syncretic approach to his work. Shoji Muramoto credits Miki as "the central figure in the Japanese humanistic movement" and the first to author a book "explicitly related to the existentialist tradition written by a Japanese thinker", his 1926 Study of the Human Being in Pascal. Miki himself writes, "one who strives for a good life is either an idealist or a humanist." His adherence to humanism throughout his works however is disputed. Tradition was a particular preoccupation of Miki's philosophy. In maturing his thought, he came to emphasize that "the philosophy of history is the logic of historical consciousness". His conception of tradition as active, ongoing transmission by human action he contrasts with the immanent evolutionism of Hegelians and conservative traditionalists. In his 1940 essay "On Tradition", he states "a proper understanding of tradition must consist of an emphasis on both the transcendence of tradition and our active attitude toward it." Through this he stresses a unification of praxis and tradition. Miki's thought also emphasized the nature of certain concepts in opposition, such as spoken and unspoken philosophy, nature and history, subject and object, logos and pathos, process and moment, organicism and dialectic, immanence and transcendence, and so on. His philosophy saw dialectic or the logic of imagination as the process of reconciliation between opposites, with the principal organ of this process being imagination