The Kyoto School's Engagement with Heidegger and German Philosophy

Direct personal and institutional contact between the Kyoto School and German philosophy, above all the phenomenological and existential tradition running from Husserl through Heidegger, was extensive and largely mediated by extended study trips Japanese scholars took to Freiburg and Marburg during the 1920s and 1930s. Tanabe Hajime, Nishida's successor at Kyoto, studied under Husserl in Freiburg from 1922 to 1924 and there encountered the young Heidegger, then Husserl's assistant; on returning to Japan, Tanabe published in 1924 an essay generally translated as "A New Turn in Phenomenology: Heidegger's Phenomenology of Life," introducing Heidegger's still-unpublished lecture-course phenomenology to Japanese readers three years before Sein und Zeit itself appeared in 1927.