Contents
Welcome address

3

Conference Theme

4

Conference venue

7

Program overview

8

Conference schedule

9

Abstracts

16

Keynote Addresses

16

Roundtable discussion

19

Pre-organised panels

20

Panels of individual papers

31

Participants’ bios

66

Public transportation

88

About the Airport transfer

88

Accessing the conference venue

92

Local safety measures

94

Supporters
The event is realised with the support of TOSHIBA INTERNATIONAL
FOUNDATION.
Our supporter in communication is the JAPAN FOUNDATION, BUDAPEST.

Cover and graphic design
Petra DomaSpecial thanks to
the doctoral students of ELTE Department of Japanese Studies:
Richárd Gottner, Angelika Pataki-Tóth, Beáta Pusztai, Dániel Rudlof
Contact the organisers: enojp2020@btk.elte.hu

2

Welcome address
It is our great pleasure to welcome all participants to the 6th Annual Conference of
the European Network of Japanese Philosophy. We started to organise this event in
2019, planning to hold it in 2020. Due to the pandemic, the Conference waspostponed to 2021, then to 2022, in hopes that we would be able to hold it as aphysical event this February. Unfortunately, the coronavirus has still not left theworld. But fortunately, we have learnt to work in online and “hybrid” modes, and in
2021 we decided not to postpone our event any longer, nor to leave anyone out
because of travel difficulties, time zone differences or any other issues.
We were very glad to receive a large number of abstracts, representing a wide
variety of topics in Japanese Philosophy, and we are very happy to welcome
renowned scholars and young researchers from more than twenty countries. We areproud to host the first hybrid annual conference of the European Network ofJapanese Philosophy, symbolising the diversity of research initiatives on our topic.
For practical information, please consult the relevant sections of this booklet or
contact the organising team locally or via the conference email.
We wish you a very pleasant event either in Budapest or joining us online, lively
discussions and new perspectives. We are confident that with your help we will beable to spend this time together.
On behalf of the Organising Team
Ferenc Takó, Raquel Bouso, Roman Pasca

3

Conference Theme(Counter)influences
Through more than one and a half millennia, Japanese thought has been
continuously shaped, widened and diversified by different influences of religious,
philosophical, scientific and ideological formations. The ability of the Japanese to
introduce, creatively fuse and dynamically modify the most different modes ofthought made Japan an ever-changing melting pot of various teachings. All the
traditions, schools and streams of thought that have entered Japan since the earliest
times until the present day have gone through numerous transformations, becoming
integral parts of Japanese culture.
From classical Confucian ideas, Buddhist thought and elements of Daoism,
through the teachings of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, until the introduction of“Western” scientific, religious, philosophical and political thought, an enormous
variety of influences reached Japan. These teachings, sometimes introduced underclose state supervision, sometimes restricted or even banned by the authorities,
sometimes seamlessly spreading through different social strata, caused continuousinternal tensions and reactions, and awakened new interpretations and applicationsof already existing ideas and methods.
Of course, it was not only the introduction of external trends that kept alive
continuous internal transformations within the different streams of Japanesethought. The mutual critique between Buddhist schools, the encounters between
Shinto and Buddhism, the tensions between different modes of Confucian teachings,
the emergence of kokugaku as a reaction to foreign influences, just like the conflicts
between Western philosophy and the Japanese intellectual tradition – these are only
a few of the more notable examples of the endless series of encounters taking place
within the physical borders of Japan.
In this flow of transmissions, centuries of reception, growth, flourishing, decay andrenewal of teachings, we see reflected the complementarity of the firmness of
tradition and the flexibility of adaptation, both of which have characterised Japanesethought from the earliest times to modern academic philosophy. The 6th Conferenceof the European Network of Japanese Philosophy is dedicated to the examination of
influences and counter-influences in the history of Japanese thought from its
beginnings to contemporary philosophy. The organisers welcome papers analysing
areas including but not limited to pre-modern philosophical traditions, religious

4thought, political ideas, encounters between different theories of arts, martial arts,
science, schools of “foreign” learning (rangaku, eigaku, yōgaku, futsugaku…), Shinto’s
encounters with other traditions, and modern philosophical schools and thinkers
following or opposing Western ideas. The purpose of the Conference is to explore thedepth and width of (counter)influences that have occurred and are endlessly
occurring in Japanese thought, through the widest possible range of approaches.

5影響・反響その１５００年以上の歴史において、日本の思想は様々な宗教的、哲学的、科学的、イデオロギー的な影響によって形作られ、広げられ、多様化してきた。たとえ完全に異質な思想であっても受け入れ、創造的に融合させ、ダイナミックに変容させる、という日本人の能力によって、日本は複数の思想が間断なく変化する坩堝になった。太古の時代から今日までに日本に入ってきた諸伝統・諸派・諸思想の全て
は、あまたの変化を経て、日本文化において不可欠な一部分を構成するようになった。
儒学から始まり、仏教・道教・朱子学・陽明学を通して、「西洋」の科学的、宗教的、哲学的、政治学的な思想に至るまで、 日本は非常に多岐にわたる思想的影響を受けてきた。それは、時には国家に厳しく監督されながら導入され、時には権力によって限定あるいは禁止され、時にはあらゆる社会的階層を難なく縦断しながら普及して、継続的な内部の緊張と反響、そしてすでに存在している思想や方法の新たな解釈や応用を引き起こした。
無論、日本思想の様々な流れにおける内面的変化を保ち続けているのは、外国から流入した動向だけではない。日本仏教の宗派同士の批判、仏教と神道の遭遇、儒学諸派間の緊迫、海外からの影響への対抗としての国学の誕生、そして西洋哲学と日本思想史の衝突… これらは日本という国の物理的国境の中で起こってきた、絶え間ない出来事のほんの一例である。
その様々な伝達の流れの中で、すなわち多様な教えの数世紀にわたる受容、発展、繁栄、衰退、そして改変において、伝統の強固性と順応の弾力性が反映され、その両方が太古の時代から現代の学術的哲学までの日本思想を特徴づけていることがわかる。European Network of Japanese Philosophy の第六回会議は太古の時代か
ら現代までの日本思想に対する影響と、その影響の受容に関し、考察するものである。現代以前の哲学的伝統、宗教的思想、政治思想、及び美術、武道、科学など異なる理論の遭遇、様々な「外国」に関する学問（蘭学・英学・洋学・仏学など）、
神道とその他の伝統との交点、西洋の考え方に同意あるいは対立する現代思想等々についての発表を広く募集している。本会議の目的は、日本思想史に対しすでに与えられた影響、並びに今後も絶えることなく与えられ続ける影響と、その受容との関係、その深みと幅を、可能な限り広い側面から探ることである。

6

Conference venue
Physical Address: Building “R”, 4 Múzeum körút, Budapest, H-1088, Hungary
Physical rooms and Zoom access:Faculty Council Hall Build. “A”, Ground Floor
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3997315192?pwd=M1dlbjRFVlhZajdaZVZNQmZkUEJIZz09
ID: 399 731 5192
Passcode: 19011200
Room 1 Floor 4, Room 423, Building “R”
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3997315192?pwd=M1dlbjRFVlhZajdaZVZNQmZkUEJIZz09
ID: 399 731 5192
Passcode: 19011200
Room 2 Floor 3, Room 356, Building “R”
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6518928192?pwd=U3p5ZHpwMlRBSGtpNTk1akxYbGVkdz09
ID: 651 892 8192
Passcode: 19051870
Room 3 Floor 3, Room 315, Building “R”
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6292618799?pwd=emgxTDFjTk9OdGRhTERuVk91Q1ptdz09
ID: 629 261 8799
Passcode: 01031889

Conference WiFi
Name: ENOJP
Password: ENOJP2022

7

Program overview
TUESDAY, 1ST FEBRUARY
14:00–14:30

Opening Address

14:30–15:30

Keynote Speech – Naoki Sakai (online presentation)

16:00–18:00

Pre-organised panels

19:00

Opening Dinner

WEDNESDAY, 2ND FEBRUARY
8:30–10:30

Panels of individual papers

11:00–12:00

Panels of individual papers

13:30–15:00

Pre-organised panel & panel of individual papers

15:30–17:00

Panels of individual papers

17:30–19:00

Roundtable Discussion

THURSDAY, 3RD FEBRUARY
9:00–10:00

Keynote Speech – Judit Árokay

10:30–13:00

Pre-organised panels & panel of individual papers

14:30–15:30

Panels of individual papers

15:45–18:30

Panels of individual papers

18:45–19:45

Special Program – Balázs Szabó

FRIDAY, 4TH FEBRUARY
9:00–10:00

Keynote Speech – Graham Parkes

10:30–12:30

Pre-organised panel & panels of individual papers

13:00–15:00

Panels of individual papers

16:30–18:00

ENOJP General Assembly8Conference schedule

Note
Please use the Autumn Leaf symbol to jump between the schedule and the abstracts

TUESDAY, 1ST FEBRUARY
13:30–14:00

Registration

14:00–14:30

Opening Address

Council Hall

Welcome speech by Imre Hamar,
Vice-Rector for International Affairs, Director of theInstitute of East Asian Studies

14:30–15:30

Keynote SpeechCouncil Hall
online presentation

Naoki Sakai
Area Studies and National Philosophy: Civilizational Chair: Ferenc
Transference in Culturalism
Takó
15:30–16:00

Break

16:00–18:00

Pre-organised panels

16:00–18:00 Panel I. CHANGING CONCEPTS OF JAPONISME IN EASTCENTRAL EUROPE – INFLUENCES AND COUNTERINFLUENCES

hybrid session

Stefano Turina, Mirjam Dénes, Mária Ildikó
FarkasChair: Ferenc
Takó

16:00–18:00 Panel II. THE IDEA OF NATURE IN JAPANESE, CHINESE
AND VIETNAMESE: THE MULTILINGUAL AND CROSSCULTURAL INFLUENCES BEHIND THE WORD “自然”
Romaric Jannel, Nguyen Duy Hung, Laÿna
Droz, Hung-Tao Chu
19:00

Room 1

Opening Dinner

9

Room 2
online session
Chair: Roman
Pasca

WEDNESDAY, 2ND FEBRUARY
8:00–8:30

Registration

8:30–10:30

Panels of individual papers

8:30–10:30

WATSUJI AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Room 3Alexandra Mustatea Thinking about Confucianism hybrid session
and Modernity in the Early Postwar Period – Watsuji
Chair:
Tetsurō’s 'The History of Ethical Thought in Japan'
Fernando Wirtz
Roman Pasca Nature, Ahistoricity, andEnvironmental Ethics
Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth Overcoming
Anthropocentrism: Watsuji, Ecology, and Symbiosis
Steve Bein Unbalancing Act: Oppression andResistance in the Ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō
9:00–10:30

JAPAN AND JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY
Joff P.N. Bradley Thinking otherwise than the
caricature of “Japanese philosophy”
Kimie Matsumoto 幽玄なる文化創造

Room 2
online session
Chair: Edward
McDougall―茶道の「型」と西田哲学の「形のない文化」―

Robert Ryan Smith Japanese Ambivalence
Towards Contradiction: The Law of NonContradiction, and the Problem of Identity andDifference, as Philosophical Imports
10:30–11:00

Break

11:00–12:00

Panels of individual papers

11:00–12:00 COUNTERINFLUENCES IN JAPANESE RELIGION I.
Dean Anthony Brink Bakumatsu Crises andPosthuman Agency: Kami Cosmologies and Village
Agronomy in the Hirata School Writings of Miyaoi
Yasuo

Room 2
online session
Chair: Adam
Loughnane

Saito Yoshifumi 日本中世の影と響き
11:00–12:00

JAPAN THROUGH THE WEST AND BACK
Raphael Chim Norinaga without kami: reading
Norinaga’s senses of yonotsune in the light ofMargaret Atherton’s “Berkeley without God”
Montserrat Crespín Perales Migration of people
and texts, shaping and transiting ideas: aphilosophical case study about Nakajima Rikizo’s(1858-1918), “Kant’s Doctrine of the ‘thing-in-itself’”(1889)

12:00–13:30

Lunch

13:30–15:00

Pre-organised panel & panel of individual papers

10

Room 3
online session
Chair: Roman
Pasca

13:30–15:00 Panel III. WATSUJI ON NATURE: JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY
IN THE WAKE OF HEIDEGGERDavid Johnson, Hans Peter Liederbach,
Graham Parkes

13:30–15:00

Room 2
hybrid session
Chair: Steve
Bein

COUNTERINFLUENCES IN JAPANESE RELIGION II.

Room 3

Vladlena Fedianina A Medieval Buddhist
Approach to Japanese History in Jien’s Works

hybrid session

Rossella Lupacchini On Zen Logic and Quantum
Physics. The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Chair: Carlos
Barbosa
CepedaAdam Loughnane “Flowers of Dim-Sightedness:
Dōgen’s Mystical ‘Negative Ocularcentrism’”
15:00–15:30

Break

15:30–17:00

Panels of individual papers

15:30–17:00

MARXISM AND EXISTENCE
Reki Ando The Anti-Marxist Moment in the 1980s
Japanese Left
Ferenc Takó Subjectivism(s) – Maruyama Masao
and the debate on shutaisei

Room 2
live session
Chair: DavidJohnsonRaji C. Steineck Uchiyama Takashi‘s Philosophy ofTime
15:30–16:30

HEIDEGGER AND JAPANMing Hon Chu Heidegger's concepts of boredom
and anxiety in light of Kimura's psychopathologicalphenomenology
Edward McDougall Heidegger Meeting Inari –What Folk-Shinto Practice Can Offer to Heidegger’s
Understanding of Technology

17:00–17:30

Break

17:30–19:00

Roundtable Discussion

Room 3
online session
Chair:
Montserrat
Crespín Perales

Room 1

JAPANESE (PHILOSOPHICAL) STUDIES

hybrid session

ACROSS CULTURES

Chair: Raquel
Bouso

Judit Árokay, Carlos Barbosa Cepeda, Raquel
Bouso, Vladlena Fedianina, David Johnson

11

THURSDAY, 3RD FEBRUARY
9:00–10:00

Keynote Speech
Judit Árokay
Translation Strategies in Transition

10:00–10:30

Break

10:30–13:00

Pre-organised panels & panel of individual papers

10:30–13:00 Panel IV. 40 YEARS OF "CONSCIOUSNESS AND
ESSENCE”. ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE
PUBLICATION OF IZUTSU'S MAJOR WORK
Jun’ichi Ono, Rodrigo Guerizoli, Hans Peter
Liederbach, Ralf Müller, Rossa Ó
Muireartaigh, Andrei Cunha, Lucas
Nascimento Machado
10:30–13:00 Panel V. MIND, FEELING, BODY (心気体): THEORY

11:30–13:00

Council Hall
Chair: Raquel
Bouso

Room 2
online session
Chair: Dean Brink

Room 3

AND PRACTICE IN JAPANESE SELF-CULTIVATION

online session

Leon Krings, Mika Imono, Yukiko
Kuwayama, Jordanco Sekulovski, Raphaël
Pierrès

Chair: Wing Keung
Lam

EAST AND WEST REFLECTED
Yuliya Osadcha Ferreira Eastern Civilizationand Western Enlightenment in Ariga Nagao’s
Bungakuron

Room 1hybrid session
Chair: Ferenc Takó

Lucy McCormick Weaponising Satori: Japanese
Zen in Georges Bataille’s ‘War’ on tout ce qui est
reconnu aujourd’hui
Francesca Greco European Nihilism on
Japanese Soil: Interwoven Influences in a Global
Philosophical Perspective
13:00–14:30

Lunch

14:30–15:30

Panels of individual papers

14:30–15:30

LOST (?) IN TRANSLATION
Oleksandra Bibik To the Question of Religious
Syncretism in Translations of the Qur'an and
Adaptations of Islam in Twenty-Century Japan
Luis Pujadas Torres Applying the Linguistic
Relativity Theory to the Relation Between theJapanese Language and Japanese Philosophy

12

Room 2
online session
Chair: Hans Peter
Liederbach

14:30–15:30

COUNTERINFLUENCES IN NŌ
Dávid Sándor Cseh An Old Man in Red Brocade– Zeami's Sanemori and the Unlikely Beauty of
Shuramono Nō Plays
Daryl Jamieson Zenchiku and the resacralisationof nō

15:30–15:45

Break

15:45–18:30

Panels of individual papers

15:45–18:30

ART AND AESTHETICS
Beáta Pusztai Lucius’s Adventures in
Wonderland
Suguru Kawasato 柳宗悦の民芸理論の射程

Room 1hybrid session
Chair: Filip
Gurjanov

Room 1hybrid session
Chair: Raji C.
Steineck――「ヴァナキュラー」という概念を軸に――Cláudia Ramos The Resonance of Zen Buddhism
in Portuguese Contemporary Art
Fernando Wirtz Myth and Aesthetics of theMachine

18:30–18:45

Lorenzo Marinucci The Place of Scent: JapanesePhilosophy and Olfaction
Break

18:45–19:45

Special Program
Balázs Szabó

Room 1
live session

Aikidō: Theory and Practice13

FRIDAY, 4TH FEBRUARY
9:00–10:00

Keynote SpeechCouncil Hall

Graham Parkes
Befriending Things with Zen Master Dōgen (and alittle help from Nietzsche at the end)

Chair: Ferenc
Takó

10:00–10:30

Break

10:30–12:30

Pre-organised panel & panels of individual papers

10:30–12:00 Panel VI. KYOTO SCHOOL DIALECTIC REVISITED:NISHIDA, NISHITANI, AND WATSUJI
Yūko Ishihara, SPK Cerda, Hans Peter
Liederbach
10:30–12:00

ACTION, EXISTENCE, EXPERIENCE
Ramona Fotiade Existential Mindscapes: Kuki
Shuzo, Shestov and the East-West Dialogue
Makoto Katsumori Hiromatsu on Role Action
and Reification

Room 3
online session
Chair: Alexandra
Mustatea
Room 1
online session
Chair: Francesca
Greco

Kazuaki Oda “Iki” of Two – Kuki Shūzō andNakai Masakazu
10:30–12:30

EAST, WEST AND THE KYOTO SCHOOL I.
Frédéric Girard Motora Yujiro, Direct
experience blogging to his Study on Oriental
Philosophy (1905) and Dacheng qixinlun
Carlos Barbosa Cepeda Tracing the Daoist
roots of Nishitani Keiji’s Thought

Room 2
hybrid session
Chair: Raquel
Bouso

Niklas Söderman A relationship flipped on its
head: Nishitani Keiji’s critique of technology
Filip Gurjanov Between Body and HistoricalWorld: Reflections on Photographic Practice with
Later Nishida
12:30–13:00

Break

13:00–15:00

Panels of individual papers

13:00–14:00

MEDIATIONS: TANABE HAJIME
Quentin Blaevoet On the concept of body.
Tanabe Hajime in dialogue with the French
phenomenological tradition (Sartre, MerleauPonty, Henry)
Satoshi Urai Mediation and Absolute Mediationin the Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime

14

Room 3hybrid session
Chair: Rosella
Lupacchini

13:00–15:00

EAST, WEST AND THE KYOTO SCHOOL II.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein Nishida Kitarō and
Muhammad ‘Abduh on God and Reason: Towards
a Theology of Place
Wing Keung Lam Nishida Kitarō andShaftesbury: An Encounter of Moral
Sentimentalism

Room 2
online session
Chair: Lorenzo
Marinucci

Sanada Wataru What Enables History to Move:
A Reading of Nishida Kitarō’s Later Works
Tak-Lap Yeung Influences and answers from atranscultural perspective: Nishida Kitaro and Mou
Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition
15:00–15:30

Closing remarks

16:30–18:00

ENOJP General Assembly

15

Room 3

Abstracts
Keynote Addresses
Naoki Sakai
Area Studies and National Philosophy: Civilizational Transference inCulturalism“Area Studies” designates a disciplinary formation that was institutionalized in higher
education in the United States of America after the end of the Second World War.
The very idea of area studies was put forth in order to supplement the forthcominginternational order to be called “Pax Americana.” Already during WWII, the lack of asystem of colonial-imperial knowledge, by means of which to manage the US
relationship toward foreign/exotic regions such as Japan, China, Southeast Asia, andLatin America, was keenly felt. Unlike old imperial powers such as Britain, France,
the Netherlands, and Japan, the United States did not have an established regime ofintelligence and research to help to globally sustain America’s colonial and imperial
operations. The introduction of the disciplinary formation of area studies drasticallychanged the international status of the United States, but it is also important to notethat it served to transform American society in such a way that US university
education was radically converted into a new model for other countries to emulate.
The study of Japanese philosophy by non-Japanese scholars is usually conductedin the fields of area studies on Japan. As long as it is qualified as philosophy,
Japanese philosophy should be classified as a discipline of theoretical character. But,
Japan is located in Asia. Hence it is supposed that Japanese philosophy embodies
something like “the spirit of Asian theory”. What can an Asian theory be? Is thequestion a blatant oxymoron, or some intellectual anomaly? What is at stake in thisinquiry is not the character of Asia at all. On the contrary, what makes the pairing ofAsia and theory appear somewhat strange is our presumption that theory issomething we normally expect of Europe or the West.
In this presentation, I will explore two philosophical figures, one from Germany
and the other from Japan: Edmund Husserl and Watsuji Tetsuro respectively.
Husserl was prolific in the early twentieth century, but died before the onset of
WWII, so he never knew area studies. Watsuji was much younger and wrote his
major works about ethics in the 1930’s and post-WWII period. In the last decade of
his life, Watsuji was engaged in area studies in a variety of ways partly because he was
exceptionally popular among area experts of the United States and Europe.
Just like any civilization, Europe produces knowledge, but it is often claimed that
it is distinguished from other civilizations by its unique mode of operation in
knowledge production. Until recently, Europe was proud of itself in its commitment
to theory – or philosophy at large – in the sense that it is determined and16determining itself in terms of the critical or self-reflective mode of knowing: itconstantly reflects upon, criticizes and transforms its own manner of knowledge
production.
Through the examination of two authors, I will discuss what the status of theoryor philosophy can potentially mean to us within the scope of area studies today.
Naoki Sakai is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Asian Studies
Emeritus. He used to teach in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell
University. He has published in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual
history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories
of textuality. His publications include: The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of
Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism (2022); Translation and Subjectivity (1997);
Voices of the Past (1991); The Stillbirth of the Japanese as a Language and as an
Ethnos (1995); Nationalism of Hikikomori (2017). He edited a number of volumes
including Politics of Translation, special issue of Translation, co-edited with Sandro
Mezzadra (2014); The end of area, special issue co-edited with Gavin Walker of
positions asia critique (2019). Naoki Sakai served as the founding editor for the
project of TRACES, a multilingual series in five languages.

Judit Árokay
Translation Strategies in Transition
Translation has a long and varied history in Japan, giving even rise to the concept ofJapan as a translation culture (hon’yaku bunka). In several different phases ofcultural contact, knowledge, information, belief, literature was integrated into
Japanese culture in the form of translated texts. The strategies for adopting andadapting were as variegated as the subjects different. Besides the transmission of
information value, there was always the question which language variant to choose as
medium. Far from the modern notion of translation being the transformation of atext from a source language into a target language, conceived of as national and to acertain degree homogeneous, translators in different ages and situations wereconfronted with a number of possible solutions. Kanbun, kanbun kundoku, futsūbun,bungobun, genbun itchi-tai are the overall categories we encounter in the Meiji
period but the stylistic and pragmatic choices were far more numerous.
In my presentation, I would like to elaborate on some examples of literarytranslation in the Meiji period to introduce some startling ideas translators came up
with: early Shakespeare versions, for being read in silence, being recited or to be put
on stage, and a translation of the German illustrated tale “Max and Moritz” byWilhelm Busch in a Japanese rendering written in rōmaji.

17Judit Árokay graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in German and English
Language and Literature, and holds an M.A. and PhD in Japanese Studies from
Hamburg University, with a Habilitation at Free University Berlin. Since 2007,
Judit Árokay is full professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Heidelberg,
specializing in pre-modern Japanese literature. Her special interests
are waka poetry and poetic theory from the Middle Ages to the end of the Tokugawa
period, the rhetoric of poetic language, and the transformation of literary language
at the advent of the modern period. Her publications include: Die Erneuerung derpoetischen Sprache: poetologische und sprachtheoretische Diskurse der Edo-Zeit,
München: Iudicium, 2010; Divided languages? Diglossia, Translation and the Rise ofModernity in Japan, China, and the Slavic World, edited with Jadranka Gvozdanović& Darja Miyajima, Cham: Springer, 2014; Founder and co-editor of the online
journal “Bunron – Studies in Japanese Literature” (bunron.org, since 2014).

Graham Parkes
Befriending Things with Zen Master Dōgen (and a little help from Nietzsche at
the end)
A powerful factor behind our current, dire environmental predicament is a deeply
dysfunctional relationship with the things around us, not just things of nature but
also human-made things. This pathology derives from the prevalent utilitarian
perspective that sees things as ‘inanimate brute matter’ (Newton).
We find the antithesis of this unhelpful attitude in the work of Dōgen, who
undercuts the difference between sentient and nonsentient beings, and ultimately
understands all existence as 'buddha-nature' (busshō) — with its connotation of birthand vitality. From the modern Cartesian perspective this may look like crude‘animism’, but it’s only after you divide the mental from the physical that you evenneed a term for projecting mental ‘contents’ onto lifeless matter.
A crucial feature of Zen practice according to Dōgen involves respecting and caring
for things, from ritual implements to cooking utensils, from monks’ robes to eatingbowls. It’s important to distinguish this kind of care from Marie Kondo’s Shintoinfluenced attitude toward possessions.
Dōgen is difficult to understand, which inclines many people not to even try since
it’s all too esoteric and Far Eastern. A comparison with Nietzsche’s concern with‘becoming good neighbours with the nearest things’ helps to dispel the idea that theinsights of Zen are incommensurable with Western philosophy. For Nietzsche, if we
attend to the closest things, we come to see that they are not so simple, or separate
from each other, but always interacting and interconnected—a condition that
undergirds his affirmation of all existence through the thought of ‘eternal recoming’.
Born and raised in Glasgow, Graham Parkes was educated at the Queen’s College
Oxford and the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at the University18

of Hawaii, the National University of Ireland, and several other universities in
Europe and East Asia, and is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the
University of Vienna. Among his many publications on Japanese philosophy are histranslation (with Setsuko Aihara) of Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-Overcoming of
Nihilism, and his edition of François Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks. His latest
book is How to Think about the Climate Crisis: A Philosophical Guide to Saner Waysof Living.

Roundtable discussion
Judit Árokay, Carlos Barbosa Capeda, Raquel Bouso, Vladlena
Fedianina, David Johnson
Japanese (philosophical) studies across cultures
It could be said that in recent years, several humanistic academic institutions acrossthe world have made a remarkable effort to diversify and decolonize their study
programs. At this round table, we ask ourselves about the place that Japanese studies
occupy, beyond area studies, in other disciplinary fields, such as philosophy, inincreasingly changing and internationalized universities. We are interested in
exchanging experiences and discussing how these studies have been, how they are
and how they could be in an increasingly globalized world that is rewriting the historyof the humanities in many ways, including the correction of past epistemic injustices.

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Pre-organised panels
Panel I. CHANGING CONCEPTS OF JAPONISME IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE –INFLUENCES AND COUNTER-INFLUENCES
Stefano Turina, Mirjam Dénes, Mária Ildikó Farkas
Changing concepts of Japonisme in East Central Europe – Influences andcounter-influences
The panel discusses the revisited and changing concepts of Japonisme through thepresentation of Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, a volume of essays
published in 2020-2021, written by an international research team of 12 experts on
history, art history, museology, transnational studies, and of course, Japonisme.
Japonisme had long been regarded simply as an art historical movement, but if we
understand it as an appreciation of Japan and its culture, or Japan’s early impact on
the world, then it can be examined from a broader perspective. Since 1990s, thegeographical focus of Japonisme studies has expanded from Western Europe, its
temporal boundaries have been significantly widened and new research aimed at
placing Japonisme within the much wider context of transnational studies, too.
The latest literature on Orientalism as a cultural historical phenomenon recognisesthat European ideas on the East during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were notunanimous, finding that Saidian Orientalism was mainly a Western European
concept, while other territories (such as East-Central Europe) had different conceptsof the East and of Japan. The formation of these “mixed” ideas on Japan were
influenced partly by Western Europe, partly by the historical context and theawareness of East-Central European identity formation, and partly by the results ofJapan’s development during the second half of the 19th century. These phenomena
and processes are richly interwoven by influences and counter-influences of thought,
tradition, concepts and stereotypes.

TURINA, Stefano (Universitá degli di Studi di Torino): Japanese Stereotypes. The
Image of Japan in Illustrated Press from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and
Beyond (1859-1899). Images have always been powerful tools to spread ideas andvisions. The development of technological reproduction of images transformed into
engravings in the periodical press helped a wide European audience from different
backgrounds to travel, at least with the imagination – to far distant countries. The
image of Japan during the second half of the 19th Century was mediated by the20

circulation of stereotypes – skillfully constructed in Paris and London or obtained
from a photograph of the Yokohama School of photography – that were almost
immediately reused in the periodical press of other European countries even thirty
years later. Those “stereotypes” were fundamental also for the development of
the japonisme phenomena and undoubtedly contributed to shape an image of acountry where the contact with the West was deliberately softened – often incontradiction with the accompanying text – in order to mitigate the fast developmentof Japan and to promote the allure of an exotic distant harmonious country.

DÉNES, Mirjam (Hopp Ferenc Museum of Asiatic Arts, Budapest): Modern
Japanese Art Infuenced by Japonisme. During the history of Japonisme studies, thephenomenon has mostly been understood as Japan’s unchanging, continuous, onesided influence on the arts and culture of the Western hemisphere. Since Japan’s
official debut as the Empire of the East at the Vienna World Fair of 1873, its
continuous presence at international exhibitions catered visitors from all over theworld with the representation of its values on traditions and on modernity, and on its
impeccable taste and highest level of artistic craftsmanship. With its experiences in
Europe and in the United States, however, Japan managed to monitor its market andkept up with the development of Western artistic styles and the changing fashion andtrends. Through building up a system of diligent research on what Western people
like, careful design, high-standard education and impeccable execution, it managed
to provide to the Western public that Japanese art which managed to keep Japonisme
en vogue for decades. Let us discover how the demands of the Western art market
counter-influenced Japan’s self-representation through the arts to change in thedawn of its modernity.

FARKAS, Mária Ildikó (Károli University, Budapest): Japonisme and identity
Issues in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Japonisme, besides being aninternational art trend sweeping throughout Europe, can also be interpreted as afactor influencing the ethnocultural identities of peoples of this region. Ideas about
the East and the relationship with the East (“orientalism”) were not only of cultural
significance to the peoples, but also played a role in shaping their collective identity
in their relationship with the West. The example of the Japanese development –which itself was greatly influenced by the Western development – had significant
effect on the discourses of identity and modernity of the peoples of this region.

21

Panel II. THE IDEA OF NATURE IN JAPANESE, CHINESE AND VIETNAMESE: THE
MULTILINGUAL AND CROSS-CULTURAL INFLUENCES BEHIND THE WORD “自然”
Romaric JANNEL, NGUYEN Duy Hung, Laÿna DROZ, Hung-Tao CHU
The idea of nature in Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese: The multilingual andcross-cultural influences behind the word “自然”
The word “Nature” is, in English, one of the most important keywords in global
discourses on environmental issues, including in high-level environmental
governance. Yet, the translations of this word endorse highly diverse connotations
across different languages and cultures. The connotations of the words “自然”
habitually used to translate the idea of “Nature” reflect different influences; the mostrecent and global are the influences from the so-called “Western sciences”. This paper
explores the multilingual and cross-cultural influences behind the word “自然”
comparatively to today’s usages and connotations in Japanese, Chinese andVietnamese.
The word “自然” lies at the crossroad of many influences throughout history,
including Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Western sciences. It is pronounced“shizen” or “jinen” in Japanese, “zìrán” in Chinese, and amounts to the Vietnamese
word “Tự nhiên”. In Chinese, “自然” is used today, both in environmental philosophy
and environmental governance, as an almost fixed translation of the environmental
aspect of the English word “nature”. Yet, from the early nineteenth century to theOpium War (1840-2), the Western missionaries usually used “xìng” 性 and “tiāndì” 天
地 to translate nature. It is only after the Sino-Japanese war (1894-5) that “自然”

gradually became to be the usual translation of (environmental) nature by themassive importation of Japanese translations.
In Japan, the word “自然” seems to have appeared in the 8th century, in Fudoki 風土
記 and Man’yōshū 万葉集. It was used by Kūkai (空海, 774-835) as a translation of the

Sanskrit expression svabhāva –the intrinsic nature of something in Indian
Buddhism– but with a Taoist meaning. Later, Shinran (親鸞, 1173-1262), founder ofTrue Pure Land Buddhism, invites to read jinen 自然 as “to be in a spontaneous state
without any artificiality” 自ずから然る. It progressively acquired the Western meaningof nature under the influence of the Western world.

22

The characters 自 and 然 have their own meanings in Chinese. In the term 自然, 自is a pronoun meaning “oneself”, referring to the subject of the sentence itself, and 然
means “in this way” or “so”, which refers to the current state of the subject of thesentence. This is reflected in Vietnamese, where “Tự nhiên” (“自然”) is used today torefer to the nature of something or someone; its character and personality. In
contrast, “Thiên nhiên” (“天然”) is widely used today as the equivalent for “nature” asin the “natural environment”.
In each language, the word used today to translate the English “nature” in global
environmental documents carries an overlapping of meanings and connotations
rooted in its epistemology and its cultural context. As much as conceptual reasoning
can help to define a word, language can also influence conceptual thinking andrhetoric. Hence, it is crucial to take into consideration the cultural baggage of thewords used to capture the idea of “nature” in environmental governance.
(Acknowledgements: CHEN Hsun-Mei (the Department of Philosophy, Kyoto
University) contributed to a first draft of this paper, which is part of a project by the
Network of Asian Environmental Philosophy (NAEP)).

Panel III. WATSUJI ON NATURE: JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY IN THE WAKE OF HEIDEGGERDavid W. Johnson, Graham Parkes, Hans Peter LiederbachBook Panel: Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of
Heidegger
This book panel will discuss David W. Johnson’s Watsuji on Nature: JapanesePhilosophy in the Wake of Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, 2019). The
author will begin with a brief summary of the bookʼs contents and arguments. There
will be two respondents; the author will contact the respondents shortly before theconference for an informal and brief summary of what area to expect an analysis ofand questions about. The author will reply to each respondent during the panel; after
this there will be a question and answer session involving other panel attendees.

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PANEL IV. 40 YEARS OF "CONSCIOUSNESS AND ESSENCE". ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF
THE PUBLICATION OF IZUTSU'S MAJOR WORK
Jun’ichi Ono, Rodrigo Guerizoli, Hans Peter Liederbach, Ralf
Müller, Rossa Ó Muireartaigh, Andrei Cunha, Lucas Nascimento
Machado40 years of "Consciousness and Being". On the anniversary of the publicationof Izutsu's major work.
This panel is dedicated to the philosophy of IZUTSU Toshihiko 井筒 俊彦 (1914–1993)
with emphasis on the interpretation of his major work "Consciousness and Essence",
which turns 40 in 2023. The panel will particularly address the question of what
Izutsu understands by "Eastern philosophy", as the dichotomisation between "East"and "West" gives rise to criticism related to problems of essentialisation andexoticisation. The contributions are intended as part of a forthcoming collective
volume dealing with Izutsu's "Consciousness and Essence".

Jun’ichi ONO: Fields Theory in Izutsu
Rodrigo GUERIZOLI (Rio de Janeiro): The Place of Medieval Philosophy in Izutsu's"Consciousness and Essence"
Hans Peter L IEDERBACH (Nishinomiya): The Significance of Izutsu's"Consciousness and Essence" for World Philosophies
Ralf MÜLLER (Hildesheim): Zen as Eastern Philosophy? On Izutsu Toshihiko’s
Attempt of a Synchronic Structuring in Comparing East and West
Rossa Ó MUIREARTAIGH: Cosmology as History or Geography. Izutsu Toshihiko's"Cosmos and Anticosmos"
Andrei CUNHA (Porto Alegre): Corpus analysis and terminology in preparation fortranslating Izutsu Toshihiko to Brazilian Portuguese
Lucas Nascimento MACHADO (Rio de Janeiro): Izutzu's Conscience and Essence
and the Question About a Method For Intercultural Philosophy

24Panel V. MIND, FEELING, BODY (心気体): THEORY AND PRACTICE IN JAPANESESELF-CULTIVATION
Leon Krings, Mika Imono, Yukiko Kuwayama, Jordanco Sekulovski,
Raphaël Pierrès

Mind, Feeling, Body (心気体): Theory and Practice in Japanese Self-Cultivation
For the classical schools and thinkers of Japanese Buddhism and Confucianism, selfcultivation plays a central role in the actualization of philosophy as a holistic practice.
Through the influence of this stream of thought and cultivation, various artistic
practices – like Nō Theater or Tea Ceremony – as well as a broad range of martial arts
have been shaped, which in turn reinterpret various philosophical concepts byembedding them in concrete embodied practices.
By looking at how mind, feeling and body are understood and transformed in thecontext of these practices, we would like to delve into in-depth analyses of different
aspects of these traditions and connect them to philosophical and phenomenologicalmethodologies. One focus of the panel will be the connection between theory andpractice, by looking at how abstract philosophical concepts are being interpreted in
the concrete medium of the body – for example in the embodiment of patterns orkata (型) – drawing on both the concrete practice itself and its expression in texts.
Another central aspect is the importance of bodily feelings and emotions in thecontext of such practices. A key term in this regard is the notion of ki (気, chin. qi),
which has both a rich tradition of interpretation and cultivation in East Asian
Philosophies as well as a wide range of expressive possibilities in Japanese everyday
language. How can modulations of feeling and emotion be understood from thestandpoint(s) of Japanese philosophy? Based on this question, we will look at how apractitioner feels during his or her practice from the first-person perspective.
Phenomenological analyses have shown that modes of practice cannot simply beunderstood in terms of either activity or passivity, but also in a variety of ways lying
in-between or out of the range of these two possibilities. Such ways of experience andpractice find a linguistic expression in different modes of grammatical voice or verbal
inflection, the most familiar example being the middle voice. Retranslating such agrammatical mode into the way we experience and embody a certain practice, a
middle voice way of practicing can be understood as arising between activity andpassivity. In the martial arts or dance, for example, a movement does not necessarily
originate from pure subjectivity (“I will do this movement”), nor from a pure25

objectivity (“I am forced to do this movement”), but somewhere in-between the two.
It becomes natural for the practitioner to do such a movement, and he or she obtains
this feeling through repeated kata practice.
By looking at these aspects of embodiment and feeling in the context of Japanesephilosophy, we aim at showing fertile (counter)influences between theory andpractice as well as between different modes of philosophizing.
Yukiko Kuwayama (Universität Hildesheim, Germany / INALCO, Paris): Ki (気) –a phenomenological gaze on the notion of ki (気) in Japanese ordinary language.
The presentation starts with an introduction of several concrete verbal expressions
from Japanese ordinary language which include the notion of ki (気). This stepderives from an idea of “linguistic phenomenology” modestly proposed by John
Langshaw Austin (1961, 130). In an analysis of these expressions – which requires
automatically a process of translating them into English in this presentation – aphenomenological gaze can be crystalized. The translations can make us an access toillustrate and grasp the mobility of ki – whose modality is but to categorize not only
as passive neither just as active. The relation between the “self” (or the first person’s
perspective) and the notion of ki sketched in the expressions seem to illustrate inwhat way and in what kind of mind, feelings and bodily conditions as perceptions
including the atmosphere one is situated (sich befinden). By pointing out the intrinsic
connection between the mood, corporality, emotionality, and the mind through theanalysis of the expressions, it is aimed to illuminate the connection between thecorporeal arts of self-cultivations and the cultivations of ki/qi in the human verbality
itself. From the point of view of Mencius’ (孟子), seeing the world as results ofcultivations of qi (气, 氣) it seems that everyone has access to practice and cultivate
oneself – even in the moment of searching and giving words to one’s feelings or evenjust in listening to the emotions, small perceptions or some idea both of oneself andthe others.
Mika Imono (Meisei University, Tokyo): How to teach bodily technique? Possibilityof bodily skill throughout the (im)possibility of online teaching. How can a teacher
communicate bodily technique, such as dance or martial art, to a disciple? We willconsider this question by contrasting online and offline (face-to-face) teaching. We
suppose here that individual teaching—trying to communicate a bodily sensation of26

technique—involves more than the simple order of movements. Difficult to transfer
in online teaching is the so-called "aura" (Benjamin) that assures the authority of a
one-time physical event, easily lost when reproduced. Several philosophers argue
about this uniqueness or liveness. However, face-to-face teaching of bodily techniquepartially transfers this liveness—otherwise, the transmission of technique would not
be possible. Thus, focusing on the contemporary issue between online and offline
teaching, this question leads us to consider the heart of transmitting bodily
technique. By analyzing some offline teaching of Noh dance (traditional Japanesetheater), we will see that the demonstrative word "this" plays a strikingly importantrole in this context. "This" indicates the limit of the linguistic explication of
movement, which nonetheless touches its link to bodily movement. In thepresentation, we begin our analysis of the transmission of the bodily technique.
Pierrès Raphaël (University Paris 1): 心 and Embodiment. The Japanese notion of
心 can be used as a tool to overcome the division between inner and outer. 心 is one of
the most commonly used terms in Japanese for the mind, though it encompasses anaffective dimension. Understood in this broader sense, it refers to both heart andmind and seems to subsume the separation between thought and body. 1) In thissense, we can start by saying that the 心 seems to be neither internal nor external(Nishida). Furthermore, the notion of 心 signals the anchoring of the self in the living
body. 2) In order to approach this question of the embodiment of the mind in a more
concrete way, we then analyze Japanese embodied practices in zen and aikido(Doganis). A particularly striking aspect of bodily practices with regard to the
problem of interiority is the notion of 間合い (Kono, Kuroda). These analyses of theway in which the body carries meaning in the practice of martial arts aim at a nonnaturalist conception of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty). 3) The institution of feelings
finally makes it possible to question the private character that the notion of 心 initiallyseemed to imply. The influence of the Analytic polemic against interiority leadsŌmori to emphasise that feelings depend on a situational context - thus, he opposes
the tendency to enclose them in the heart. The critique of interiority in 物と心 leads us
to the claim that there is no interiority of the heart:「心」には「中」がないのである。
Leon Krings (Universität Hildesheim, Germany): Patterns of “Inverse
Correlation”: Japanese Practices of the Interplay between Body and Mind. Many

27

approaches to Zen-Buddhism and the Japanese embodiment arts characterize themas non-dualist. While this is in certain respects correct, it should be evenly
emphasized that they are just as much non-monist, maintaining a difference between
two poles while allowing for patterns of unification and mutual interplay. In theclassical writings on Nō theater and swordsmanship, we can observe such aninterplay between body and mind, in what Minamoto Ryōen calls an “inverse
correlation” (逆対応). In my presentation I will argue that the mind or “heart” (心kokoro) can in many instances be interpreted as a mode of “awareness” or “attention”
that, while standing in a certain contrast to general or coarse bodily patterns (型 kata)by being hidden from them at first glance, nevertheless shows itself in the finestructures of these patterns themselves and in the subtle depths of bodily presence,
namely in the form of embodied micro-patterns which are at the same timetransformations of awareness and subtle movements of attention. In this way, theabove-mentioned “inverse correlation” between body and mind can be interpreted asa mutual interplay between “coarse” and “fine” patterns of embodied presence, aninterplay that unifies both aspects by maintaining or even intensifying theirdifference.
Jordanco Sekulovski (Temple University Japan): History, Culture and system ofThought: Understanding Kata as a Meta-axiom of Knowledge in Japan. This
presentation is a part of ongoing research focused on the obscure notion of kata. So
far, my scope has been on the relationship of this concept in Watsuji’s work andspecifically his Ethics. In my previous research published in the European Journal ofJapanese Philosophy (EJJP), I have elaborated on the expanded understanding of
kata to be investigated as a generic technique for the self-creation and selftransformation of individuals, like Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self,considered an ethical and aesthetic paradigm dating back to European Antiquity. In
the same vein, I have argued that interpreting kata as a technology of the self thatdelineates a Japanese form of ethics and analyzed this in contrast to Baruch Spinoza’s
Ethics one of the most philosophically revered and influential texts on the matter in
the West. This presentation continues the exploration of kata as a technology of theself by putting an emphasis on kata as a meta-axiom of knowledge in Japan.

28

PANEL VI. KYOTO SCHOOL DIALECTIC REVISITED: NISHIDA, NISHITANI, AND
WATSUJI
Yūko Ishihara, SPK Cerda, Hans Peter Liederbach
Kyoto School Dialectic Revisited: Nishida, Nishitani, and Watsuji
As has often been mentioned, German Idealism exerted a decisive impact on Kyoto
School philosophy, at least in its formative phase. Particularly Hegel’s dialectic
figures prominently in Nishida, Tanabe, and Watsuji, not to speak of left-wing Kyoto
School philosophers like Miki and Tosaka. Neither Nishida’s notions of the concrete
universal and the historical world, nor Tanabe’s logic of species or Watsuji’ssystematical ethics could have been developed without critically appropriating
Hegel’s dialectic.
And yet, suggesting that the dialectical thinking of Kyoto School philosophers wasat the center of research would be an exaggeration. Some notable exceptions
notwithstanding, the focus lies on historical reconstructions, phenomenologicalinvestigations, and post-structuralist readings.
This panel tries to explore a different path. Its contributors aim at problematizing
the potential, dialectical thinking has not only for reconstructing Kyoto School
philosophy, particularly Nishida, Watsuji, and Nishitani, but also for putting into
sharper relief the systematical problems they were concerned with: the historicalworld, ethical life, and self-awareness.
Ishihara suggests that new light can be shed on later Nishida’s idea of thedialectical world by comparing it with Eugen Fink’s idea of the world-play(Weltspiel). In his magnum opus, Spiel als Weltsymbol, Fink proposes that the worldis itself a play, a “game without a player”, groundlessly bringing things to appearance,
while the human being takes part in this play as a co-player, letting the world appear.
Yoshihiro Nitta has pointed out that this specific relation between the human being
and the world is reminiscent of later Nishida’s idea of the self-determining world,
where the world expresses itself through the individual human being. While Nishida
never spoke of the world as a play, Ishihara claims that the dialectical movement of
the world and our role in it can be better understood by bringing the concept of playinto view.
Cerda holds that by revisiting The Dialectics of Religious Existence, a text
Nishitani wrote in 1935, it is possible to demystify several notions that form the very
core of Nishitani’s later thought: field, standpoint, and self-awareness. This allows us
to reconsider the significance, the problem of normativity has for a reading of29

Religion and Nothingness that would challenge established interpretations. While
this book is often understood within a post-metaphysical framework stemming from
Heidegger’s sweeping critique of Western philosophy, Cerda claims that due to thiswide-spread reading, the problem of normativity, which is underlying Nishitani’slater thinking, has been paid less attention than it deserves.
Liederbach claims that taking Watsuji’s dialectics of dual negation seriously will
provide a fresh view on problems that are usually left out in Watsuji-scholarship:
human agency and normativity. This is understandable, since for a long time,
Rinrigaku and Fūdo have been read against the backdrop of Heidegger’s Being andTime. Decoupling Watsuji’s ethics from this established interpretative framework andacknowledging the Hegelian elements in his thinking will help to reassess thecontribution, his non-binary thinking can make to a normatively robust critique ofmodern subjectivism.

30

Panels of individual papers
WATSUJI AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Alexandra Mustatea
Kanda University of International Studies, Mihama, Japan

Thinking about Confucianism and Modernity in the Early Postwar Period –Watsuji Tetsurō’s 'The History of Ethical Thought in Japan'
This paper will discuss Watsuji Tetsurō’s ‘History of Ethical Thought in Japan’ (日本倫理思想史), in an attempt to explore the postwar intellectual mood surrounding the

Confucianism-modernity debate in Japan. Also, by approaching Watsuji’s view on
this issue within the broader context of his philosophical system, the paper will offer
further insights relevant to the interpretation of his far more influential work,‘Rinrigaku.’
Watsuji published his ‘History of Ethical Thought in Japan’ at around the sametime as Maruyama Masao was publishing his ‘Studies in the Intellectual History of
Tokugawa Japan,’ yet history has treated the two philosophers’ work very differently.
Maruyama’s ‘Studies’ has been, for the past decades, the touchstone of Japanese
Confucian studies, with many contemporary authors incessantly echoing his views on
Confucianism’s philosophical ‘implosion’ at the end of the Edo period. On the other
hand, Watsuji’s ‘History’ garnered much less attention in international researchbeyond a summary indictment of his cultural particularism and possible support forthe prewar militaristic government (Bellah 1965). And although more recent
scholarship has started to add more nuance to this perception of Watsuji’s philosophy
and politics (LaFleur 2001, Maraldo 2019), discussion of his work on Confucianism –as well as the Confucian influence on his own ethical philosophy – is stillconspicuously absent.
Therefore, this paper will focus on the few chapters in Watsuji’s ‘History’ which
cover the crux of the Confucianism-modernity debate – the Edo and Meiji periods –,as well as his ‘Preface,’ which provides the theoretical framework of his endeavour. By
discussing these fragments, I will explore two essential aspects of Watsuji’s ‘History:’on the one hand, his take on Confucianism and modernity as an alternative to his
contemporary’s, Maruyama; and on the other hand, the theoretical framework that
positions ‘History’ at the core of Watsuji’s ethical philosophy, alongside (and closely
connected with) ‘Rinrigaku.’

31

By doing so, this paper will not only explore the postwar intellectual moodconcerning the Confucianism-modernity debate in Japan but also – albeit
tangentially – provide further insight into the interpretation of Watsuji’s seminal‘Rinrigaku.’

Roman Pasca
Kyoto University, Japan

Nature, Ahistoricity, and Environmental Ethics
In Shizen shin’eidō (“The True Way of the Functioning of Nature”), Andō Shōeki(1703-1762) described a vision of the universe in which Nature (shizen) is an entity
sufficient in itself, complete in its isness, all-encompassing and inclusive. For Shōeki,shizen no yo (“the World of Nature”) is the unspoiled, primordial realm where all
manifestations of life coexist in a pristine, quintessential state. Opposed to this realm
is the shihōsei (“the World of the Private Law”), which represents human society,warped by an antagonism with the “True Way” because of the existence of selfserving, man-made laws.
For Shōeki, the whole world is a dynamic continuum in which Heaven andEarth do exist separately, but as the two sides of the same coin, i.e. as Heaven-andEarth combined together in a totality created and governed by a flow of energies thatcirculate constantly, uninterrupted and eternal. This, for him, is the realm of Nature,
and all forms of existence can only be immanent to this realm, deeply embedded
within it. Therefore, since Nature is beginningless and endless, notions such as “time”
or “history” seem to be completely irrelevant, as nothing can exist outside Nature.
In my presentation, I start from this idea of “denial / annihilation of history”
and examine the concept of time in Shōeki’s philosophy, focusing on its role in the
ontology and epistemological status of the human being, while also pondering on its
relevance for environmental ethics.

Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth
Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan

Overcoming Anthropocentrism: Watsuji, Ecology, and Symbiosis
In this presentation, I will argue that the environmental problem ofanthropocentrism can be overcome by developing the ecological potential in
Watsuji’s philosophical thought. To achieve this aim, I extend Watsuji’s ethical theoryof betweenness from human beings to all forms of life, by appealing to Watsuji’s32

concept of climate. I also illustrate the practical application of Watsuji’s thought
through the concept of symbiosis and speculate upon how symbiotic relations can be
developed between human beings and non-human beings in Japan.

Steve Bein
University of Dayton, Ohio, USA

Unbalancing Act: Oppression and Resistance in the Ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō
Watsuji Tetsurō describes an ethical life as a life in which one’s social relationships
maintain a harmonious balance between satisfying one’s own desires and obligations
and satisfying those of the communities to which one belongs. What he does notaddress is the question of subcultures. If ethics is the balancing of private and public
interests, what happens when an individual is a member of a subculture whose
communal interests are ignored (or even actively thwarted) by the dominant culture?
How, for example, is one to be a good Hawaiian and also a good American, given thehistory of oppression between those two cultures?
Many of us live in the intersection of multiple cultures, with competing andsometimes mutually exclusive interests. In the case of minority subcultures, we mightinterpret Watsuji’s ethics as a tool of oppression. After all, to organize a resistancemovement is by definition a disruptive, disharmonious, unbalancing act. Yet in theabsence of organized resistance, the alternatives are few: to suppress one’s own
interests and assimilate with the dominant culture, or to refuse to do so and suffer
the consequences of nonconformity. Thus members of minority subcultures appear(at least prima facie) to have no moral path forward.
I argue against this prima facie assumption, offering instead a holographic accountbased on Watsuji’s ethics of the family. I argue that subcultures can have similar
standing to that of the family, which justifies political resistance by oppressedsubcultures as a harmony-seeking endeavor.

JAPAN AND JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY
Joff P.N. Bradley
Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan

Thinking otherwise than the caricature of “Japanese philosophy”
I feel compelled to respond to the apparent caricature of Japanese philosophy
presented by Julian Baggini in his book How the World Thinks. He presents theaesthetic, experiential character of Japanese thought and suggests that Japanese33

thought is somehow tied more than anything else to the present, to immediacy andthe transient (this itself goes against the grain as Japanese philosophy can be viewed
as spatial more than temporal). The aesthetic at best is something sustained by theintellectual milieu, yet somehow it remains emotive, merely something felt,
something nebulous. It is neither conceptual nor abstract in the Western sense; nor isit strictly linguistic. It is not exactly something said, but rather something sensitive tothe contextual and the relational – again perhaps appealing to the spatial and less tothe temporal. But it is nevertheless a profound rumination on the imperfection andimpermanence of things. It is more communal and collective than individual andtherefore it is definitely not dualistic. It pertains to the nothing, to emptiness, to the
middle, to the space between things – to the logic of ‘basho’. Syncretic and connectedwith the transience of nature and in its own way it gives access to and gives itself overto the non-human. This is the caricature of the caricature. I want to spend some time
thinking about whether this is the case and whether Baggini’s position on Japanesethought stands up to criticism. I am left puzzling over the maddening question: Whatis ‘Japanese philosophy’?

Kimie Matsumoto 松本

きみゑ,Osaka University, Japan幽玄なる文化創造―茶道の「型」と西田哲学の「形のない文化」―
西田幾多郎(1870–1945)にとっての現実の世界は西洋と東洋とが初めてぶつかり合った時代である。「形相を有となし形成を善となす泰西文化」と「形なきものの形を見、声なきものの声を聞く」東洋文化である。約言すれば有相の文化と無相の文化である。西田は有相と無相との絶対矛盾的自己同一と捉えることによって、論理化し「哲学的根拠を与えて」東西の場を開いたのである。日本文化の本質は「情の文化」である。
１千利休（1522〜1591）の「型」
茶書の原点となる、『山上宗二記』は利休の絶頂期に弟子の山上宗二（1544〜1590）
が著述した茶道秘伝書であり、この茶書には人間形成の道に通ずる、草庵茶道の理論が完成したことが記されている。茶道は、型の教育である。「型とは、伝統の客観化された集積である」。
『山上宗二記』に「茶湯風体、禅宗よりなるによりて出で、悉く学ぶ」とあるように、仏法を修行し得道することであり、見性すること、自覚することである。「茶湯34

名人に成りての果ては、道具一種さえ楽しむは、弥、侘び数寄が専らなり」。さらに「主を名人に身を赦し、山を谷、西を東と茶湯の法度を破り、物を自由にす。宗易一人の事は目聞きなるによりて、何事も面白し」とある。利休のこの言葉は、法度を自由にするところに、茶道の特質を把握したものとして注目されている。
2 西田幾多郎の「形のない文化」「場所の論理」は自己の中に無限に自己を映す「自覚の思想」と述語(一般)が主語(特殊)を包摂するという判断の形式が結合したものである。西田は絶対矛盾的自己同一の「場所」を確立する。絶対矛盾的自己同一とは絶対無の自覚的限定の最も具体的な段階
が歴史的世界と考えられるものであり、創造的世界の創造的要素ということができる。
筆者は情や意を本とする「無」の思想から千利休の「型」を西田幾多郎の「形なきものの形を見、声なきものの声を聞く」という「形」のない文化から哲学的、学問的に解明する。

Robert Ryan Smith
University College Dublin, Ireland
Japanese Ambivalence Towards Contradiction: The Law of Non-Contradiction, and
the Problem of Identity and Difference, as Philosophical Imports
This essay contends that what makes the Kyoto school so unique and well-equipped
for cross-cultural philosophical dialogue is Japanese philosophy’s peculiar acceptanceof contradiction that stems from the often-overlooked Japanese spiritual customs
and cultural sentiments preceding the introduction of both Buddhist and Western
philosophies. More specifically, the contention is that Shintoism and Japaneseculture do not share the “hermetic” allergy to contradiction found in many of their
Buddhist and Western counterparts which are compelled to defuse contradictions or
differences between different philosophical, cultural or religious standpoints
wherever they are found. I first flesh-out this attitudinal difference on asociohistorical level since early Japanese spiritual traditions lacked codified doctrine
and because the notions of contradiction or identity were not realized asphilosophical conundrums until their introduction as such. Using Stuart Picken’s
work on religious philosophy, I show how Shintoism has lacked the proselytizingimpulse that characterizes hermetic traditions and how in the cases in which new
religious traditions have been integrated into Japanese culture, there has not been afelt-need to rectify contradictions between the old and new through fusion or
subsumption of one into the other. Then, by drawing on Takeo Doi’s works on theJapanese sentiments of amae (甘えの), Honne (本音) and Tatemae (建前), I argue that35

an ambivalent attitude towards contradiction is reflected in the Japanese concept ofidentity which allows for the contradictory overdetermination of identity acrossdifferent facets of life. Subsequently, through the Nishida Kitaro’s notions of Basho(場所), active-intuition (行為的直感), and “absolutely contradictory self-identity”, it isoutlined just how this ambivalence towards contradiction reanimates the imported
philosophical questions of contradiction and identity. I first do so by pointing-out
how when it comes to the ātman-anātman relationship, while many Buddhist
traditions err on the side of dissolving ātman altogether, or fusing both terms in overemphasizing their identity, Nishida goes to excruciating lengths to emphasize theirsimultaneous identity and non-identity with one another. Likewise, even in inheriting
the Hegelian dialectic, Nishida’s dialectic of Basho interminably differs in that thelatter cannot be as easily reified into some process or “spirit” as Basho is“nothingness” that makes dialectical determinations possible but is never captured byor identified with the dialectical process; Basho is the inherently contradictory“indeterminate source of determinacy". Also, while the mediation of contradictoryterms is found in Nishida’s notion of active-intuition, these terms simultaneously
survive their integration or sublation in a way that they do not for Hegel. I conclude
by agreeing with James Heisig’s claim that the Kyoto School could serve as a platform
for “world philosophy” as this ambivalent attitude towards contradiction allows one
to step outside of one’s own philosophical identity and engage with othercontradictory schools of thought without contorting them to fit one’s preexisting
philosophical framework.

COUNTERINFLUENCES IN JAPANESE RELIGION I.
Dean Anthony Brink
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Bakumatsu Crises and Posthuman Agency: Kami Cosmologies and Village
Agronomy in the Hirata School Writings of Miyaoi Yasuo
As a village head, leading local intellectual of the Hirata School Kokugaku lineage andactive writer at various times on ethical, spiritual, and practical issues for goodfarming and community-building, Miyaoi Yasuo (宮負定雄 1797–1858) offers key
examples of how kami were imagined in ways that form cosmological and speculative
bases for conceptualizing manifest and unseen agencies that figure prominently in his
problem-solving in emergent modern Japan. By examining passages from multiple

36

texts mentioning or alluding to kami, this paper explores how Miyaoi’s attention here
may reflect his agenda for engaging contemporary contingencies and in effectreconfiguring the modeling of communities in the wake of the crises of the Tempō
Period by invoking a broad spectrum of ethical debates incorporating references tobest agronomical practices and ethical choices and behavior. Miyaoi rather
unstintingly focuses in his essays on various ethical issues that he relates tosustainable practices (and what we would call ecologies) in village life, notably taking
stands against infanticide and for population-expansion even after the famines of theera. This paper entertains the possibility of integrating critical (feminist)
posthumanist and post-anthropocentric relationally-situated speculative agencies(and cosmologies) intimated in these writings as forms of what N. Katherine Hayles
calls noncognitive thought or the unthought, both in light of what Tsujimoto Masashi
has explored in term of somatic learning in earlier Tokugawa thought and what Rosi
Braidotti calls “an affirmative bond that locates the subject in the flow of relations
with multiple others.”

Saito Yoshifumi 斎藤 嘉文
日本中世の影と響き「影響」というテーマは、私たちの視線を単一の要素から複数の要素の間に移動させる。淡い影を見、遠い響きを聴くためには、研ぎ澄まされた知覚とともに、それを解放する間（ま）が必要である。日本中世にそのような間が存在したとすれば、それはどんな設（しつらえ）をもってつくられたのだろうか。
試みに定家・道元・世阿弥・利休らの功業を辿ってみると、かれらが互いに離れていながら繰り返し還ってくる主題の一つが浮上する。それを、とほり（通り・透り）という古語で呼ぶことにしよう。「見渡せば花も紅葉もなかりけり浦の苫屋の秋の夕暮れ」。歌人は花・紅葉を透って浦の苫屋のあはれを見、茶人は露地から茶室、また茶室から露地へ通って侘びを知り、能役者は夢幻を透って現在を物語る。これらの間にある共通の形式とは、二つの世界の境界を通り、透る体験である。はるか以前、仏教はすでに此岸＝衆生と彼岸＝諸仏という二つの世界を定義した。しかし彼岸は此岸から限りなく遠い。道元が見出したのは、境界を曖昧にすることなくこれを近づけ、透り、通ることを可能にする論理だった。それを「現成公案」と呼ぶ。公案（諸仏の知・彼岸の知）をこの世界に衆生の所作として現成させるのである。

37

JAPAN THROUGH THE WEST AND BACK
Raphael Chim
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Norinaga without kami: reading Norinaga’s senses of yonotsune in the light ofMargaret Atherton’s “Berkeley without God”
This paper proposes a reading of Motoori Norinaga’s thoughts as presented in his
Kojiki-den and, chiefly, in the preface, Naobi no Mitama under inspiration from
Margaret Atherton’s paper, “Berkeley without God”. This reading serves towards theend of exploring the possibility of removing kami from Norinaga’s thoughts.
Atherton explored the possibility of removing God from George Berkeley’s idealist
philosophy and did so by showing that Berkeley’s theory of sensory representation
could be separated from Berkeley’s subsequent locating of the causes of sensory ideas
in God. I shall attempt the same strategy with respect to Norinaga. Specifically, I shallinvestigate the senses Norinaga used the phrase yonotsune in Naobi no Mitama, as“common practice”, “common occurrence”, “common principle derived in terms ofcommon customs, in relation to common occurrences”, and, simply, “common”. By
synthesizing these senses of yonotsune, I shall argue that the term provides us with anaccount of our experiences of any object common in the world. At the same time, I
make use of Norinaga’s insistence that human beings could never understand theprinciples regulating the world and the causes of those principles (i.e. kami) to argue
that the account of human experiences derived from yonotsune could not tell us thecauses of human experiences. I argue thus for the separability of the account of humanexperiences provided by yonotsune and accounts dealing with those principles
regulating the world and the causes of those principles.

Montserrat Crespín Perales
University of Barcelona, Spain
Migration of people and texts, shaping and transiting ideas: a philosophical casestudy about Nakajima Rikizo’s (1858-1918), “Kant’s Doctrine of the ‘thing-in-itself’”(1889)
In line with the annual conference general topic, this presentation proposal aspires tointroduce a line to examine the interrelation between individual agents and thecreation and distribution of knowledge between Japan and Western context in the
19th and 20th centuries. Thus, this proposal aims to contribute to the influences andcounterinfluences on a philosophical level, exploring the trajectory of a philosophical38

core idea, the Kantian “thing-in-itself”, taking as a point of departure Nakajima
Rikiz ’s (1858–1918) PhD dissertation: Kant’s Doctrine of the “thing-initself” (1889).
Nakajima’s studied in the West -he attended Yale University, receiving his PhD
thanks to this investigation on Kant-, representing one example, between manyothers, of what William Sweet describes as “the phenomenon of ‘migrating texts andtraditions’” (Sweet, 2011: 1). Nakajima’s dissertation on Kant has remained as ahidden text for many Western and Japanese philosophy historians, researchers, andstudents. So, first, the objective is to take the conference’s opportunity to reveal theimportance of these pioneering texts to promote mutual knowledge and explorationof the interaction between Western and Japanese intellectual spheres. This will
discover some aspects of the historical formation of philosophy as an academic
discipline in Meiji Japan, and, at the same time, the critical interpretations of westernmodern thought will throw light on the philosophical and intellectual atmosphere of
the period. In parallel, this presentation will try to show a possibility to explore asingular case of the named earlier phenomenon, “migration of texts”, that goes
together with migration of Japanese scholars to the West, offering a possibility toinquiry and explain ways of introduction of philosophical texts, concepts, and ideas
into different sociocultural contexts. At the end, the critical revision of thedissertation can help to reveal some aspects of the period of irruption and formationof academic philosophy in Japan during the end of nineteenth century and earlytwentieth century, discovering some important aspects of the reception of Kantianand German modern philosophy in Japan and East Asian context on that time.

COUNTERINFLUENCES IN JAPANESE RELIGION II.
Vladlena Fedianina
Moscow City University, Russia
A Medieval Buddhist Approach to Japanese History in Jien’s Works
This study addresses the issue of Buddhist historiography in 13th-century Japan. It isbased on the works of the Tendai monk Jien (1155–1255), in particular the Gukanshōand his poetry. The complex philosophical concepts expressed in Jien’s writings
demonstrate the way in which Buddhist ideas shaped his interpretation of history. A
Buddhist approach to understanding Japan’s past defined Jien’s ideological focus andprovided a theoretical foundation for the practical implementation of his historicaltheory. According to Jien, the historical process is characterized by inescapableō

39decline as well as cyclicity. The historical model developed by Jien describes
Japanese history as a succession of different forms of imperial rule willed by
Amataresu and subjected to one overarching Principle, the rhythm of the kalpa.
This study focuses on two peculiarities that informed Jien’s historical views. They
are the time-spatial concept of sangoku-mappō (“three countries, the Latter Days of
the Law”) and the idea of honji-suijaku, (“original nature, trace manifestation”). Bothconcepts shed light on Jien’ perception of Japan as a country located on the marginsof the Buddhist world and ruled by its native deities. An analysis of Jien’s writings
provides evidence that he relied on Indian Buddhist cosmology to explain the place ofJapan in the world while turning to the indigenous features of Japanese Buddhism tomake sense of local history.

Rossella Lupacchini
University Federico II of Naples, Italy
On Zen Logic and Quantum Physics. The Sound of One Hand Clapping
There is a general awareness that quantum physics has questioned the conventional
divide between the objective reality, pursued through scientific investigation, and thesubjective reality, immediately accessible to human soul. Although the developmentof natural science, focusing on the demand for objectivity, has tended to overlook theessential relational character of our knowledge, such character shows itself withcrystal clarity in the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. Not surprisingly, thequantum picture of physical reality conflicts with the classical logic of western
philosophy of science and encourages to consider different ways of thinking. Indeed,according to Werner Heisenberg (1958), "the great scientific contribution intheoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication
for a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far Eastand the philosophical substance of quantum theory." Which philosophical ideas are
involved? An answer is naturally suggested by Hideki Yukawa in The Freshness of
Mellow Ideas (1968); 'as a scientist', he regards ideas of ancient China as'extraordinarily modern'. My aim is to elaborate on Yukawa's perceptive insights inthe spirit of Zen logic.
To some extent, the very uncertainty principle might be trace to those 'mellow
ideas'. The uncertainty at the core of quantum theory cannot be dispel by means ofmore accurate experiments; in fact, it rather reveals that physical reality is much
deeper and larger than it seems, and most of it is invisible. Quantum theory deals

40with the fundamental entities of physics, such as electrons and photons, anddescribes their 'properties' in a way which makes it difficult to regard them asproperties at all. We cannot talk of an electron having such and such value of a spincomponent. All possible values unite in the quantum state of the electron, only whena measurement is performed a value turns out as a result of the interaction between
the system and the instrument, i.e., as a relational property. Thus, two basic
ingredients coalesce into quantum uncertainty: the multiplicity of mutually
alternative values, the impermanence of any physical property. In this perspective,
the quantum idea seems to be not so much unlike the 'great Uncertainty' described by
Suzuki Daisetz (1959) as "productive of all uncertainties," while the inner working of
the whole physical world might echo the life of what Suzuki called the 'Cosmic
Unconscious'. Now, since what has been traditionally called 'the universe' is only thevisible part of physical world, that is, just a branch, a new word, multiverse, has beencoined to denote physical reality as a whole. In the frame of the multiverse, even themutuality between a man and a butterfly, which concerned Chuang-tzu, makes
perfect sense: in one universe Chuang-tzu is a man dreaming of being a butterfly, inanother universe Chuang-tzu is a butterfly dreaming of being a man.

Adam Loughnane
University College Cork, Ireland“Flowers of Dim-Sightedness: Dōgen’s Mystical ‘Negative Ocularcentrism’”In addition to the centrality of vision suggested by the title given to Dōgen’s writings,“Treasury of the True Dharma Eye” (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵), metaphysics andmetaphor related to light and vision appear throughout his writings (e.g., “flowers ofvision,” “Dharma Eye,” moonlight, mirroring, reflection, “radiant light”, “profounddarkness”, “dim-sightedness”), revealing a sometimes overt, sometimes latentocularcentrism to his thought. Despite the dangers some have articulated regarding
the hegemony of the visual (McMahan, Levin), I seek to cast Dōgen’s philosophy as a“negative ocularcentrism”. The claim I develop is that the dangers of visual dominion
reside not in the philosophical prioritization of vision to the neglect of otherperceptual modalities, but specifically in the latent positivism visual metaphor tends
towards. To distinguish Dōgen’s use of vision- and light-related ideas and imagery
from such positivism—and from contemporary Western critiques of therepresentational model and its attendant binaries—I interpret his understanding of41

vision according to his central concepts, “activity” (行持 gyōji) and “expression” (道得dōtoku). If Dōgen’s notion of vision can be grasped according to the dynamics ofactivity and expression, (thus, within the structure of emptiness), we can find anegative ocularcentrism evading the perils of the positivist, representational model
while capitalizing on a deeper complexity of visual experience by embracing thevisually negative, including; blindness, illusion, invisibility, and darkness as
constitutive features of the visual.

MARXISM AND EXISTENCE
Reki Ando
Osaka University, Japan

The Anti-Marxist Moment in the 1980s Japanese Left
Marxism was a major reference point both for social and political movements as wellas intellectuals in the postwar Japanese left. Its privileged position, however,collapsed throughout the 1970s. Consequently, leftist activists and intellectuals began
to internally critique Marxist thought. This paper aims to trace aspects of thisintellectual shift from the latter half of the 1970s through the early 1980s. The
critique of Marxism was of course not limited to Japan: it was a common problematicseen in many developed capitalist countries during the period. The strongest
influence on Japanese intellectuals at the time came from trends in French thought,
particularly critiques of Marxism made by André Glucksmann, Alexandre-Solzenitin,
and Michel Foucault. These intellectuals’ texts were translated into Japanese during
the late 1970s and early 1980s and inspired leftist intellectuals in Japan as examplesof “anti-Marxist thought”. In order to reconstruct the process of this intellectual
importation, this paper takes up the thinker Toda Tōru (1943-1984) and examines his
interpretation of and reaction to the above-mentioned French intellectuals. I willargue that he embarked on the project of “anti-Marxist thought” in direct response to
their ideas. Toda’s project represents a critical reflection on the devolution of theemancipatory project into brutal violence, and a search for alternative possibilities tobring about the revolutionary event.

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Ferenc Takó
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary

Subjectivism(s) – Maruyama Masao and the debate on shutaisei
Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男 (1914–1996) had an essential influence on the intellectual
atmosphere of post-war Japan, a very complex scene containing a large variety ofphilosophical views, many of them stemming in the West. A central question of
Maruyama’s writings, also being a key element of the intellectual debates of the postwar years, was the question of autonomy and the role of the individual in shaping
history. An important encounter of views related to these topics in the second half of
the 40s was the debate on shutaisei 主体性 (subjectivity), i.e., a series of discussions indifferent forms between 1946 and 1948. The debate consisted of different
interpretations of shutaisei, with Umemoto Katsumi’s understanding playing acentral role, modified and criticized from different perspectives by other intellectuals.
A key figure among these critics was Maruyama Masao who represented the“modernist”, “value-based” interpretation (Koschmann 1981, Kersten 1996). The
debate as such clearly shows how different Western views of history, historicalprogress, and the role of the individual in that progress are interpreted in theJapanese context, furthermore, at a time when the future of a whole nation was felt to
be at stake in each ideological discussion. In terms of Maruyama’s views, his
contributions to the debate reflect his position towards different wings of Marxist
historical theory. In my presentation, I will analyse various views confronted in the
shutaisei debate using the example of the famous roundtable discussion between
leading intellectuals of the era published in Sekai in 1948, “Yuibutsushikan to
shutaisei” (“Historical materialism and shutaisei”, later in: Yoshino ed., 1961). In theanalysis I will focus on Maruyama’s understanding of values and value-based actions
and his interpretation of the freedom of the individual as the final goal of historicalprogression. By means of the examination carried out through the analysis of an
actual discussion, it will be shown in a direct way how Maruyama’s views confronted
those of other prominent intellectuals of the era, as well as how he mobilised his
understanding of Western philosophical teachings in his reactions to opposing
arguments.

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Raji C. Steineck
University of Zurich, Switzerland

Uchiyama Takashi‘s Philosophy of Time
There is not one “real” form of time. Instead, time assumes different shapes,
depending on the ways human beings are involved in change and actively engage it.
This seems to be the fundamental idea behind Uchiyama Takashi‘s 内山節 (b. 1950)
Twelve chapters on time (『時間についての十二章』, first published with Iwanami in1993). Uchiyama does not treat time as a neutral object or an abstract idea. Instead,he demonstrates how human beings build notions of time depending on the kinds ofdynamism they interact with, and the way this interaction is socially organised. His
analysis thus echoes the fundamental idea of historical materialism that the social
modes of survival / reproduction have a dominant role in the formation of humanconceptions. Building on this principle, Uchiyama vividly describes various suchmodes and the morphologies of time they both engender and generate. He offers ananalysis of various “cultures of time” and their mutual interactions. On a conceptual
level, his ideas point towards understanding time as a necessary reification. This
insight may help to grasp both its supportive function for human culture and society,and to criticize ideological views of time.
Uchiyama’s philosophy has not received extensive treatment outside Japan so far.
The presentation will therefore introduce the key ideas of his book. It will further
evaluate his propositions on the basis of the evidence and the theoretical references
presented.

HEIDEGGER AND JAPANMing Hon Chu
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Heidegger's concepts of boredom and anxiety in light of Kimura's
psychopathological phenomenology
The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin creatively borrows the Latin expressions "postfestum (after the feast)" and "ante festum (before the feast)" to characterizemelancholic and schizophrenic experiences respectively. Accordingly, themelancholic experiences one’s own self always in the form of an “I was”, trapped in apast which is irremediably lost. It lives by mourning forever for an event which is nolonger. The schizophrenic, on the contrary, always feels surprised by the excessive

44

upcoming of new events, coercing the self to undergo constant destruction andrecreation to an extent that hardly any stable personality can remain. It lives in theforever impatience to wait for a not yet ripe occurrence. An interesting comparison
can be found between Kimura’s psychopathological descriptions and Martin
Heidegger’s existential analyses of the temporality of Dasein. On the one hand, themelancholic’s temporality corresponds to Dasein’s thrownness in the world, whereby
one finds itself always already abandoned to a factual situation which is too late toventure. On the other hand, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to Desein’s
Being-ahead-of-itself, wherefrom one is exposed to the indeterminacy of open future
possibilities. In other words, we can say that both the melancholic and theschizophrenic structures of temporality are constitutive moments of Dasein’s
existence, especially when Kimura speaks of a "phenomenological proportion"
between melancholia and schizophrenia which coexist in most of us. I thereby
suggest interpreting two basic moods investigated by Heidegger, namely boredom
and anxiety, in light of the psychopathological concepts of Kimura. While Heidegger
has ever explored boredom and anxiety as two points of departure to philosophicalreflection without explaining their systematic relation, Kimura’s analyses draw ourattention to their being two limit-cases of Dasein’s existence. I will argue in mypresentation that a parallel reading of the two basic moods of Dasein and the twoends of psychopathological temporality will help us to understand the emergence ofphilosophical attitude, an achievement of human rationality, as an intrinsic variationof human madness.

Edward McDougall
University of Wolverhampton – Durham University, England

Heidegger Meeting Inari – What Folk-Shinto Practice Can Offer to
Heidegger’s Understanding of Technology
Heidegger’s later philosophy concentrates on the symptoms of Europeanisation andtechnology in modernity, in particular the reduction of beings into resources anddestruction of their meanings to be. Although Heidegger sees possible remedies inthe East Asia World, it is not clear as to how his philosophy can interact with the East
Asian thought and be applicable in a contemporary context. This paper aims to
explore this issue, taking the worship of Inari in Folk-Shinto as a basis. Modern
Japan is an Europeanised and technological society, in the Heideggerian
understanding, although Folk-Shinto, an ancient “folk-religion” focusing on ritual45

and practice, continues to be practiced in Japan. Inari, as a key kami in Japaneseculture, stands outside the mythological narrative of the Kojiki but connects withJapanese folklore. Despite of its ancient origin, its worship co-exists with the highly
developed, technological society. This paper will set up a dialogue between Heidegger
and Folk-Shinto. It will reflect on the philosophical significance of Folk-Shinto
practice in relation to Heidegger’s understanding of technology, and discuss how a
Heideggerian approach to technology can learn from Folk-Shinto practice.
The coexistence of Folk-Shinto with a technological society raises immediate
questions for Heidegger: does this mean that Folk-Shinto is part of gestell? If so, how
can Folk-Shinto practice be a possible remedy for such a technological society? If not,what can Folk-Shinto practice, as a remedy, do for this society? To address thesequestions, this paper will consider the relationship between technology, humans andnature. First, it will focus on the tension between the wild and the ordered natures in
Inari (who is associated with the fox and rice cultivation) to reveal the way which
Folk-Shinto practice exists in modernity. Referring to Heidegger’s distinction
between “The Thing” and the object, this paper will demonstrates that Folk-Shinto
practice is able to present a refusal to reduce beings to resources within atechnological society. Further, Folk-Shinto practice will be interpreted as response to
and embodiment of the generative flux of things, in relation to Tim Ingold’s animist
reading of Heidegger. From this, the paper will argue that Folk-Shinto, as a dynamic
flux, is able to remain hidden and maintain its mystery. This enables Folk-Shinto toresist being used up as resources by a technological society. In this way, Folk-Shinto
offers to Heidegger’s thought a contemporary example of remedy for symptoms oftechnology. Acknowledging this means opening a possibility of transformation for
individuals in a technological society to surpass gestell. Nevertheless, some mightsuggest that the continued practice of Folk-Shinto in a technological society would
reinforce gestell by maintaining an illusion of naturalness. This paper will finallyreflect on this issue.

EAST AND WEST REFLECTED
Yuliya Osadcha FerreiraTaras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Eastern Civilization and Western Enlightenment in Ariga Nagao’s Bungakuron

46

Ariga Nagao (有賀長男, 1860–1921) wrote his On Writings or Bungakuron (「文学論」,
1885) in the period of vigorous discussion by Meiji scholars on how to develop further
Japanese society. He focuses on harmonious combination of the Chinese spiritual
tradition and the European technical progress in the sphere of state management,social activities as well as fine arts, and philosophy. In comprehension of the Westernand Eastern civilizations, Ariga observes two fundamental world-view principles. The
first is analysis (分解) as a scientific approach to understand the material world; thesecond is synthesis (保合) as a method to perceive the essence of various phenomena
and things. He concludes that the ancient Japanese culture and the forthcoming
Western enlightenment are “not incompatible with each other like fire and ice” (byAriga). Moreover, their integration might be fruitful for Japan: the energy ofEuropean science (理学の精) counterparts the beauty of Chinese text (文章の美), andtheir synthesis will result in great harmony (大和) in many domains. Ariga eventuallystates that this could serve for the unrivalled-before-upcoming-prosperity of theJapanese society.

Lucy McCormick
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Weaponising Satori: Japanese Zen in Georges Bataille’s ‘War’ on tout ce qui est
reconnu aujourd’hui
Beyond vague references to his ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ influences, the engagement ofinterwar writer and philosopher Georges Bataille with Buddhist traditions remains
largely unexplored. This paper addresses one aspect of this gap in understanding,focusing on the influence of Japanese Zen on Bataille’s meditation practice. This
practice was developed in the secret society Acéphale, founded by Bataille in the late
1930s. The society, founded on the practice of silent and solo meditation, explicitly
declared a ‘war’ on ‘tout ce qui est reconnu aujourd’hui’ (all that is recognised today) a reference to a European religious and socio-political framework considered to havefailed. This paper considers how Japanese Zen concepts influenced Bataille’s
personal practice while also being weaponised in the service of his ‘war’. In particular,
the paper highlights the influence of satori: as a momentary breakthrough ofenlightenment associated with an instant of violent rupture, is shown to haveinfluenced what Bataille variously called the expérience intérieure, the opération
souveraine and – finally – méditation.

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In the first instance, records of Bataille’s meditation practice demonstrating his
Zen influences are drawn together. These include the internal papers of Acéphale,
which trace the development of Bataille’s meditation practice, and the publication ofcertain meditations in the society’s journal as La pratique de la joie devant la mort
(The Practice of Joy before Death). Bataille’s reception of D.T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen
Buddhism is also explored, in particular Suzuki’s description of the violence by which
satori may be achieved. Bataille is shown to have engaged with satori in his own
practice, as a means of achieving a state he is concerned with throughout his work:that of ecstasy born of a violent rupture with reality. His aim of developing acommunity of practitioners is then considered as a means of weaponising such apractice in the service of Acéphale’s ‘war’.

Francesca Greco
University of Hildesheim, Germany

European Nihilism on Japanese Soil: Interwoven Influences in a Global
Philosophical Perspective
One of the most intriguing and intricate encounter between the European and theJapanese culture is, in my view, the philosophical reception of nihilism in Japan on
the background of the old familiarity with the nothingness rooted in the Japanese
thinking.
My contribution to the 6th Conference of the ENOJP places itself in the frameworkof a globalized philosophizing and aims to address some possible reciprocal(counter)influences between European and Japanese thought on the topic of
nihilism. How the notion of nihilism arose in the middle of Europe, how it has been
understood in modern Japan and how its appropriation in the Japanese philosophy
influences an actual discourse about contemporary forms of nihilism are the leading
questions of the present proposal.
In my presentation I will first briefly sketch the emergence of nihilism at end of the
18th century in German speaking regions. My depiction will cover the imprint ofNietzsche’s (1844–1900) prophecy and establishment of that diversified current ofthought. In the second place, I will switch my historical and philosophical focus to thereception and adaption of the European nihilism in Japan during the modernizationera (近代化). The pejorative strain of nihilism in Europe gains in Japan a very different
meaning thanks to the merge of it with preexistent spiritual traditions andphilosophical treatises, as we can observe in Nishitani’s (1900–1990) philosophy. His48

distinction between nihilum (虚無) and emptiness (空) and his judgment of his
contemporary Japanese culture will be the second part of my presentation. In myfinal section I will articulate and reflect about the influences of a Japanese approachto nihilism in a global philosophical perspective on the background of contemporary
forms of nihilism.
At the end of the presentation we will have schematically opened three different
possibilities concerning the understanding of and the dealing with nihilism, which it
should provide a rich ground for discussions.

LOST (?) IN TRANSLATION
Oleksandra Bibik
Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University, Vinnytsia, Ukraine

To the Question of Religious Syncretism in Translations of the Qur'an and
Adaptations of Islam in Twenty-Century JapanThe development of Islam and translation of Muslim texts to the Japanese language
has begun in the Meiji Era. At that stage, different ways of understanding Muslim
concepts and terms have appeared along with the first Japanese texts about Islam.
Another important point for Japanese perception of Islam as a new religion fromforeign was the Pan-Asian ideology, which was followed by both Japanese translatorsand believers of Islam.
Japanese intellectuals set different views on the role that Islam could take in thedevelopment of Japanese ideology, religion, political and diplomatic relations.
Different religious and philosophical backgrounds that translators of the Qur’an weretended to use for the Japanese adaptations of specific Arabic Philosophical terms
have become one of the fundamental points to the future understanding of Islam.
Usage of Buddhism (Okawa Shumei, Mita Ryoichi) and Shinto (Sakamoto Ken’ichi,
Takahashi Goro) and Christian (Mita Ryoichi) terms in translations marked the
beginning of Japanese adaptation of Islam.
Religious syncretism could be understood as a specificity of both religious (Tanaka
Ippei, Ariga Bunpachiro) and philosophical incorporations (Okawa Shumei,
Toshihiko Izutsu) of Islam into the context of Japanese culture. Recent scholarshipon this issue has highlighted the role of Islam in the development of Japanese PanAsianism. The given presentation is devoted to the comparative analysis of six

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Japanese translations of the Qur’an and consideration of influences of thesetranslations’ particularities to the development of Japanese adaptations of Islam.

Luis Pujadas Torres
Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain

Applying the Linguistic Relativity Theory to the Relation Between theJapanese Language and Japanese Philosophy
I will try to answer two questions. First, can the Whorfian linguistic relativity theory(LRT) explain the fact that the Japanese language is better suited than otherlanguages to express some peculiarities of Buddhist thought and Japanesephilosophy? Second, does this fact help corroborate the LRT? Ueda Shizuteru,
Thomas Kasulis, and Rolf Elberfeld, among others, have insisted upon the relevanceof the fact without taking account of the theory. This is understandable if one
considers that the LRT lost its appeal with the appearance of the universalism andinnatism that pervaded the cognitive sciences following the Chomskyan revolutionthat discouraged empirical investigation on the topic. However, the late nineties of
the twentieth century saw a resurgence of the LRT, now simply called neoWhorfianism, due precisely to newly dicovered empirical evidence. Inasmuch, then,as the LRT is back and alive, it should be put to test as an explanation of our fact,which will lead to an affirmative answer to our first question. That will set it in a
wider framework in which all languages are supposed to favor some kind of thought.
Every time a piece of analogous evidence is found for a different language, the LRTgets a new amount of corroboration and so our second question also deserves to beanswered affirmatively.

COUNTERINFLUENCES IN NŌ
Dávid Sándor Cseh
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary

An Old Man in Red Brocade – Zeami's Sanemori and the Unlikely Beauty of
Shuramono Nō Plays
Maple leaves,
while brushing them aside
he returns home wearing brocade
and the people see him.
(Sanemori, translation by Mae J. Smethurst)

Zeami Motokiyo’s 世阿弥元清 (1363?–1443?) role in the founding of traditional
Japanese nō theatre is widely known, and he is also held to be the most important

50

playwright of shuramono 修羅物 nō plays. Otherwise known as second-category or
battle nō, these texts focus on the legendary warriors of the Genpei War 源平合戦
(1180–1185), both their victories and losses, and subsequent suffering in the afterlife.
In Fūshikaden 風姿花伝, Zeami writes that while shura roles are worthy of dramaticimitation, there is “little interest” in them unless they are about a famous warrior
from the Heike monogatari 平家物語 with a clear connection to poetry and music. His
reasoning seems sound, for how can we expect nō’s shining beauty from plays about
the bloody conflicts and inevitable death of military men? Zeami’s definition will help
answer the question: exactly how does the dark, ephemeral, and unlikely beauty ofshuramono come about?
This paper attempts to answer this question with the help of research done by suchnō experts as Tom Hare, Shimazaki Chifumi, Mae J. Smethurst and others. The study
also relies on Zeami’s various teachings, and by analyzing his nō masterpiece
Sanemori 実盛 aims to present how Zeami synthesized various religious, literary andtheatrical traditions in his shuramono plays, and in so doing, became the singularartist of an entire subgenre of nō drama still performed today.

Daryl Jamieson
Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

Zenchiku and the resacralisation of nōThough it was Zeami Motokiyo who first brought the art of nō to a point of popular
perfection in the early 15th-century Kyoto, it was his son-in-law Konparu Zenchiku
who took Zeami’s theatre for city-dwellers and courtiers and returned it to the sacredspaces of temples and shrines in Nara. Under the influence of new religious ideas
both domestic and Chinese, Zenchiku refashioned nō as a spiritual drama, adjusting
its focus from pleasing audiences and the military elite to pleasing the gods andenacting religious truths.
This paper will look at the religious-philosophical background of both Zenchiku’stime and our own to see how Zenchiku’s innovations came about and how theyfunction today. Recent scholarship has well documented, through the analyses ofboth men’s nō texts and treatises, how Zenchiku’s methods developed out of Zeami’s.
In this paper, I will focus on structural differences between Zenchiku and Zeami's
works, analysing the plays as performed pieces of music theatre (as opposed to static
texts). This will reveal how Zenchiku’s understanding – as developed in his Six

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Circles, One Dewdrop treatise – of the novel mixture of Shintō, Buddhist, andConfucian religious and philosophical ideas which were circulating and interacting in
the 15th century actually influenced the structure of his plays. I will also look at thekinds of responses his nō plays afford, addressing the question of their relevance tocontemporary audiences. With reference to aesthetics as conceived by the membersof the Kyoto School (especially Nishitani and Ueda), I will argue that Zenchiku’s
innovative structures afford being experienced (and were intended to be experienced)
as aesthetic events which open up our consciousness to what Ueda calls the ‘hollow
expanse’.

ART AND AESTHETICS
Beáta Pusztai
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary

Lucius’s Adventures in Wonderland
Japanese popular visual culture has historically been fascinated with the dynamics of“cross-cultural” interactions, may their dominant “Other” be the Chinese, thePortuguese, the Dutch, or the Americans. The portrayal of a cross-cultural encounteris always a double-edged sword, since it cuts both ways. Just as it paints a subjective
picture of the current Other from a Japanese point of view, it also attempts to build ahypothesis about how the Other perceives the Japanese. Thus, the depiction andexamination of such an encounter also provides a field for the negotiation ofJapanese national identity. The comical-satirical tone characteristic of many
Japanese comics and cartoons puts this contemplative, even philosophical side tointerrogating cross-cultural transactions into sharp relief. Focusing on the currently
popular franchise Thermae Romae (based on a comic series by manga author Mari
Yamazaki), playing at a time-travelling narrative of ancient Roman bathhousearchitect Lucius Modestus and his adventures in modern Japan, the present paper
aims at analyzing the different representations of cross-cultural interaction between
Japan and the West found in contemporary Japanese animation.

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Suguru Kawasato
INALCO, Paris, France

柳宗悦の民芸理論の射程――「ヴァナキュラー」という概念を軸に――本発表の目的は、日本の哲学者柳宗悦の芸術理論を検討し、民芸における「ヴァナキュラー」な様式を浮き彫りにするとともに、柳の民芸論の射程を追求することである。
「ヴァナキュラー」という単語は、人類学と建築の分野で特別な意味を持っている。それはプロの建築家によって作られた様式に組み込まれていないが、昔から伝統的な建築の中に存在しているスタイルを示すために使用されている。
建築の分野で「ヴァナキュラー」な様式があるならば、特に柳が言及している陶器に、この様式があるかどうか問うことが可能だろう。これまで日本の民芸における「ヴァナキュラー」な側面を見出す研究は行われてきていない。それゆえ、私た
ちは柳のテキストを分析し、それを見出すことにしたい。
柳によれば、「伝統」は職人の「個別的性格」を超えた伝統的な「法則」または「形態」の中に存在している。「ヴァナキュラー」な様式は、それが存在する文化と不可分に結びついているので、それは文化から独立した対象と見なされるのではなく、そのなかでその様式が生きている、文化全体において考察される必要がある。ハイデガーの考えと柳の考えを応用すれば、この可能性は考えられるものとなる。「ヴァナキュラー」という概念に基づいて、柳の理論の射程を拡大する可能性を見出すことが出来るのである。

Cláudia Ramos
University of Lisbon, Portugal

The Resonance of Zen Buddhism in Portuguese Contemporary Art
The ongoing research is designed around the relationship between Zen Buddhism
and Portuguese contemporary art. In the 1980’s and 1990’s in Portugal, Hôgen
Daidô, a Zen Buddhist master, played a major role in the work and thought of several
artists. Particularly in the work of Pedro Morais and Manuel Zimbro.
This article begins a first mapping of the artists who, from the second half of thetwentieth century to the present, have worked in relation to zen, and presents Pedro
Morais' LOCUS SOLUS project, a project the artist dedicated to Hôgen Daidô.
The Here and Now is represented in this investigation through curatorial practice.
The Blue Blooms in the Shadow is the first exhibition born from this research. It wasan exhibition that took place in Lisbon, at Appleton, in October 2020, and started

53

with a poem by Hôgen Daidô: A Penetration of Spring Light. Shining a light on issues
such as repetition, silence and vacuity.
Vacuity is, of course, one of the central points of this article. The emptiness of Zen
Buddhism does not seek the dissolution of form, but to create a form out of
emptiness, from emptiness. In the words of Kitaro Nishida: "the form of what isformless and listening to the sound of silence". Thus, we can understand theinscription I found in one of Pedro Morais' notebooks: "The doing is only doing when
it is flooded in silence".

Fernando Wirtz
University of Tübingen, Germany

Myth and Aesthetics of the Machine
In the 1930s and 1940s authors such as Miki Kiyoshi, Nakai Masakazu and Saigusa
Hiroto became interested in the problem of technique. In this presentation I would liketo investigate how they thought about the relationship between technology and art.
While Miki tends to interpret the technical mediation as something subjectiveobjective, Nakai defines technology in his Logic of the Committee (1936) as a ‘momentof mediation’ (媒介契機) between the order of nature and the order of human beings. In
order to understand this definition, one should take the point of view of the distinction
between Nakai’s ‘medium’ (媒体 or メディウム) and ‘mediation/Mittel’ (媒介 or ミッテル).
Therein, the medium is described as homogeneity (同質性), while the mediation ischaracterized as a mediating opposition (媒介的対立), that is, as something dynamic andunfixed. Saigusa, on the other hand, conceives technology as a ‘Mittel as a process’. To
what extent can this idea be applied to his conception of art?

Lorenzo Marinucci
University of Kyoto, JapanThe Place of Scent: Japanese Philosophy and Olfaction
The character nioi 匂, “scent”, is a Japanese creation: the Chinese kō 香 wasapparently not enough to express the Japanese take on scents and atmospheres. The
character 匂, moreover, did not originally refer just to “scent” or “perfume”.
Originating from the right element of in 韻, “resonance”, it was used to express the54radiance and beauty of colourful things, of perfumes, of sounds. nioi was a matter ofaura or atmosphere, a synesthetic field.
The peculiar phenomenology of olfaction offers an approach to the world very
different from the vision-centric one of ancient Greek and European ontology. Scentsare not given us as objects in the sense of Gegenstände, “things standing before us”.
We are enveloped by them, often without even noticing: they are “smellscapes”,
something hanging between specific noemata and whole horizons. Scents have noform, so abstracting them is impossible. However, as the double meaning of the Latin
word essentia suggests, they reveal something fundamental about things while free togo beyond them: both their spiritual and erotic role speaks of this sense of“transcendence”. Spatially, they are always here and yet, unavailable as objects, they
maintain an “unbridgeable distance” (Benjamin). Temporally, they challenge thelinear understanding of time: not only they change from moment to moment, lacking
a stable identity; they are paradoxical in being at the same time unavailable tovoluntary memory and able to bring us back in time in a most potent fashion, to alocus that seems enshrined in an “eternal now”.
A distinctive feature of Japanese cultural history has been, in Nishida Kitarō ’s
words, “seeing what is formless”. Indeed, we can retrace the role of such nioi inJapanese poetics (waka, renga and haikai), as an experiential revelation of emptinessin the context of Buddhism and in the field of traditional arts such as Nō, or in thedevelopment of only olfaction-based form of art in the world, the ceremony-game ofkōdō 香道.
It would be striking if this cultural background would not show up in modern
Japanese philosophy, not only for his historical influence but because of its
phenomenological potential: a core prejudice of Western thought, its overreliance on
vision, can be bracketed by this Japanese attention for ambiance and atmospheres.
While authors like Kuki and Nishitani dealt creatively with scent, Nishida’s
philosophy, is noticeably “deodorized”, to borrow Jim Heisig’s pithy expression. In
this contribution I will try to argue that the logic of basho developed from the 1920s
can be understood also in the broader perspective of such olfactory aesthetics. Even
more, Nishida’s philosophy can engage fruitfully with such a phenomenology of
atmosphere. In scent we can recognize the paradoxical but undeniable conjunction ofsubject and object in a common field of “nothingness” that is one of the chief
concerns of Kyoto School philosophers.

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ACTION, EXISTENCE, EXPERIENCE
Ramona Fotiade
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Existential Mindscapes: Kuki Shuzo, Shestov and the East-West Dialogue
There have been few non-European philosophers of the early twentieth-century who
have had a deeper, if surreptitious, influence on their cultural environment than Kuki
Shuzo and Lev Shestov. The argument in this paper proposes to trace the two-way
exchanges between Kuki Shuzo and the French philosophers of existence, paying
particular attention to Kuki’s book, Propos sur le temps (1928), which has beencredited with influencing Camus’s interpretation of Sisyphus as happy, while having
in turn taken its cue from Shestov’s mention of the Greek myth in the preface toPotestas Clavium (1928). Drawing on archival and critical resources from European
and Japanese libraries, the paper will attempt to shed light on Kuki’s and Shestov’srole in the French reception of phenomenology and the emergence of theexistentialist movement, by focusing on their conceptions of time, history andpersonal experience. Kuki’s and Shestov’s sustained interaction with Husserl,
Heidegger and Bergson in 1928 (the year when Kuki gave his two lectures on time at
the Décades de Pontigny, and Shestov published his essay on the philosophy of
religion) will be considered in the wider context of the Japanese translations of
Shestov’s works (starting with The Philosophy of Tragedy and Creation from the
Void in 1934), which sparked vivid debates in the counter-modernist circles in Kyoto
and Tokyo, but were often appropriated and adapted by the philosophers of theJapan Romantic School in their attempt to overcome the Eurocentric Westerncultural canon.

Makoto Katsumori
Akita University, Japan

Hiromatsu on Role Action and Reification
In his analysis of the practical dimension of the world, Hiromatsu Wataru (廣松渉
1933–1994) focuses on the theme of role action and, in particular, on the problem ofreification concerning role action. In Hiromatsu’s view, human action generally takes
place as “role action” (役割行為), that is, action performed in response to expectations
by others. It is not that roles exist prior to role action, but rather that roles are56

produced and reproduced each time they are played. However, Hiromatsu argues,roles often become more or less fixed and tend to appear as “ready-made” positions
or statuses. Further, although the norms of action are reproduced every time anaction is carried out, the manner of action often becomes fixed so that the norms tend
to be conceived as ready-made givens. As Hiromatsu further suggests, the whole“organization” of roles tends to appear as a ready-made reality, “as if it existed prior
to the participation of individuals.” He critically designates these circumstances as“institutional reification (物象化) of the nexus of role actions.”
On closer inspection, however, Hiromatsu’s analysis of reification as just outlined
seems to diverge in part from his general conception of reification, which was largely
formulated within the framework of synchronic structural analysis. While hegenerally defines reification as the hypostatizing misconception of a relation, his
account of reification regarding role action pertains to a dynamic movement throughwhich social relations structure and restructure themselves. Specifically, what he calls
the reification of roles may be formulated as the process through which a series ofactions a1, a2, . . . , in which roles [a1], [a2], . . . are produced each time (a1 as [a1], a2 as[a2], . . .), is restructured into a system in which actions are functionally subsumed
under a general Role [a*] (a1, a2, . . . as [a*]). Of pivotal importance here is
Hiromatsu’s paradoxical notion of the “becoming ready-made” (既成化) of roles andnorms as well as the whole organization. Reification as becoming ready-made is atemporal notion that paradoxically tends to conceal its own temporal dimension,
which implies the apparent reduction of dynamic movement to a synchronic
structure.

Kazuaki Oda
Osaka University, Japan“Iki” of Two – Kuki Shūzō and Nakai Masakazu“Iki”（「いき」） is one of the most popular concepts representing Japanese
aesthetic sensibility. Kuki Shūzō defines “iki” as sophisticated coquetry with pluck in
The Structure of “iki.” Since his book is known as a classic, his definition of “iki” is thestandard. Nakai Masakazu, who was influenced by Kuki, also discussed “iki” inIntroduction to Aesthetics and Japanese Beauty. Both Kuki and Nakai think that“iki” is the aesthetic sensibility of the Edo period. However, there are somedifferences in their opinions. Kuki finds an ideal of samurai in “iki.” However, Nakai

57

thinks that “iki” is for chōnin, and it comes from Bashō-style haikai. He thinks that itis the escape from the heaviness of the aesthetic sensibility of the samurai. Thismeans that what Nakai called “iki” is rather similar to what Kuki discussed as fūryū（風流） in An Essay on Fūryū.
Kuki longs for dynamic eternity. He wants to keep the fragile beauty of the
moment. He quotes from a waka by Henjō and describes the wind（風）assomething that keeps beauty from disappearing. On the other hand, Nakai longs forconstant renewal. He does not want to maintain anything and finds Japanese beautyin escape. He quotes from Bashō’s teachings and describes the flow（流） of water ina stream as the symbol of karumi （軽み） and “iki”, which create beauty as escape.
This difference shows the nature of their philosophies.

EAST, WEST AND THE KYOTO SCHOOL I.
Frédéric Girard
Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, Paris, France

Motora Yujiro, Direct experience blogging to his Study on Oriental Philosophy(1905) and Dacheng qixinlun
It is well known that the « pure experience » is the key-concept in Nishida Kitarō(1870–1945) philosophy but also that he preferred afterwards to use the Japanesenotion of basho because « pure experience » was too psychological in his mind. In
fact, the synonymous concept of « direct experience » can be found in a publication
by Motora Yūjirō (1858–1912) in the Journal of Philosophy, translated in Frenchlanguage in the Revue de Philosophie, directed by the specialist of experimental
psychology Théodule Ribot (1839–1916). Ribot himself gave a review of thispublication with some elements of analysis of Motora’s conception of the self basedon Buddhist psychology. At the time, the theory of Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
concerning the pure duration, the immediate data of consciousness (1889), based on
scientific psychological inquiries, were stressed as a major thesis and philosophicalbasis. The « direct experience » of Motora is, belonging to him, said to condense the
Oriental philosophy of mind and self, Tality. But Motora argues that it is the result of
the mind’s analysis of Shinnyo, that is the central concept of the Treatise on the act offaith belonging to Mahāyāna, Dacheng qixinlun, that leads to this conception. We
shall argue the tenets of Motora’s ideas which seem to be in connection with
Nishida’s views.

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Carlos Barbosa Cepeda
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá

Tracing the Daoist roots of Nishitani Keiji’s Thought
A careful reading of Nishitani Keiji’s work reveals the presence of terminology
historically rooted in Daoism, a feature that raises two questions: To what extent is
Nishitani’s philosophy influenced by Daoism? And what impact does it have on its
interpretation? I will address these questions by: (1) showing that Daoist-rooted
terminology is central in his work; (2) tracing the source of such terms back to Dōgen,then further back to Chan and Huayan, and ultimately to Daoist classics; (3)returning to Nishitani in order to assess the impact of this terminology in his thought.
All this may have a great impact on the interpretation of Nishitani’s critique ofscientism and scientific reductionism.
Many of the terms to be analyzed contain the nuance of “returning to the source(of reality).” It is possible, indeed, to find the roots of this “return vocabulary” (so to
speak) in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, but, in its turn, he uses terms that can be found in 8th
to 12th-century Chan Buddhist and Daoist alchemy texts. These treatises use terms
such as 返 本 還 源, which refer to the individual’s acting and being in tune with its
original nature (自然), and which ultimately stem from the Daodejing. I wish to argue
that Nishitani’s critique of scientific reductionism resonates with the Daodejing, as
revealed by his return vocabulary. Therefore, we find in Nishitani an occasion for
dialogue between Daoism, Buddhism and scientific thought toward a harmonious
relationship between science and spirituality.

Niklas Söderman
Tallinn University, Estonia – University of Helsinki, Finland

A relationship flipped on its head: Nishitani Keiji’s critique of technology
An interesting aspect of Nishitani Keiji’s later philosophy is his discussion oftechnology within his wider critique of modernity. Nishitani discussed ourrelationship with mechanization in the 1960s when he saw that our use of scientificrationality was overtaking us and turning us from users of technology to being usedby technology. He wrote in a context of rapid industrial development, when thetechnologies in question were related to the sphere of work. Nowadays, though,following revolutions in information and communication technologies, his warning of59

this logic of modern development and subsumption of our subjectivity rings far moretrue as our personal lives have become colonised by technology.
Still, Nishitani’s account of technology’s deep penetration into our lifeworlds
remains markedly abstract. Shifting perspective might have allowed him to note howthat penetration is driven by the logic of capitalist expansion that constantly seeks
new markets to exploit, and it is through that logic that tools we have produced to aid
us have come to use us as resources for that continuous expansion. Here Nishitani
echoes the approach inherent in much of the Kyoto School philosophy, in how theirwork often overlooks the way subjectivity is also rooted in relationships to material
processes and systems of production. This also raises an interesting question relating
to the Kyoto School’s view on subjectivity in general: if subjectivity is understood as
fundamentally nonegological, might this also mean that it is radically open to cooption by an external logic of operation?

Filip Gurjanov
University of Vienna, Austria – Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Between Body and Historical World: Reflections on Photographic Practice with
Later NishidaNishida’s “turn” toward philosophy of history in the later period of his thinking ismarked by a shift in focus, in which concepts of the historical world (歴史的世界) andbody (身体) occupy center stage. More specifically, Nishida emphasizes theimportance of embodied practical activity, by means of which humans partake incontinuous creation and development of historical reality. This framework provides
fruitful grounds for reflecting aesthetic practices, especially with respect to theirperformative character. Following on from my earlier attempt to describe thephotographic practice in terms of Nishida’s logic of place, in this presentation I aim
to explore the potentials of Nishida’s late philosophy toward a similar end. In thiscontext, I will consider several different themes: production of photographic images
as public objects (公のもの), photographers’ visibility by others (which connects with
their embodied presence in the world), as well as their bodily situatedness (based on
Ching-yuen Cheung’s interpretation). All these aspects can be considered different
ways in which photographers exercise “influence” on the objectivity of the historicalworld, as well as “counter-influences” that the aforesaid objectivity may have in coconstituting the act of photographing. Finally, the presentation aims to address

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kinaesthetic aspects of photographing. I wish to explore what kind of activity (作用)and movement (運動) different body-parts perform in order to realise thephotographic act. In this context, special attention is devoted to Nishida’s
understanding of the eye and the hand.

MEDIATIONS: TANABE HAJIME
Quentin Blaevoet
University of Strasbourg, France

On the concept of body. Tanabe Hajime in dialogue with the French
phenomenological tradition (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Henry)
From 1924 to 1931, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) dedicated a number of articles andlectures to the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. This
period, though, is marked by Tanabe’s growing dissatisfaction with phenomenology,
which led him, from 1930 to 1933, to a cycle of studies on Hegel’s dialectics, whichitself led to the elaboration of the Logic of Species (or “Logic of the Specific”). The
triggering factor that urged him towards Hegel was, certainly, as Tanabe makes it
clear in two important articles from 1931, Synthesis and Transcendence and The
Position of Anthropology, the negligence of his German masters regarding theconcept of body, which he considered to be determining in the unification of theuniversal and the particular, which he was striving, in the wake of Nishida Kitarō, tospell out. This return from phenomenology to Hegel has also been undertook by
French phenomenologists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques
Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Tran Duc Tao or, more recently, JeanLuc Marion. It may thus be wondered what makes Tanabe’s own attempt original andhow it could contribute to phenomenological studies today. In my presentation I will
confront Tanabe’s philosophy with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Henry, who reinjected
Hegel in the phenomenological debate and introduced the body as a central concept
in phenomenology in order to enlight the originality of Tanabe’s take on Hegel and to
display the role the concept of body played in the elaboration of his “postphenomenological” thinking.

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Ō

Urai Satoshi
tani University, Kyoto, JapanMediation and Absolute Mediation in the Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime
Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) developed his “absolute dialectics” between 1930 and
1933. This would be no mere way station for Tanabe’s thinking: for as late as 1948,
Tanabe claimed that his new philosophical developments continued to depend on it.
Indeed, we could say that his whole philosophy since the 1930s is based on absolute
dialectics.
This unique dialectics is characterized by the concept of “absolute mediation,” that
nothing is unmediated. Everything in the historical world, whose structure absolute
dialectics is meant to elucidate, including even the Absolute, is mediated bysomething else.
Absolute mediation is carried out through Tanabe’s concept of absolutenothingness, the basic principle of all change and formation in the historical world.
As such, absolute nothingness is something to which we are connected in allprocesses of relating and changing.
Yet, Tanabe also contends that when we undergo “death-and-resurrection”—thesalvific process of his philosophy of religion known as “metanoetics”—we are“mediated by the universal,” where “the universal” is a reference to “absolutenothingness.” This creates the following tension. On the one hand, Tanabe says that
we are always mediated by absolute nothingness. On the other hand, Tanabe claims
that such mediation is typical of salvation. If these are both true, then it seems tofollow that we are always, already saved. How are we to understand this relationshipbetween “being mediated by the universal” and absolute mediation? This
presentation aims at clarifying the foundation of Tanabe’s philosophy by unravelingthe relationship between these two ideas.

EAST, WEST AND THE KYOTO SCHOOL II.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait City, Kuwait

Nishida Kitarō and Muhammad ‘Abduh on God and Reason: Towards a
Theology of Place
I compare the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945) with the Egyptian
philosopher and reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). Both philosophies
emerged within similar cultural contexts. Both thinkers attempt to think

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relationships between the individual and the universal through organic models. In
parallel, both philosophies produce paradoxical positions regarding the integration ofreason and religion. Like Abduh, Nishida is interested in the unity of God. How do wehave to think the unity of God when every unity is only composed ofindividuals? ‘Abduh’s concept of God reflects Nishida’s “self-determination of theworld as a self-Contradictory Self-Identity” (mujunteki jiko dōitsu, 矛盾的自己同
一,TPR: 34) because, according to Nishida, God is an “infinite self-determining form”(25) inside whose unity everything expresses itself organically. God is a contradictory
unity, and ‘Abduh’s reflections on the existence of God insist on a similar sort ofcontradictory self-identity.* Nishida concludes that the fundamental source ofrelation between elements must be sought in the infinite self-determining (自己限定jiko-gentei) form of God that expresses itself organically.

Wing Keung Lam
Dokkyo University, Sōka, Japan

Nishida Kitarō and Shaftesbury: An Encounter of Moral Sentimentalism
This paper explores the potential and problems of moral sentimentalism that lie inthe encounter of Nishida Kitarō and Shaftesbury. With respects of Nishida’s moral
philosophy, a number of scholarships can be found on its relationship with ImmanuelKant and Thomas Hill Green. Meanwhile, Nishida discusses Shaftesbury and themoral sense school that follows extensively in Zen no Kenkyū (善の研究, An Inquiry
into the Good), Eikoku Rinrigakushi (英国倫理学史, A History of British Ethics) and soon. In An Inquiry into the Good, the concept of harmony (調和) and the mean (中庸)
for the good highlighted by Shaftesbury are referred. The discourse of moral sense
school developed by Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith is examined in
The History of British Ethics. I would like to argue, therefore, Nishida’s moral
philosophy is deeply influenced by Shaftesbury and his followers. On top of this, I
would like to suggest that Nishida is a moral sentimentalist, who emphasizes feelings,
passions or sentiments play a fundamental and decisive role for moral actions. In
order to unpack this claim, I shall delve into the following issues: firstly, therelationship between Nishida and Shaftesbury. Secondly, Nishida’s moral philosophy* The contradictoriness becomes even more obvious in Ibn ‘Arabī for whom the Absolute and the world are“contradictorily identical with one another.” “The Absolute and the world are the same while being at the sametime diametrically opposed to each other” (Izutsu 1983: 89).

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and the school of moral sense. Thirdly, the lessons that Nishida may offer for moral
sentimentalism.

Sanada Wataru
Osaka University, Japan

What Enables History to Move: A Reading of Nishida Kitarō’s Later Works
The purpose of this paper is to examine what enables history to move, according to
Nishida Kitarō’s later works. In his later works, he came to examine not only an
identity that holds all things together as one, but also contradictory aspects, such asindividual and universal. It is true that he developed the concept of pure experience
under the influence of Bergson’s “pure duration,” which is an indivisible succession ofqualitative changes. Intuition in Bergson’s and Nishida’s sense puts us, as people, incontact with a whole continuity of this fluidity; however, we cannot be aware that weare in this fluidity unless we have an outside perspective. Although Nishidaattempted to resolve this problem in his early works, he ended up taking this fluidity
as a given. Thus, in his early and middle works, he could not explain why the
movement of history was possible. However, in his later works, he explained thismovement not only from an outside perspective or, in other words, from theperspective of an individual; he examined it in terms of the correlation between
individuals and the world. In this paper, I propose to interpret this correlation as the
structure that enables history to move. Nishida thought that individuals transformthe world, and in turn, the world, which is transformed determines and also provokes
them to transform the world. This mutual determination makes the world (and also
individuals) renew dialectically. Nishida regarded this dialectic renewal of the world
as the movement of history.

Tak-Lap Yeung
Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Influences and answers from a transcultural perspective: Nishida Kitaro and
Mou Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition
As a pathway connecting Western philosophy to Eastern, Nishida Kitaro and Mou
Zongsan have similarly taken the challenge to reinterpret the meaning of intellectual
intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung), through which the special characters of Asian
philosophical thoughts can clearly be revealed in the perspective of world philosophy.
Nishida believes that there is no clear distinction between intellectual intuition and64perception (or in other words, empirical intuition). Intellectual intuition contains far
richer content than ordinary intuition, which can be seen from the artistic andreligious experience. Intellectual intuition transcends the dichotomy between subject
and object and serves as a united basis for knowledge and morality in relation toreligion; Mou, on the other hand, believes that the acknowledgment of intellectual
intuition is the common character of Chinese philosophy in general (including
Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism). By such character, human beings can act as
infinite beings in terms of morality and with which they can stand for and live out
their subjectivity. The above appropriations show not only the different approaches
to reinterpret Kant’s conception of intellectual intuition but also the unique way ofmodernization of traditional Asian philosophy. The former introduces a different
understanding of consciousness and unconscious acts for a better understanding of
the living phenomenon, the latter rebuild the foundation of Confucianism by Kantianargumentation of morality. In this paper, I will not only shed light on their thinking
on intellectual intuition but also evaluate their interpretations according to their
reception of Kant and phenomenology.

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Participants’ bios
Reki ANDO
Osaka University, Japan
Reki Ando is a PhD student majoring in political theory and history at the Graduate
School of Human Sciences, Osaka University. His research fields include
emancipatory theories and political philosophy, with special interests in the actualityof theory in relation to social movements. His current project analyzes the changing
concept of the political in French thought during the late 1970s and early 1980s. He is
also working on a study of the decline of Japanese Marxist thought in the same time
period.
Judit ÁROKAY
Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Judit Árokay graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in German and English
Language and Literature, and holds an M.A. and PhD in Japanese Studies from
Hamburg University, with a Habilitation at Free University Berlin. Since 2007, JuditÁrokay is full professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Heidelberg,
specializing in pre-modern Japanese literature. Her special interests are waka poetry
and poetic theory from the Middle Ages to the end of the Tokugawa period, therhetoric of poetic language, and the transformation of literary language at the adventof the modern period. Her publications include: Die Erneuerung der poetischen
Sprache: poetologische und sprachtheoretische Diskurse der Edo-Zeit, München:
Iudicium, 2010; Divided languages?

Diglossia, Translation and the Rise ofModernity in Japan, China, and the Slavic World, edited with Jadranka
Gvozdanović & Darja Miyajima, Cham: Springer, 2014; Founder and co-editor of theonline journal “Bunron – Studies in Japanese Literature” (bunron.org, since 2014).
Carlos BARBOSA Cepeda
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá
Junior researcher in Japanese philosophy. Current interests: environmental
philosophy, intercultural philosophy, philosophy of religion. Member of theEuropean Network of Japanese Philosophy (ENOJP), the Latin American Association66

of Intercultural Philosophy (ALAFI) and the Colombian Network of Philosophy of
Religion (RCFR). Currently adjunct professor at Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de
Colombia, Bogotá.
Steve BEIN
University of Dayton, Ohio, USA
Steve Bein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton, where heis a specialist in East Asian thought.
Oleksandra BIBIK
Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University, Vinnytsia, Ukraine
Oleksandra Bibik was born in 1993. Currently, she is a postgraduate student at Vasyl
Stus Donetsk National University in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. She is also a member of the
Academic Workshop for the Study of Religion. Professional interests lie in the field ofJapanese ideology, Pan-Asianism in Japan, and History of Religions in Japan(particularly she is focusing on Islam studies). She has published more than 20
academic articles.
Quentin BLAEVOET
University of Strasbourg, France
Quentin Blaevoet is a doctoral student at the University of Strasbourg, France. Hisinterest is in the different receptions of phenomenology in Japan through the worksof thinkers from the Kyoto School and that of more contemporary Japanese
phenomenologists, in the front row of which that of Nitta Yoshihiro (1929–2020). He
is preparing a dissertation on the first reception of Husserl and Heidegger in Japan in
the works of Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), and is participating in the ongoing efforts
to make the latter’s early works available in French and English.
Thorsten BOTZ-BORNSTEIN
Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait City, Kuwait
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein was born in Germany, did his undergraduate studies in
Paris, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. As a
postdoctoral researcher based in Finland, he undertook research for four years on

67

Russian formalism in Russia and the Baltic countries. He has also been researchingfor three years in Japan on the Kyoto School and worked for the Center of Cognitionof Hangzhou University (China) as well as at Tuskegee University in Alabama. He is
now Professor of philosophy at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait.
Joff BRADLEY
Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan
Joff Bradley is a professor at Teikyo University, and visiting professor at Jamia Millia
Islamia, New Delhi, India, and visiting fellow at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea.
He is vice president of the International Association of Japan Studies. Joff has cowritten A Pedagogy of Cinema & coedited: Deleuze and Buddhism; Educational Ills
and the (Im)possibility of Utopia; Educational Philosophy and New French
Thought; Principles of Transversality, Bringing Forth a World; Bernard Stiegler
and the Philosophy of Education. He published Thinking with Animation in 2021.
Dean Anthony BRINK
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Dean Anthony Brink is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages andLiteratures at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Recent
publications include three monographs: Poetics and Justice in America, Japan, andTaiwan: Configuring Change and Entitlement (Lexington Books, 2021); Philosophyof Science and The Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitar , Tanabe Hajime
and Tosaka Jun (Bloomsbury, 2021); Japanese Poetry and Its Publics: From
Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima (Routledge, 2018).
Sova PK CERDA
Sova PK Cerda is a MEXT scholar doing doctoral work on Nishitani Keiji at Kyoto
University’s Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies. The thesis
explores the anti-Cartesian and post-Kantian motivations in Nishitani’s thought, as
well as in the Anglophone reception of Kyoto-School philosophy. Sova is interested in
the bundle of issues that concern “the good life,” in particular, subjectivity (being aself) and normativity (dealing with being a self).

ō68Raphael CHIM
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chim Wung Cheong is a PhD candidate at the Department of English in the Chinese
University of Hong Kong.
Hung-Tao CHU
National Taiwan University
Hung-Tao Chu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at National
Taiwan University. He has published articles on Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi. He
is now focusing on the political thought in the Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor(Huangdi Sijing 黃帝四經 ), an excavated document from the Han Dynasty.

Ming Hon CHU
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Ming Hon Chu is a doctor candidate in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His
current theme of research is the motivations to phenomenological reduction. He isinterested in how philosophy helps to illuminate different kinds of limit-experience.
His recent publication is Formen der Versunkenheit. Die Rolle der Traumanalyse im
Frühwerk Eugen Finks (2020), which investigates dreaming as a special
phenomenon for reshaping our understanding of experience.
Montserrat CRESP N Perales
University of Barcelona, SpainMontserrat Crespín Perales, Ph.D. (Barcelona, Spain). Bachelor's Degree in Law (1998)
from Pompeu Fabra University and in Philosophy (2004) from University of Barcelona(with honors). Japan Foundation Fellowship Researcher at the International ResearchCentre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto (2006). Master’s in research inContemporary East Asia at Autonomous University of Barcelona (with honors) (2008).
PhD in Philosophy from University of Barcelona (Cum Laude) (2013) with the doctoral
thesis entitled Experience, Self-consciousness and Will. The conceptualization ofsubjectivity in Nishida Kitaro’s first period philosophy (1911-1923). She is currently
lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona. More info andpublications: https://philpeople.org/profiles/montserrat-crespin-peralesÍ

69

Dávid Sándor CSEH
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary
Dávid Sándor Cseh received his Aesthetics MA diploma at Eötvös Loránd University(ELTE) and graduated as a theatre dramaturg at the University of Theatre and Film
Arts in Budapest. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Aesthetics Departmentof ELTE, where he studies the aesthetics of Japanese nō theatre. He is also a freelancedramaturg who has worked at such theatres as Miskolc National Theatre andVígszínház. He was a Fellow of the Japan Foundation in 2017 and has been a member
of ENOJP since 2015.
Andrei CUNHA
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Universidade Federal do Rio
Grande do Sul (Brazil), literary translator, with published translations of works by
Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, Nagai Kafû, Tawada Yôko, Ogawa Yôko and Inoue Yasushi, as
well as the first Brazilian translation of the Hyakunin Isshu and a compilation of
Kokinshû poems.
Mirjam DÉNES
Hopp Ferenc Museum of Asiatic Arts, Budapest
Mirjam Dénes is a Hungarian Art Historian and Japanologist, a graduate from Eötvös
Loránd University and Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in
Budapest. Since 2015 she has been curating the Japanese art collection of the Ferenc
Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts. Besides the management of ca. 8000 items, she
focuses her research on the histories of collecting Japanese art in Hungary, an on
Japonisme. She organized various exhibitions and conferences, published books andcatalogues, and managed an international research group which published
Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (2020).

70Laÿna DROZ
Kyoto UniversityLaÿna Droz holds a PhD in Global Environmental Studies at Kyoto University in2020. Her book titled The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics was publishedin 2021. Inspired by Japanese and cross-cultural environmental philosophy, it
explores sustainability and individual responsibility in the global context of pluralismof worldviews. Droz is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center for
Climate Change, with a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Mária Ildikó FARKAS
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest
Mária Ildikó Farkas (PhD) is Historian and Japanologist, Associate Professor at theInstitute of Oriental Languages and Cultures, Károli Gáspár University of theReformed Church in Hungary. She holds an MA and PhD in History and an MA in
Japanese Studies. She is specialized in modern and early modern (Asian andEuropean) cultural history, modernization and collective identity issues. She has
several publications on Hungarian-Japanese relations, on “Turanism”, and on thecultural aspects of Japanese modernization (in Hungarian and in English).
Vladlena FEDIANINA
Moscow City University, Russia
Vladlena Fedianina is Chair of the Japanese Language Department of Moscow City
University. She holds a doctorate in Japanese History (of Japan) from Moscow State
University (2006), translated the Kitano Tenjin Engi into Russian, and has publishedwidely in the field of the history of Japanese religions.
Ramona FOTIADE
University of Glasgow, Scotland
Ramona Fotiade is Reader in French at the University of Glasgow, and a specialist of
existentialism, surrealism and film-philosophy. In 2016, she curated the retrospective
exhibition, Lev Shestov – The Thought from Outside, at the Town Hall of the 6tharrondissement in Paris, and edited the exhibition catalogue. Her other publications
include: Pictures of the Mind. Surrealist Photography and Film (2018), Du tragique à71

l’ineffable : Léon Chestov et Vladimir Jankélévitch (2011), Conceptions of the Absurd:
From Surrealism to the Existential Thought of Shestov and Fondane (2001).
Frédéric GIRARD
Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, Paris, France
Frédéric Girard is a Professor Emeritus in Japanese Studies at the French Institute ofOriental Studies (Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient).
Francesca GRECO
University of Hildesheim, Germany
Francesca Greco is currently a research member of the DFG funded research project
Histories of Philosophy in a Global Perspective (Geschichten der Philosophie in
globaler Perspektive) directed by Prof. Dr. Rolf Elberfeld at the University ofHildesheim, where Francesca is also working on a PhD project in philosophy in thefield of intercultural philosophy, especially Japanese philosophy with the provisional
title Form of Negativity. Not, Nothingness, Relationality (Formen der Negativität.
Nicht, Nichts, Relationalität) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rolf Elberfeld and PD.
Dr. Katrin Wille. Among her publications we find Der Ort der Wahrheit. Heideggers
Ortsdenken mit Blick auf die Philosophie Nishidas (2017), Ricordare il dimenticato
Vattimo e la ‘vocazione nichilista dell’ermeneutica’ oltre un pensiero dualista (2018),
Orten und Grenzen: Übergangsräume im Philosophieren Nishida Kitarōs (2020), Ein
Blick ins Werk »Storia delle storie generali della filosofia« aus globaler Perspektive(2021), Reformulating the Position of Indifferentism in the Japanese Buddhist
Philosophy and several video conferences accessible from YouTube.
Rodrigo GUERIZOLIFederal University of Rio de Janeiro
Rodrigo Guerizoli, PhD from the University of Cologne, is professor in the philosophy
department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he conducts researchmainly in the area of history of medieval philosophy (13th and 14th centuries), withemphasis on dealing with issues related to metaphysics and theory of action.

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Filip GURJANOV
University of Vienna, Austria – Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Filip Gurjanov is a PhD student at the University of Vienna and Charles University(Prague), as well as a DOC fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Gurjanov’s
project focuses on a phenomenological approach to the act of photographing. In thiscontext, he is mainly engaged with early Martin Heidegger as well as Nishida Kitarō’s
philosophy, exploring different ways in which their thought can be used to cast lighton the photographic act.
Mika IMONO
Meisei University
Mika Imono, PhD in Philosophy, University of Toulouse II (2013) and PhD in
Philosophy, Doshisha University, Kyoto (2015), Associate Professor at the Departmentof Education, Meisei University, Tokyo. Subject of both of her theses is a comparison
between the philosophical concepts of Maine de Biran and Kitarō Nishida. Aftercompleting her thesis, Mika Imono has been holding various research and teaching
appointments in Japanese Studies at the Universities of Bordeaux Montaigne (2013–2015) and Strasbourg (2015–2019). From 2019 to 2020, she was awarded the Hakuho
Japanese Research Fellowship, and subsequently pursued her studies at theInternational Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto (2019–2020).
Yuko ISHIHARA
Ritsumeikan University
Yuko Ishihara is an associate professor at the College of Global Liberal Arts at
Ritsumeikan University in Osaka, Japan. Her research areas include the Kyoto School
philosophy and classical phenomenology, with a specific interest in transcendental
philosophy. She completed her PhD dissertation in 2016 on a comparative study ofHeidegger’s and Nishida Kitaro’s critical engagements with transcendental
philosophy in the late 1920s. Her recent research focuses on the topic of play and how
modern philosophers, both eastern and western, have turned to the notion of play to
overcome the metaphysics of subjectivity.

73

Daryl JAMIESON
Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
Daryl Jamieson is an assistant professor of composition at Kyushu University inFukuoka, Japan. His research revolves around recovering marginalized ways
interpreting art (sound) from non- or pre-capitalist societies, especially nō. He
composes for both Japanese and western instruments and his music has been widely
performed. His Vanitas trilogy received the 2018 Toshi Ichiyanagi Contemporary
Prize. He is also the co-founder and artistic director of the music theatre company‘atelier jaku’.
Romaric JANNEL
Romaric Jannel received his PhD from the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes in Paris
with a thesis on the philosophy of Yamauchi Tokury . He collaborated with Augustin
Berque on a French translation of Logos et Lemme, the only work of Yamauchi to betranslated into a Western language to date. He studied Buddhist philology withFr d ric Girard and Japanese philosophy with Uehara Mayuko. He is currently parttime lecture at Kyoto University.
Prof. David W. JOHNSON
Boston College
David Johnson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He works inthe fields of contemporary Japanese philosophy (especially Watsuji, Kimura Bin, andNishida), hermeneutics and phenomenology (especially Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty,
and Heidegger), and comparative/intercultural philosophy. He has been a visiting
researcher at the University of Freiburg, the Nanzan Institute for Religion andCulture, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, and Pompeu Fabra
University. His current research focuses on integrating the social ontology of theJapanese philosopher and psychiatrist Kimura Bin into the a-subjective
phenomenology of Jan Patočka and the phenomenology of life of Merelau-Ponty andRenaud Barbaras.

É

ū

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74

Suguru KAWASATO
INALCO, Paris, France
学歴 (最近のもの)
2020年9月: フランス国立東洋言語文化大学大学院日本学専攻修士課程修了
2020年11月 : パリ・ナンテール大学、知識・言語・モデリング研究科博士課程入学
2021年3月 : 名古屋大学大学院人文学研究科博士課程後期課程修了
2021年4月-：名古屋大学大学院人文学研究科博士研究員
職歴2020年9月1日−フランス国立東洋言語文化大学日本学科講師
Yukiko KUWAYAMA
University of Hildesheim
Yukiko Kuwayama is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Hildesheim(Germany) and a language teacher (Japanese) at the Institut National des Langues etCivilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. She submitted her PhD thesis Ki (気),Fühlen und Empfinden: Eine linguistische Phänomenologie vorprädikativer
Erfahrungsformen in November 2021. She did a bachelor in philosophy at Sophia
University (Jōchi daigaku), Tokyo, with a focus on Kantian epistemology andpractical philosophy (2013) and a master’s program on translation between German
and Japanese at the University of Bonn, Germany (2016).
Leon KRINGS
University of Hildesheim
Leon Krings s a member of the research project “Histories of Philosophy in a Global
Perspective” (HiPhi) at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, where he is also
working on a PhD thesis on the phenomenology of embodiment, with a focus on the
training of embodiment patterns (型 kata) in the context of Japanese philosophy andpractice. His other research interests include intercultural philosophy, Nishida
Kitarō, and philosophy as a form of life (Lebensform). His latest publication is thecollected volume Transitions: Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy (2021),
co-edited with Francesca Greco and Yukiko Kuwayama. He is currently preparing the75

publication of Histories of Philosophy and Thought in the Japanese Language: A
Bibliographical Guide from 1835 to 2021.
Wing Keung LAM
Dokkyo University, Sōka, Japan
Lam Wing Keung is currently teaching at Dokkyo University, Japan. His researchinterests lie in Japanese philosophy, transcultural philosophy, and virtue ethics. His
recent publications include Japanese Philosophy in East Asia (in Japanese, co-edited),
Globalizing Japanese Philosophy as An Academic Discipline (co-edited), Japanese
Ethics and Confucian Tradition (in Chinese, co-edited) and so on.
Hans Peter LIEDERBACH
Nishinomiya
Hans Peter Liederbach received his Dr. phil. in philosophy from Eberhard-Karls
University Tübingen, Germany. He is a Professor of Philosophy and German at
Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, Japan. He has done research on theeffective history of Western philosophy in modern Japan (Watsuji, Kuki, Nishitani,
Heidegger, and Hegel). Currently he is interested in how the philosophical discourseof modernity has been received by Japanese philosophers and how this reception
shapes our understanding of Japanese philosophy and philosophy in general. He is
the author of Martin Heidegger im Denken Watsuji Tetsurōs: Ein japanischer
Beitrag zur Philosophie der Lebenswelt. München: Iudicium, 2001, the co-author of
Haidegā “Tetsugaku e ni kiyo” kaidoku. Tokyo: Heibonsha 2006, various articles,
and translations. Recently, he edited Philosophie im gegenwärtigen Japan.
München: Iudicium, 2017.
Adam LOUGHNANE
University College Cork, Ireland
Adam Loughnane is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork. His
research centres on the phenomenological and aesthetic traditions of Europe andAsia. He has recently completed a monograph entitled Nishida and Merleau-Ponty:
Artistic Expression as Motor-Perceptual faith (SUNY 2019), is presently working on
an introduction to Japanese aesthetics, Phenomenology of Tea (Bloomsbury, 2022)

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and co-editing a forthcoming volume Tetsugaku Companion to Ueda Shizuteru:
Language, Experience, and Zen (Springer, 2022).
Rossella LUPACCHINI
University Federico II of Naples, Italy
Rossella Lupacchini teaches philosophy of science at the University Federico II of
Naples. Her research focuses on the foundations of physics and mathematics. Her
interests encompass forms of scientific and artistic representation, geometricstructures, and the history of ideas from Leibniz to modern physics. More recently,
she has turned her attention to the contrast between Eastern and Western ways ofthinking the infinity, particular as reflected in the mathematical view of some
philosophers of the Kyoto School.
Lucas Nascimento MACHADO
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Professor of History of Philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
Philosophy PhD from the University of São Paulo, current director of the LatinAmerican Network for Intercultural Philosophy (ALAFI), translator. Currently
interested on the following areas of research: German Idealism from an intercultural
perspective, Methods in Intercultural Philosophy, Buddhism and Indian Philosophy,
Byung-Chul Han’s Philosophy.
Katsumori MAKOTO
Akita University, Japan
Katsumori Makoto 勝守真 is professor emeritus in philosophy at Akita University,
Japan. After studying geophysics, he majored in the history and philosophy of scienceat the University of Tokyo. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Vrije Universiteit,
the Netherlands. His main fields of research are the philosophy of science, andcontemporary European and Japanese philosophy. His publications include 『現代日本哲学への問い：「われわれ」とそのかなた』 (2009) and Niels Bohr’s Complementarity: Its

Structure, History, and Intersections with Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (2011).

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Lorenzo MARINUCCIUniversity of Kyoto, Japan
Lorenzo Marinucci is currently a Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Kyoto,with a postdoc research project dealing with the theme of scent in Japanese andEuropean thought. He has been a Canon Europe Fellow (Kyoto University, 2020-21)
in the same atheneum, and got his PhD from the University of Rome - Tor Vergata in
2019. He is also active as a translator of Japanese philosophy, poetry and fiction.
Kimie MATSUMOTO
Osaka University, Japan松本

きみゑ

大阪大学大学院人間科学研究科
未来共生学

博士後期後期課程

共生の人間学

博士論文のテーマ
千利休の教えを日本文化論に位置付ける研究
Lucy MCCORMICKUniversity of Glasgow, Scotland
Lucy McCormick is a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. Her
work explores the reception of Buddhist traditions in the French interwar avantgarde, with a focus on Georges Bataille’s engagement with Tibetan Buddhism andJapanese Zen.
Edward MCDOUGALL
University of Wolverhampton – Durham University, England
Edward McDougall is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton andTutor at Durham University. McDougall specializes in Heidegger and East Asian
Philosophy. His Ph.D. thesis considered the hermeneutic foundations of Heidegger's
dialogue with the “East Asian World”. He has sought to continue this dialogue,
focusing on Daoism and Shinto. His paper, Everydayness, Divinity, and the Sacred:
Shinto and Heidegger, was published in Philosophy East and West. McDougall's
works also include a book chapter, “Is Heidegger Eurocentric? A Geography of Being”(Perspektiven mit Heidegger: Zugänge-Pfade-Anknüpfungen), and encyclopaedia

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entries such as “Justice and Religion: Daoism” (Encyclopaedia of Global Justice),“Heidegger and Intercultural Philosophy” and “Folk Shinto” (Online Dictionary ofIntercultural Philosophy). In his forthcoming works, McDougall further looks at theconnections between Heidegger's thought and Japanese culture, particularly in Keiji
Nishitani's works and Hayao Miyazaki's animations. McDougall has also extended his
research to the philosophical significance of animism.
Rossa Ó Muireartaigh
Aichi Prefectural University
He is an associate professor at Aichi Prefectural University in Japan and has a PhD
from the European Graduate School. He is the author of the forthcoming The Zen
Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki (Bloomsburg). He has also completed various
Japanese to English translations of Japanese philosophy.
Alexandra MUSTATEA
Kanda University of International Studies, Mihama, Japan
Alexandra Mustatea is currently a Lecturer at Kanda University of International
Studies, where she teaches courses on Japanese literature, premodern history, andreligion. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest in 2011, and she has
been in Japan ever since. She specializes in Japanese intellectual history, focusing on
Tokugawa Confucianism and its relationship with modern Japan's nation-building
mechanisms, both in philosophical and socio-historical terms. Recently, she has been
exploring the issue of Confucianism in the ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō, but she has also
developed an interest in the way early-Meiji Japanologists have perceived and madesense of the connection between Confucianism and the various facets of ‘modernity’.
Ralf MÜLLER
University of Hildesheim
Ralf Müller is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy at the
University of Hildesheim (Germany). His research interests involve philosophy oflanguage and culture, particularly the intercultural philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. His
research also encompasses regional philosophies including pre-modern Buddhist andmodern Japanese philosophy. After completing a doctoral dissertation, “Dōgen’s

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language thinking: Systematic perspectives from history and the theory of symbols”
at Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) and postdoctoral studies at Kyoto
University (Japan), he has become the principal investigator for the research project“Translating Philosophy in/to Japan” („Übersetzung von Philosophie nach Japan in
kulturphilosophischer Perspektive“). For further details, see http:// www.ralfmueller.eu.
NGUYEN Duy Hung
Nguyen Duy Hung was born in Vietnam, is an environmental researcher with about
20 years of studying and working in the issue. He had started studying inenvironmental technology at Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) for
his Bachelor degree in Vietnam (2001–2006). After nearly 5 years working for HUST
right after graduation, he had come to the University of the Philippine-Diliman (UPD,
Philippines) to take a master course in Environmental Engineering (2010–2012).
And then, he had moved to Kyoto University (KU, Japan) to proceed his PhD. Course
in Global Environmental Studies in 3 years (2013–2016). And then he had come backand continuously worked for HUST until the year of 2018 when he had come back KU
to do his 1-year research fellow. Since 2019, he has returned Hanoi to work as anenvironmental researcher and consultant for a Japanese company located here.
Again, he has enrolled in a PhD. Course in Environmental Engineering at VNU
University of Science since 2020. His fields of expertise are environmental
monitoring and survey, water analysis Environmental Assessment of Sites andOrganization (EASO), Environmental impact assessment (EIA), environmental due
diligence.
ODA Kazuaki
Osaka University, Japan
Oda Kazuaki 織田和明 is a Specially Appointed Researcher in the Graduate School of
Human Sciences Center for Collaborative Future Center at Osaka University. He
received a PhD (Human Sciences) from Osaka University in 2021. His publications
include Kuki Shūzō and the Question of Origins.

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Jun’ichi ONO
University of Tokyo
Jun’ichi ONO, PhD from the University of Tokyo, is currently Assistant Professor in
Philosophy at Jichi Medical University, Japan. He is the Japanese translator of
Izutsu’s Language and Magic.
Yuliya OSADCHA FerreiraTaras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Graduated from the Kyiv National Linguistics University (2001); received PhD intheory of literature (2006) from the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature (theNational Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Currently works on the topic Mechanisms
and Strategies of Literary Canon Formation in the Early Meiji Literary Criticism.
Author of the monograph Ego-prose watakushi-shōsetsu in Japan: Theory, Genesis,
Modern Context (2013) and the full translation into Ukrainian of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s
The Essence of the Novel (2015).
Graham PARKES
A native of Glasgow, Graham Parkes has taught philosophy at universities in the
United States, Europe, and East Asia, and is now Professorial Research Fellow at the
University of Vienna. He has published widely in the fields of European, Chinese, andJapanese thought, with a current emphasis on environmental philosophy. His latest
book is How to Think about the Climate Crisis: A Philosophical Guide to Saner Waysof Living (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
Roman PASCA
Kyoto University, Japan
Roman Paşca is an assistant professor at the Department of Japanese Philosophy at
Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters. His research focuses on thedevelopment of the concept of “nature” in premodern Japanese philosophy. He is
also working on the relation between nature and self within the frame ofenvironmental ethics, and on “deep ecology” in Japanese philosophy.

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Raphaël PIERRÈS
University Paris 1
Raphaël Pierrès is a doctor of the University Paris 1, where he currently teaches
general philosophy and the reading of philosophical texts in foreign languages, inparticular in Japanese (on Nishida). During his doctorate, carried out under the
direction of André Charrak, he worked on the problem of interiority in the history ofmodern philosophy, and is now developing its contemporary implications in acomparative perspective. He is an associate member of the Laboratoire d'Histoire dela Philosophie Moderne of the University Paris 1 (HiPhiMo) and participates in theEuropean Network of Japanese Philosophy (ENOJP).
Luis PUJADAS Torres
Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain
Born at Palma de Mallorca in 1949. Graduated in Philosophy from the Universitat deBarcelona (UB). PhD obtained at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), publishedas La ascensión y caída de la teoría funcionalista de la mente. Adjunct Professor ofPhilosophy of Language at the UIB. Now retired, but still working on the relationshipbetween the Kyoto School, continental philosophy, and analytical philosophy. He has
contributed presentations to the first, second, fourth, and fifth ENOJP conferences.
Beáta PUSZTAI
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary
Beáta Pusztai is a PhD student at the Department of Japanese Studies at Eötvös
Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary (Doctoral School of Linguistics, Doctoral
Programme of Japanology). She is also a PhD student of Film, Media andContemporary Culture at Eötvös Loránd University and a guest lecturer at
Metropolitan University, Budapest, Hungary. Beáta is a long-time admirer anddevoted researcher of the animated medium. Her main field of research is anime, i.e.
the Japanese animated cartoon. Her primary academic concerns are the transculturaland intermedial aspects of the Japanese cartoon. She is interested in issues such as
the dynamics of intermedial adaptation in contemporary Japanese visual culture—
focusing on the strong interconnectedness among manga, anime, and live-action film,
or the cross-cultural adaptation between Japan and the West and the formation of82

national identity in the anime medium, and various other matters—mainly of visualexpression—pertaining to the Japanese cartoon as a peculiar type of graphic
animation.
Cláudia RAMOS
University of Lisbon, Portugal
Cláudia Ramos is a PhD student in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of
Lisbon (Portugal) and Master in Criticism, Curatorship and Theories of Art from thesame University. She is a researcher with a scholarship from the FCT and develops
work at the Research and Study Center in Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts,
University of Lisbon and in the Research Group of the Mystical and PhilosophicalLibrary Alois M. Haas of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She has curated
projects such as Labyrinth Studies or The Blue Blooms in the Shadow, working withmuseums and other cultural spaces.
SAITO Yoshifumi
医科大学を卒業後、生物学と哲学の連結を図り、90年代前半「伊藤源石」の筆名で『現代思想』に数篇を寄稿した。「分裂と融合」「微の分析」「免疫の意味ノロ
ジー」など。2001年冬、道元に遭遇し、『正法眼蔵』の標準解の確立を目指して研究を開始した。2017年夏、最初の成果を『跳訳道元–––仏説微塵経で読む正法眼蔵』として出版した。文化学院、新潟大学などで教えた。建築をこよなく愛す。
Naoki SAKAI
Cornelle University, USA
Naoki Sakai is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Asian Studies
Emeritus. He used to teach in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell
University. He has published in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual
history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories
of textuality. His publications include: The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of
Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism (2022); Translation and Subjectivity (1997);
Voices of the Past (1991); The Stillbirth of the Japanese as a Language and as an
Ethnos (1995); Nationalism of Hikikomori (2017). He edited a number of volumes
including Politics of Translation, special issue of Translation, co-edited with Sandro83

Mezzadra (2014); The end of area, special issue co-edited with Gavin Walker of
positions asia critique (2019). Naoki Sakai served as the founding editor for the
project of TRACES, a multilingual series in five languages.
SANADA Wataru
Osaka University, Japan
Sanada Wataru 眞田航 is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Human sciences,
Osaka University. The focus of his study is Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy of history. His
publications include 「西田幾多郎「世界の自己同一と連続」における「弁証法的世界」―行為における「非連続の連続」を手掛かりに―」 (2021).

Jordanco SEKULOVSKI
Temple University
Jordanco Sekulovski Ph.D. is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at
Temple University Japan; Associate Foreign Researcher at the East Asian ResearchCenter, Kyoto University; General editor of Studia Philosophica (Chisokudō
Publications); and organizer and coordinator of the TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series.
He received a PhD in Philosophy from Paris X University under the supervision ofFrançois Laruelle and is the author of Postures et pratiques de l’Homme: libéralisme,philosophie non-standard et pensée japonaise (2013). For more information please
visit http://jsekulovski.wix.com/nonphi as well as https://sites.temple.edu/
tujphilseries/ and follow us on Twitter at @SekulovskiJ & @TujPhil.
Kyle SHUTTLEWORTH
Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan
Kyle Shuttleworth is a JSPS International Research Fellow at Rikkyo University,where he is researching the interface between environmental ethics and Japanesephilosophy. His recent publications include the monograph The History and Ethicsof Authenticity with Bloomsbury (2020), the research article ‘Virtues and Ethics
within Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku’ in Asian Philosophy (2020), and the translationof Watsuji’s controversial essay ‘America’s National Character’ in Philosophy Eastand West (2021).

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Robert Ryan SMITH
University College Dublin, Ireland
Robert Ryan Smith is PhD candidate at University College Dublin.
Niklas SÖDERMAN
Tallinn University, Estonia – University of Helsinki, Finland
Niklas Söderman is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Tallinn University andpolitical science at University of Helsinki. His research interests include intellectual
history and comparative philosophy, particularly the Kyoto School philosophy, as
well as nationalism studies and narratology.
Raji C. STEINECKUniversity of Zurich, Switzerland
Raji C. Steineck is professor of japanology at University of Zurich (Switzerland),visiting professor at Yamaguchi University’s Research Institute for Time Studies, andpresident of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST). His main researchinterests are the critical theory of symbolic forms, Japanese intellectual history, andthe study of time. He has just finished the draft of a monograph on time in Dōgen andmedieval Zen Buddhism.
Ferenc TAKÓEötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary
Ferenc Takó studied Japanese Studies and Philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University(ELTE) in Budapest, where he currently lectures at the Department of JapaneseStudies. His research addresses the encounters between Asian and European cultures
focusing on Max Weber and Maruyama Masao. His papers have been published inleading Hungarian periodicals as well as in international journals and volumes suchas the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy and Frontiers of JapanesePhilosophy. He is editor of Journal of East Asian Cultures published by ELTE.

85

Universitá degli di Studi di Torino
Stefano Turina is an Italian Art Historian, graduated at the University of Turin,
where he is now conducting research as a PhD candidate on artistic exchanges
between Italy and Japan in the 1950s and the 1960s. His research has mainly focusedon the phenomena of Japonisme in Italy and beyond, on the histories of collecting
Japanese art in Italy, on the cultural exchanges between Italy and Japan and on
photography of the Yokohama school. He has presented papers and published essays,
among which two in the volume Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy(2020).
URAI Satoshi
tani University, Kyoto, Japan
Urai Satoshi 浦井聡 graduated fromtani University and completed studies at thegraduate school of Kyoto University in 2019. He received his Ph.D. from Kyoto
University with a dissertation entitled Tanabe Hajime’s Philosophy of Religion:
Transformation-and-Mediation Between Ethics and Religion (田辺元の宗教哲学―倫理と宗教の転換媒介―) in 2021. At present, he is an assistant professor oftani University.

His studies center on the Kyoto School and Pure Land Buddhism, especially Tanabe
Hajime, Takeuchi Yoshinori, and Shinran.
Fernando WIRTZ
University of Tübingen, Germany
Fernando Wirtz holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires anda PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tübingen. His postdoctoral research
project at the University of Tübingen centers on the philosophy of Miki Kiyoshi.
Besides Japanese philosophy, he is also interested in German idealism, interculturalphilosophy, and the philosophy of myth. He is an active board member of theGesellschaft für Interkulturelle Philosophie.

Ō

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Ō

Ō

Stefano TURINA

Tak-Lap YEUNG
Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Tak-Lap Yeung (born in Hong Kong) received his Ph.D. from the Free University of
Berlin, currently is working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Academia Sinica. He
specializes in continental philosophy and transcultural philosophical comparison. His
published works in English, German and Chinese concerning Immanuel Kant, Martin
Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Mou Zongsan, Nishida Kitaro, etc. can be found on
https://sinica.academia.edu/TaklapYeung.

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Public transportation
About the Airport transfer

Taxi and other shuttle services
After landing at Ferenc Liszt International Airport (BUD), you have several options to
get into the city centre. There are many cabs waiting for the arrivals, we suggest you
using Budapest Taxi, they have an app, their phone number is +36 1 777 7777.
In Hungary, the taxi has a fixed tariff of 300 HUF/km (0.95 EUR/km), in addition toa one-off basic fee of 700 HUF (2.2 EUR) and a waiting fee. A ride to the city centre
should typically cost around 7200 HUF (26 EUR), depending on the traffic. (Prices
include VAT. Prices indicated in EUR are subject to the prevailing HUF/EUR
exchange rate.)
Alternatively, you can also use miniBUD which is a minibus transfer company,
halfway between taxi and public transportation; available from here: https://www.minibud.hu/

88Public transport
Public transportation in Budapest is exceptionally great. The transportation routes
mesh the city as a spiderweb, making quick and easy to get from one point of the city
to another, usually with many alternatives. The public transport company is called
BKK, it has its own app “BKK FUTÁR” (available from here: https://futar.bkk.hu/)
which is useful to see active timetables and planning trips.
BKK has two bus lines between the city and the airport: these are the 100E airport
shuttle which is a direct line between the airport and the city centre, and the 200E,
which is a line between the airport and Kőbánya-Kispest railway station, which is also
the terminal station of the subway line M3.
100E requires an Airport Shuttle Bus Single Ticket which costs 900 HUF (2.6 EUR). It
terminates at Deák Ferenc tér at the city centre, but it also stops at Kálvin tér (connected
to subway line M3) and Astoria (connected to subway line M2) – both only a few
minutes walk from the conference venue. You can find more information here:
https://bkk.hu/en/travel-information/public-transport/airport-shuttle/

200E can be used with any ticket or pass valid on other BKK vehicles. It terminates atKőbánya-Kispest which is connected to the subway line M3. Please note that at the
moment, the subway line M3 is under reconstruction, therefore the subway fromKőbánya-Kispest is only available until the station Nagyvárad tér. From there, subway
replacement buses are available, under the name “M3 Metro replacement/Metrópótló”.
For latest information, you can visit the official website: http://m3felujitas.hu/en89For guests accommodated at the University dormitory
Dormitory at 1107 Budapest, Zágrábi utca 1.
(Note that the first four-digit number always indicates the postal/zip code in the caseof Hungarian addresses.)
From the Airport: we advise you to use bus 200E and from Kőbánya-Kispest takethe subway M3 until the station Ecseri út. This is the easiest, and cheapest option: asingle ticket is usable within 45 minutes (transfer from the bus to the subway
included), which means, you can use only one ticket to get to the dormitory from the
Airport. Just please make sure you keep your ticket with yourself until the end, sinceinspectors could check it anytime on the lines. From the Ecseri út metro station, thedormitory will take just a few minutes by foot.

90

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Accessing the conference venue

Main gate of the campus

From Astoria
If you are accommodated near to or at the square Astoria, the Campus of ELTE
Faculty of Humanities is just around the corner. You can simply walk on Múzeum
körút boulevard, towards Kálvin tér, the ELTE campus will be shortly on the left.
After you enter the main gate (see picture above), building “A” (A épület) will be thefirst building on the left, building “R” is in the back of the campus, you need to turnleft at the garden.

From Kálvin tér
If you are accommodated near to or at Kálvin tér, the campus is ca. 5 minutes from you.
You can use the tram line 47/49, take bus number 9, or the M3 Metro replacement bus

(all three will take only one stop from Kálvin tér to Astoria). You can also approach thecampus by foot, and we would advise the latter, because it takes less than 5 minutes,
with an opportunity to see the Hungarian National Museum, and to explore
restaurants, cafés and bookshops on the way. By walking you just simple have to walkon Múzeum körút boulevard, towards Astoria, the campus will be on the right.

From the Zágrábi utca dormitory
The easiest and fastest way to approach the ELTE campus from the dormitory, is totake the subway M3 from Ecseri út station. Please note that due to the reconstruction,
the subway terminates at Nagyvárad tér station. From there you can transfer to the
M3 Metro replacement bus. The replacement bus will stop at Astoria, just near at thecampus. From there, it will be the same as if you would approach the campus from
Astoria (see above).

Local safety measures• Please note that it is mandatory to wear a face mask covering the nose and themouth everywhere in the buildings of the University.
• Please pay attention to physical distancing during the sessions as well as during the
breaks.
• Hand sanitizers will be placed in each room, but please pay special attention topersonal hygenie rules.
• Please be aware that it is not allowed to eat or drink at the campus of the faculty.
You will be informed about the arrangements of the coffee breaks locally.
• Please be aware that you need a valid vaccination certificate to attend an event at
the University.