Kuki Shuzo was a prominent Japanese academic, philosopher and university professor.
Background
Kuki Shuzo was the fourth child of Baron Kuki Ryuichi a high bureaucrat in the Meiji Ministry for Culture and Education (Monbushō). Since it appears that Kuki's mother, Hatsu, was already pregnant when she fell in love with Okakura Kakuzo, otherwise known as Okakura Tenshin, a protege of her husband's (a notable patron of the arts), the rumour that Okakura was Kuki's father would appear to be groundless. It is true, however, that Shuzo as a child, after his mother had separated and then divorced his father, thought of Okakura, who often visited, as his real father, and later certainly hailed him as his spiritual father.
Education
At age 23 in 1911, Kuki Shuzo converted to Catholicism and he was baptized in Tokyo as Franciscus Assisiensis Kuki Shuzo.
A graduate in philosophy of Tokyo Imperial University (1912), Kuki Shuzo spent eight years in Europe to polish his knowledge of languages and deepen his already significant studies of contemporary Western thought and became a pupil of the famous German philosopher Dr. Rapheal von Koeber.
At the University of Heidelberg, he studied under the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, and he engaged Eugen Herrigel as a tutor.
At the University of Paris, he was impressed by the work of Henri Bergson, whom he came to know personally and he engaged the young Jean-Paul Sartre as a French tutor.
It is little known outside Japan that Kuki Shuzo influenced Jean-Paul Sartre to develop an interest in Heidegger's philosophy.
At the University of Freiburg, Kuki Shuzo studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl and he first met Martin Heidegger in Husserl's home.
He moved to the University of Marburg for Heidegger's lectures on phenomenological interpretation of Kant, and for Heidegger's seminar "Schelling's Essay on the Essence of Human Freedom."
Career
Artistically inclined, Kuki Shuzo matured into a philosopher of deep thought. Shortly after Kuki's return to Japan, he wrote and published his masterpiece, "The Structure of Iki" (1930). In this work he undertakes to make a phenomenological analysis of iki, a variety of chic culture current among the fashionable set in Edo in the Tokugawa period, and asserted that it constituted one of the essential values of Japanese culture.
Kuki Shuzo took up a teaching post at Kyoto University, then a prominent center for conservative cultural values and thinking.
Kuki Shuzo became an Associate Professor in 1933 and in that same year, he published the first book length study of Martin Heidegger to appear in Japanese.
At the University of Kyoto, Kuki was elevated to Professor of Philosophy in March 1934. The next year, he published "The Problem of Contingency", also known as "The Problem of the Accidental". This work was developed from his personal experiences in Europe and the influences of Heidegger. As a single Japanese man within an encompassing "white" or non-Japanese society, he considered the extent to which he became a being who lacked necessity. His Kyoto University lectures on Heidegger, Man and Existence, were published in 1939.