R eview s 197 Ueda Shizuteru 上田閑照，Nishida Kitaro: Ningen no shogai to iu koto

Ueda shizuteru has devoted his years after retiring from teaching at Kyoto University some eight years ago to making the thought of Nishida better known in Japan, editing material from Nishida’s Zenshu for reissue, writing commentaries, and publishing his own interpretations of Nishida’s key ideas. These efforts, as overdue as they are in Japan, are also welcomed by the philosophical community outside of Japan, even though the barrier of the language locks the majority of readers out. Interest in the West in the thought of Nishida and disciples (fanned in part by translations of Nishida, Tanabe, Takeuchi, and Nishitani that have appeared over the past fifteen years) has led many a young scholar and graduate student to probe deeper into the state of philosophy in Japan today, and in some cases to undertake the training to read the texts in the original — only to discover that the influence of Nishida’s ideas on the contemporary intellectual scene in Japan is considered minimal, if not outright passe. Persisting in their conviction of the value of these thinkers for world philosophy and refusing to be swayed b