REVIEWS Himi Kiyoshi 氷見潔，Tanabe tetsugaku kenkyu: Shukydtetsugaku no kanten

remains largely unexplored territory in Japan. Immediately after the war his philosophy came under suspicion from a number of quarters — and for a brief period after ms death in 1962, some efforts were made to recapitulate ms life achievement. Other than that, Japanese academia has by and large turned a deaf ear to Tanabe’s ideas. If there is any interest at all, it seems to be concentrated in the circles of those who studied directly under him. In recent years, however, Tanabe has attracted the attention of scholars from the West _ principally Japanologists and philosophers of religion—as a representative of Japan’s modern intellectual tradition ranking with the thought of Nishida and Nishitani Keiji. In 1984 the German theologian Johannes Laube published the results of research conducted in Japan on Tanabe; 198b saw the English translation of one of Tanabe’s major works, Philosophy as Metanoetics, under the direction of Takeucm Yosmnori; and in 1989 an international symposium was organized in the United States to dis cuss that book, the results of which were published the following year (Unno and H eisig 1 9 9 0).1 hough the future is hard to predict, there is good reason to suppose that the interest will be sustained in the years to come as part of the broader interest in modern Japan. fhe waves of enthusiasm shown abroad have yet to wash back to the shores of Japan. To the best of my knowledge, until the appearance of Himi Kiyoshi’s Studies in the Thought of Tanabe in 1990，only one book-length work on Tanabe had been published m Japanese since his death, and that was written by Ienaga Saburo nearly twenty years ago (1974). As late as 1991 the editors of a special volume to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Tanabe’s birth expressed the hope in their preface that the book “may in some small measure attract attention among Japan’s younger generation of philosophers to the imposing system of thought that Tanabe has left us