The first, and perhaps the most interesting, question regarding Japanese philosophy is whether there is such a thing. Or, to be more precise, whether there was any Japanese philosophy before Nishida Kitarō's 1911 An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyō). Some Japanese scholars today, such as Sakamoto Hyakudai, deny that there has ever been any Japanese philosophy. Others, like Nakamura Yōjirō, argue that there was none before Nishida. This is somewhat surprising in that since 1920 much of the same literature originating from China has been called Chinese philosophy by the Chinese, while a little later a Korean version was labeled Korean philosophy by the Koreans.

To understand why the Japanese have not followed suit, we need to examine how the notion of "philosophy," as it is known in the West, first took shape in the Japanese intellectual world during the Meiji period (1868–1911). At that...