 Watsuji enrolled in the graduate school of Tokyo Imperial University in 1912, the same year that he completed his undergraduate studies. His studies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in 1912, and of Kierkegaard in 1915 provide ample evidence of his interest in and competence in Western philosophy. At the same time, he continued to study the Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Keats, being torn between his literary and philosophical interests. In any case, perhaps because his literary attempts were “complete failures,” he decided to give “up literary creation and devoted all his exertions to the writing of critical essays and philosophical treatises” (Furukawa 1961, 218). It was not long before he was in demand as a teacher, first as a lecturer at Tōyō University in 1920, an instructor at Hōsei University in 1922, an instructor at Keiō University in 1922–23, and at the Tsuda Eigaku-juku from 1922–24 (Dilworth et al 1998, 221). But his real break came in 1925, when Nishida Kitarō and Hatano Seiichi offered him the position of lecturer in the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Literature at Kyoto Imperial University, where he was to take on the responsibility for the courses in ethics. This put him at the center of the developing Kyoto School philosophy. As was the custom at the time with promising young scholars, he was sent to Germany in 1927 on a three-year scholarship. His reflections on that sojourn in Europe became the substance of his highly successful book, Fūdo, which has been translated into English as Climate and Culture. In fact, Watsuji spent only fourteen months in Europe, being forced to return to Japan in the summer of 1928 because of the death of his father. In 1929, he also took on a part-time position at Ryûkoku University, and in 1931, he became a professor at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1934, he was appointed professor in the Faculty of Literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and he continued to hold this important post until his retirement in 1949. Perhaps part of the reason that he is so often viewed as someone on the periphery of the Kyoto School philosophic tradition has to do with his work in Tokyo, geographically removed from the center of discussion and dialogue in Kyoto. 