 Japanese philosophers have historically interacted intensively with a multitude of philosophies outside their native boundaries—most prominently Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Western. So they have benefited from a rich trove of ideas and theories on which to draw in developing their own distinctive philosophical perspectives. As a result Japanese philosophers have always been acutely attuned to the intimate relations among culture, ways of thinking, and philosophical world views. An island chain twice as distant from its continental neighbors as Britain is to its own, Japan escaped successful foreign invasion until 1945. Accordingly, it largely negotiated its own cultural, including philosophical, development without an alien power forcibly imposing on the archipelago its own religious world view or philosophical theories. The early twentieth-century academic philosophers in Japan, for example, were so well educated in the world’s texts and theories, many in the original languages, that they were among the most internationally informed philosophers of their time.