 Even before his travels in Europe (1927–28), Watsuji was convinced that one’s environment was central in shaping persons and cultures. In Guzo Saiku (Revival of Idols), published in 1918, he had concluded that “all inquiries into the culture of Japan must in their final reduction go back to the study of her nature” (Furukawa 1961, 214). From about 1918 on, Watsuji’s focus became the articulation of what it is that constitutes the Japanese spirit. Ancient Japanese Culture, which he wrote in 1920, is an attempt to revitalize Japan’s oldest Chronicles (the Kojiki and Nihongi) using modern literary techniques as well as newly available archaeological evidence. He treated these collections of ancient stories, legends, poems, songs, and myths as literature, rather than as sacred scripture. Quoting from the Kojiki the imaginative story of creation, he then glosses this rich account: “‘When the land was still young and as a piece of floating grease, drifting about as does a jellyfish, there came into existence a god, issuing from what grew up like a reed-bud…’ [is] a superb…image of a piece of grease floating about without definite form like a thin, muddy substance far thicker than water, yet not solid, and of the image of a soft jellyfish with a formless form drifting on the water, and of the image of exuberant life of a reed-bud sprouting powerfully out of the muddy water of a swampy marsh. There is no other description that I know of that so graphically depicts the state of the world before creation” (Furukawa 1961, 221–22). It is a concrete and graphic depiction of the formlessness out of which all things arose, and is perhaps an early attempt at talk of nothingness, a central idea of the Kyoto School, and later on for Watsuji as well. 