  Nishida was born on May 19, 1870 in the village of Unoke on the Sea of Japan just north of the city of Kanazawa. His birthplace, later incorporated into the town of Kahoku, is the site today of archives and a monumental museum, perhaps the world’s largest architectural structure dedicated to a single philosopher. Nishida grew up in the early years of the Meiji era (1868–1912), when Japan had reopened to the world after two and a half centuries of relative isolation and was undergoing a revolutionary Europeanization of its political, educational and cultural institutions. As it touched Nishida’s early years, this “modernization” came in the form of both a rigid, often oppressive school atmosphere that demanded obeisance to the emperor, and a liberating exposure to the progressive ideas of the Japanese “Enlightenment” that had introduced Western philosophy to Japan. In high school in Kanazawa he studied Chinese Confucian, Neo-Confucian and Daoist classics, learned to read English and German, excelled in mathematics, and attempted briefly to penetrate works of Hegel and Kant. He formed a life-long friendship with fellow student D.T. Suzuki, and with him dropped out of high school in 1890. Admitted into Tokyo Imperial University as a “limited status” student the following year, Nishida studied Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer under the first philosophy professors in Japan. After graduating in 1894 with a thesis on Hume’s theory of causation, he married and held teaching positions at several provincial high schools and universities. During the next decade, despite the demands of family life and teaching German among other subjects, he published a few philosophical essays, but was more intent on formal meditation practice under Zen masters in Kyoto. He began composing what later appeared as An Inquiry into the Good in 1905 and on the basis of that work secured a position at Kyoto Imperial University in 1910, becoming Professor of Philosophy there in 1914.