 The Kyoto School, of which Nishida was the pioneering founder, is so identified because of its common focus: Nishida’s important work, East/West comparative philosophy, and an on-going attempt to give expression to Japanese ideas and concepts by means of the clarity afforded by Western philosophical tools and techniques. Whereas the general emphasis of the Kyoto School is on epistemology, metaphysics and logic, Watsuji’s primary focus came to be ethics, although his earlier studies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard ranged far beyond the ethical. And while his impressive output (an original nineteen volume collected works has been expanded by Yuasa Yasuo (1925–2005), his former student who became one of Japan’s leading contemporary philosophers, to twenty-seven volumes) includes wide-ranging studies in the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy, his focus was not on Nishida and Tanabe, but on reconstructing the origins of Japanese culture more or less from the ground up. Hence, while many of his ideas, e.g. the centrality of the concept of ‘nothingness’ or ‘emptiness,’ and dialectical contradiction, show the influence of the Kyoto School thinkers, his own creative approach led him to formulate them differently, and to apply them to ethical, political, and cultural issues. Nevertheless, given the overlap of concepts, it would be a mistake to exclude him from some sort of honorary membership in the Kyoto School (see the entry on the  Kyoto School).  And given that there never was an actual ‘school’ at all, it is enough to say that Watsuji was an active force in Japanese philosophy in the twentieth century, along with Nishida, Tanabe, and later on, Nishitani. 