sentences:  After spending a year in Switzerland, they were unable to return to Peking as they had planned, since the Chinese universities had by that time all been closed.Billeter and Wen spent the year 1967-1968 in Paris and then departed for Japan, where Billeter was admitted as a Junior Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies 人文科學研究所 at Kyoto University (1968-1970), studying under the guidance of Shimada Kenji 島田虔次.At Kyoto he began what would become his PhD dissertation on Li Zhi 李贄 (1527-1602), a heterodox thinker from the Late Ming period.