Schutz in Japan: A brief history

Abstract

Alfred Schutz had a Japanese fellow scholar, Tomoo Otaka, to whom he expressed his deep gratitude in his book, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Sch?tz, 1932: 10).1 Though several Japanese philosophers had known German phenomenologists (E. Husserl, M. Heidegger and others) in the 1920-30s, it is very few who referred to Schutz's thought extensively in Japanese social scientists' circle of that time except for Otaka. This paper deals with a brief bibliographical history of the reception of Schutz's phenomenology in Japan in the period after the end of World War II.