ABSTRACT
There are two fine studies of the history of Kierkegaard's reception in Japan. Kierkegaard Made in Japan by Finn Hauberg Mortensen is an exhaustive study of this kind and presents many details of this history. The History of Kierkegaard's Reception in Japan by Kinya Masugata is an essay which gives a general view of the history of the reception. According to Masugata, the name of Kierkegaard was already known in Japan in the second half of the 1880s. The Kierkegaard Society in Tokyo was first established in 1950. The Kierkegaard Society in Kyoto was first established by Masaru Otani and Kagami Hashimoto in 1937. The Søren Kierkegaard Research Center was first established by Jun Hashimoto in 1998. There are also the Japanese Society of Existential Thought, the Japanese Association for Religious Studies, and The Study Group of the History of Ideas in Northern Europe, where papers about Kierkegaard are often read.
