Kyoto

Japan's ancient imperial capital, dense with temples and Zen practice: Nishida Kitaro taught at Kyoto Imperial University from 1910, giving his name to the philosophical movement his students built around him.

Kyoto had been the imperial capital for a thousand years and kept its temples when the government moved to Tokyo, which left it a city of Zen monasteries with a new imperial university among them. Nishida taught there from 1910. He practised zazen for years and worked out an account of pure experience, prior to any split between subject and object, that tried to hold Buddhist practice and German idealism in one conversation. The canal path where he walked while thinking now carries his name.