Yukiko Kuwayama is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo.
After graduating from Sophia University (Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Letters), she received her M. A. in translation (German-Japanese) from the Graduate School of Asian Studies (Department of Japanese Studies), University of Bonn, and her degree of Dr. phil. from the Department of Philosophy, University of Hildesheim. After working for three years as a lecturer at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, she returned to Tokyo in July 2023. As a part-time lecturer at the Faculty of Japan Studies and the Graduate School of Global Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies she lectured on the history of neologisms in modern Japan, on a transcultural reflection of the interaffectivity (through a Japanese notion kūki) and on Japanese feminisms. She currently lectures "academic writing" in Musashino University.
Yukiko specializes in phenomenology of feelings, perception, sensation, and emotion (Merleau-Ponty, Hermann Schmitz). Inspired by later wittgensteinian understanding of language, she analyzed the word field of ki (気) from Japanese contemporary language via her linguistic phenomenology (conceptualized through her reading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and J. L. Austin's "linguistic phenomenology") in her doctoral thesis. For the relevance of the question on language in Zen Buddhistic philosophies, she researches also on Japanese philosophy starting from Nishida Kitarō's to Ueda Shizuteru's philosophy. She is a co-responsible and co-moderator of the Groupe d'étude de philosophie japonaise at the Institut français de recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est (Inalco/Université de Paris/CNRS) and the Japanese Philosophy Network (U-Tokyo).