Nishiwaki became interested in poetry while a student at Keio University, and contributed verses to the boy's magazine
Shonen Sekai. He also began to write poetry in
English. Nishiwaki expressed distaste for the
romanticism and subjective modes which dominated modern Japanese poetry. After graduation, in April 1917, he was hired by
The Japan Times newspaper, but left over a management dispute a few months later. He then found a position at the
Bank of Japan in March 1918, but was forced to resign due to poor health. Through the introduction of a friend, he was then accepted at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 1919. Nishiwaki then accepted a teaching post at Keiō University in April 1920, while continuing to contribute English verses to various journals, and editing poetry magazines on the side. In 1922, Nishiwaki decided that he wanted to study in England, and took the steamer
Kitano Maru from
Kobe in 1922. However, he arrived too late to be admitted to a university, and spent a year in
London at ease, meeting with authors including
John Collier and
Sherard Vines. He lived at the Hotel Rowland in
Kensington in 1923, and visited
Scotland in July. He was finally admitted to
New College,
Oxford in May 1924, enrolling in the honors course, and travelling to France and Switzerland in his free time. While at Oxford, over the next three years he was introduced to
modernist literature and the works of
James Joyce,
Ezra Pound, and
T. S. Eliot. He was also fascinated by
Charles Baudelaire and developments in the French
surrealism, and even attempted to compose some works in
French. His first volume of poetry,
Spectrum (1925), was written in English and published in
London at his own expense. While in England, Nishiwaki married Marjorie Biddle in 1924, but divorced her in 1932. He remarried to Saeko Kuwayama in 1932, by whom he had a son. Returning to Japan in November 1925, Nishiwaki accepted a position as a professor at Keiō University's Faculty of Letters and taught the history of
English Literature as well as a range of courses in
linguistics. A later exhibition catalogue treats student circles around Nishiwaki as one early point of origin for
Surrealism in Japan and identifies
Shūzō Takiguchi as one such student. Alongside his academic work, he kept writing on the side, and was especially inspired by the poetry of
Hagiwara Sakutarō, whom he lauded as one of the great poets of the
Taishō period. Nishiwaki experimented with new techniques, and began writing poetry in Japanese for the first time. In 1927, he published Japan's first
surrealist poetry magazine,
Fukuiku Taru Kafu Yo. The next year, along with collaborators such as
Anzai Fuyue, he brought out another new magazine
Shi to Shiron ("Poetry and Poetic Theory") and became a leader of the new contemporary poetry movement. In 1933, he published
Ambarvalia, a collection which gathered together the previous experiments and efforts in writing poetry in Japanese; however, Nishiwaki suddenly stopped publishing after the outbreak of the
Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and announced that he would concentrate on research of the classics and ancient literature. He was one of the 14 poets arrested on charges of
sedition, after the introduction of the
National Mobilization Law as government censors chose to interpret some of his surrealistic poems in a critical manner. During
World War II, he evacuated to
Chiba Prefecture with his library of over 3000 volumes, and later to back to his hometown of Ojiya in Niigata. ==Later literary career==