Hatano was born in
Matsumoto in
Nagano Prefecture, and educated at
Tokyo Imperial University, from which he graduated in 1899. He was very influential in stimulating the study in Japan of Western philosophy and religion, both through his teaching (he was the first to teach the history of Western philosophy at Tokyo Semmon Gakko, now
Waseda University), and through his early writings. These included
An Outline of the History of Western Philosophy (1897),
The Origins of Christianity (1909), and
A Study of Spinoza (1904–1905). The last of these was originally written in
German and only translated into
Japanese in 1910. It was reprinted after WW2. He opposed a
positivist approach to religion, arguing that though
rationality underpinned religious beliefs, it depended upon an autonomous form of
experience to discover at least partial truth. He died in
Tokyo at the age of seventy-three. ==Bibliography==