ABE Jiro (1883-1959) is famous for his philosophical essay titled (Diary of Santaro) (1914-18), and he is regarded as a representative of (Culturalism) of the Taisyo era in Japan. As was often the case with young intelligentsia of that period, he was interested in both Western and Eastern cultures and at the same time sincerely sought the way of living as a Japanese. He swayed between diversity of cultures and identity of his own personality. Abe wrote an (Aesthetics) in 1917, which is a selected and abridged translation of the empathic aesthetics of Theodor Lipps (1851-1914). Lipps developed his philosophy on the basis of the psychological principle of 'empathy'. Abe reconstructed the essence of Lipps' aesthetics mainly from the following books by him: Asthetik, Die ethischen Grundfragen, Leitfaden der Psychologic. Abe highly respected the personality of Lipps; later he published a book titled (Personalism) (1922), which is based on the ethics of Lipps and applies it to contemporary political problems. Despite his extensive and profound knowledge of aesthetics, Abe could not complete his own book on aesthetics. For, I think, empathic aesthetics is not a relative theory which can be replaced by another, but a kind of world view based on Personalism which regards a mere object as an irreplaceable personality. He called his standpoint in aesthetics 'aesthetics from inward', which includes aesthetic experience, expression, interpretation and moreover cultural philosophy, but empathy still remains in the center of his hypothetical aesthetics.
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