Abstract
After two decades of teaching and research at the Collège de France, Jean-Noël Robert enthusiastically retraces his career devoted to Japanese philology. Thanks to this field of study, he has been able to shed light on the Sino-Japanese dialectic sealed by the Buddhist doctrine which, from the early Middle Ages to the modern era, has breathed its dynamism into the civilization of the Rising Sun. This dialectic was reflected in the fundamental contribution of Chinese written culture in both literary and religious spheres, which Japan was able to avoid completely taking over by instituting, from the earliest texts, the Japanese language as the language of the indigenous gods, and therefore irreducible to the continental contribution. Looking beyond the Sino-Japanese example, the author proposes to extend his "hieroglossic" approach to other cultural and linguistic areas, in order to better understand our world today.
