Nicolas Bernard Fiévé is a French historian of Japanese Architecture; he was born in Paris in 1959 and is the son of the cinema decorator, Bernard Fiévé. In 1993, he became a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and in 1996 he joined the Collège de France’s Japanese Civilization research team. In 2007, he was elected Professor at the Historical and Philological Sciences Department at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), where he teaches the history of pre-modern (16th to 19th centuries) Japanese urbanism, architecture and gardens. He is a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan. Nicolas Fiévé is currently Director of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), or French School of Asian Studies. Biography After graduating from secondary school in literary studies, Nicolas Fiévé was admitted to the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-La Villette. In 1984, shortly after obtaining his DPLG degree and graduating as an architect, he left for Japan with a scholarship from the Japanese government, and he joined the research laboratory in Architectural Theory at the University of Kyoto led by Professor Katō Kunio 加藤邦夫, an architect and phenomenologist as well as a disciple of the modernist Masuda Tomoya 増田友也 (1914-1981) whom he had recently succeeded at the University of Kyōto and who introduced Anthropology of Architecture to Japan. When Nicolas Fiévé joined his research group, Katō Kunio was lecturing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception while finishing a Japanese translation of Christian Noberg-Schulz's Roots of Modern Architecture and beginning that of Genius Loci. Under the tutelage of this remarkable master, Nicolas Fiévé undertook to study the architecture of medieval Japanese tea houses from a phenomenological perspective and began his research on medieval Japanese architecture and space. While in Japan, Nicolas Fiévé took an avid interest in the study of Japanese and its different scripts, and upon his return to France in 1986, he decided to further his knowledge of Classical Japanese. The following year, having obtained his undergraduate degree in Japanese, he began a master's degree in Classical Japanese at the Université Paris VII where he turned out to be the only student of his class. In addition to lectures on Classical Japanese dispensed by Jacqueline Pigeot (Université Paris VII), his thesis supervisor, he also attended Jean-Noël Robert’s (EPHE) and Francine Hérail’s (EPHE) lectures in Sino-Japanese Studies. Throughout this period he earned a living working at the Paris Office of