The French essayist and writer Maurice Pinguet (1929-1991) graduated to the twenty years of the Normal School Superior of Paris. He was professor of Classical Literature, professor of the Sorbona, friend of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. In the mid-fifties, a scholarship takes him to Japan, where he would live for more than twenty years. In that country he began working at the University of Tokyo and in 1963 he was appointed director of the Franco-Japanese Institute of Tokyo. In 1966 invites to Japan to Roland Barthes, that dedicates to him the Empire of the signs, essay written like fruit of that trip.