He came into contact with Zen Buddhism through his father, a businessman who was also a calligrapher and lay Zen practitioner. He graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Keio University in Tokyo, in which Cultural Institute Linguistic Studies and later became professor. Later, he taught teaching at Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran and at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Knowledgeable about thirty languages​​-including Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Russian and Greek, in 1958 completed the first translation of the Koran from Arabic into Japanese. Although he focused his research on Islam, he also became interested in other schools of oriental wisdom as the Hindu Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism and Taoism. He is the author, among other works, Sufism and Taoism. A comparative study of key philosophical concepts (1983,.. Trad cast, 1997), Language and Magic. Studies in the Magical Function of Speech (1956), Ethicon-Religious Concepts in the Quran (1966), God and Man in the Koran (1980), Creation and the Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy (1994) and by Toyo Izutsu, The Theory of Beauty in the Classic Aesthetics of Japan (1981).