He joined the mountaineering club for students and made friends with Takeo Kuwabara, Eizaburo Nishibori, etc.

[2] Imanishi and Kani Tokichi (可児 藤吉)[3] were interested in the ecological difference between insects that depend on the parts of a river.

[4] He joined as a member of the Mongolian expedition of Kyoto Imperial University in the same year, where he demonstrated the skill of mountaineering and survival from his high school days.

[8]) He was promoted to professor of the Kyoto University Research Centre for the Cultural Sciences in 1959.

Imanishi and his students did foundational research on the behavior and social life of semi-wild horses[11] and, later, macaques,[12][13][14][15] identifying individuals and making detailed observations on them over generations.

[18] Imanishi introduced the Japanese term kaluchua,[19] which was later translated by Masao Kawai and others to refer to socially learned behaviors as "pre-culture".

[24] He emphasized the dynamics of animal societies and considered Western lab studies "static.

[1]: 313 Imanishi's concept of species society is central to his views of the interconnectedness of things in nature.