On the recommendation of A. W. Williamson, in July 1873, Divers left for Japan. This country had then only begun to remodel, in particular by introducing Western sciences and institutions. Divers was invited to teach general and applied chemistry at the Imperial College of Engineering at Toranomon, Tokyo. He eventually became the Principal of the College in 1882. In 1886 the college was incorporated with the Tokyo Imperial University, where Divers held the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry until his return to England in 1899. During his first seven or eight years in Japan due to administrative and teaching duties, as well as numerous requests from the Department of Public Works to analyse samples of various minerals and noble metals. As a result, his first papers after leaving England were on Japanese minerals, and these were communicated to the meetings of the British Association held in York in 1881. One of these papers was on the occurrence of selenium and tellurium in Japanese sulphur obtained from lead-chamber deposits of the Osaka sulphuric acid work. Using this material he later discovered tellurium sulfoxide and developed a new method for the quantitative separation of tellurium from selenium. These and other papers on tellurium and selenium were published in the "Journal of the Chemical Society" during 1883–1885. There he published more than 20 other paper within a short period of 1884–1885, mostly on the chemistry of nitrogen and sulphur compounds.