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Nitobe Inazō (新渡戸 稲造, September 1, 1862 – October 15, 1933) was a Japanese educator, diplomat, agronomist and political scientist. He studied at Sapporo Agricultural College under the influence of its first president William S. Clark and later went to the United States to study agricultural policy. After returning to Japan, he served as a professor at Sapporo Agricultural College, Kyoto Imperial University, and Tokyo Imperial University, and the deputy secretary general of the League of Nations. He also devoted himself to women's education, helping to found the Tsuda Eigaku Juku and serving as the first president of Tokyo Woman's Christian University and president of the Tokyo Women's College of Economics. Early life Nitobe was born in Morioka, Mutsu Province (present-day Iwate Prefecture). His father Nitobe Jūjirō was a samurai and retainer to the local daimyō of the Nanbu clan. His grandfather was Nitobe Tsutō and his great-grandfather was Nitobe Denzō (Koretami). One of his cousins was Nitobe Inao. His infant name was Inanosuke. Nitobe left Morioka for Tokyo in 1871 to become the heir to his uncle, Ōta Tokitoshi, and adopted the name Ōta Inazō. He later reverted to Nitobe when his older brother Nitobe Shichirō died. Educational career Nitobe was in the second class of the Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University). He was converted to Christianity under the strong legacy left by William S. Clark, the first Vice-Principal of the College, who had taught in Sapporo for eight months before Nitobe's class arrived in the second year after the opening of the college and so they never personally crossed paths. Nitobe's classmates who converted to Christianity at the same time included Uchimura Kanzō. Nitobe and his friends were baptized by an American Methodist Episcopal missionary Bishop M. C. Harris. Nitobe's decision to study agriculture was caused by the hope expressed by Emperor Meiji that the Nitobe family would continue to advance the field of agricultural development (Nitobe's father had developed former wasteland in the north of the Nambu domain near present-day Towada, now part of Aomori Prefecture, into productive farmland). In 1883, Nitobe entered Tokyo Imperial University for further studies in English literature and in economics. Disappointed by the level of research in Tokyo, he quit the university and sought study opportunities in the United States. In 1884, Nitobe traveled to the United States where he stayed for three years, and studied economics and political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In Baltimore, he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). It was through a Quaker community in Philadelphia that he met Mary Patterson Elkinton, whom he eventually married. Their only child died in infancy, but they adopted Nitobe's nephew, Yoshio, and a female relative Kotoko. He also influenced the establishment of the Friends School in Tokyo. At Johns Hopkins, he participated in the Seminary of History and Politics, a group of graduate students and faculty in history, political science and economics. After his departure from Hopkins in 1887, a colleague read a paper written by Nitobe in 1888, "The Japanese in America,", in which he studied the first official missions sent from Japan to the United States, beginning in 1860. He later returned to Hopkins in December 1890, when he presented a paper on "Travel and Study in Germany." Also in 1890, Johns Hopkins presented Nitobe with an honorary bachelor's degree in recognition of his accomplishments despite not earning a PhD from Hopkins. While at Johns Hopkins, he was granted an assistant professorship at his alma mater, the Sapporo Agricultural College, but was ordered first to obtain a doctorate in agricultural economics in Germany. He completed his degree after three years in Halle University and returned briefly to the United States to marry Mary Elkinton in Philadelphia before he assumed his teaching position in Sapporo in 1891. When he returned to Japan, he had published books in English and in German and had received the first of his five doctorate degrees. Nitobe continued his teaching tenure at Sapporo until 1897 as he took leave from the college. He spent three years writing first in Japan and later in California. One of the books that he wrote during that period was Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Meiji bureaucrat and educator In 1901, Nitobe was appointed technical advisor to the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan, where he headed the Sugar Bureau. Nitobe was appointed a full professor of law at the Kyoto Imperial University in 1904 and lectured on colonial studies. He became the Headmaster of the First Higher School (then the preparatory division for the Tokyo Imperial University) in 1906 and continued this position until he accepted the full-time professorship at the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University in 1913. He taught agricultural economics and colonial studies and emphasized humanitarian aspect of colonial development and critical assessment of colonialism, and was cross-appointed the founding president of Tokyo Woman's Christian University (Tokyo Joshi Dai). His students at Tokyo Imperial University included Tadao Yanaihara, Shigeru Nanbara, Yasaka Takagi, and Tamon Maeda. (Yanaihara later continued Nitobe's chair in colonial studies at Tokyo University; but Yanaihara's pacifist views and emphasis on indigenous self-determination, which he partly inherited from Nitobe, came into a full conflict with Japan's wartime government during World War II, with the result that Yanaihara was barred from teaching until after the war). Nitobe and Hamilton Wright Mabie in 1911 were the first exchange professors between Japan and the United States under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. After World War I, Nitobe joined other international and reform-minded Japanese in organizing the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Diplomat and statesman When the League of Nations was established in 1920, Nitobe became one of the Under-Secretaries General of the League, and moved to Geneva, Switzerland. He became the director of the International Bureaux Section, in charge of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (which later became UNESCO under the United Nations' mandate). His legacy in this period includes the settlement of territorial dispute between Sweden and Finland over Swedish-speaking Åland. In its resolution, the Islands remained under the Finnish control, but adopted complete disarmament (i.e., no military presence on the islands and its citizens are exempt from military service) and granted autonomy, averting a possible armed conflict (See also Åland crisis). In August 1921, Nitobe took part in the 13th World Congress of Esperanto in Prague, as the official delegate of the League of Nations. His report to the General Assembly of the League was the first objective report on.... Discover the Inazo Nitobe popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Inazo Nitobe books.