Inazo Nitobe

Inazo Nitobe (1862–1933) was a Japanese educator, diplomat and writer. Born into a samurai family in Morioka, he studied at the Sapporo Agricultural College, where he became a Christian, and then at Johns Hopkins and in Germany, and he married an American Quaker. He taught at Sapporo, Kyoto and Tokyo, headed the First Higher School and was the first president of Tokyo Woman's Christian University. Bushido, the Soul of Japan (1900), written in English, explained the samurai ethic to the West and was widely translated. From 1920 to 1926 he served as an under-secretary general of the League of Nations in Geneva. His portrait appeared on the Japanese 5,000-yen note.