Kan'ichi Asakawa
- In this Japanese name, the family name is Asakawa.
Kan'ichi Asakawa (朝河 貫一 Asakawa Kan'ichi, December 20, 1873 – August 10, 1948)[1] was a Japanese academic, author, historian, librarian, curator and peace advocate.
Contents
Early life
He was born in Nihonmatsu, Japan. He studied at Waseda University in Tokyo.
In 1899, he earned a bachelor's degree (B.A.) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.[2] He continued his studies at Yale University. He earned a doctor's degree (Ph.D.) in 1902.[3]
Career
He lectured at Dartmouth in 1902. In 1906-1907, he was a professor at Waseda.
In 1907, Asakawa was appointed curator of the East Asian Collection at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library.[3]
Asakawa was an instructor at Yale from 1907 through 1910 when became an assistant professor. He became the first Japanese professor at a major American university. He taught history at Yale for 35 years.[3] Among those he influenced was John Whitney Hall.[4]
Asakawa helped found Japan studies and Asian studies in the United States.
Politics
After the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Asakawa began to speak out against the growth of militarism in Japan. In 1941, he tried to prevent war between the US and Japan.[5]
Selected works
In an overview of writings by and about Kan'ichi Asakawa, OCLC/WorldCat includes roughly 110+ works in 220+ publications in 5 languages and 2,400+ library holdings.[6]
- The Early Institutional Life of Japan. (1903) [7]
- The Russo-Japanese Conflict: Its Causes and Issues (1905)
- The Origin of Feudal Land-Tenure in Japan (1914)
- The life of a monastic shō in medieval Japan (1919)
- The documents of Iriki, illustrative of the development of the feudal institutions of Japan (1922)
His works also included contributions to the publications Japan edited by Frank Brinkley (1904); the History of Nations Series (1907); China and the Far East (1910); Japan and Japanese-American Relations (1912); and The Pacific Ocean in History (1917).
Legacy
Asakawa lived most of his life in the United States. In the history of the Japanese-Americans, he is considered among the Issei who were immigrants born in Japan.[8]
In 2007 the Asakawa Japanese garden at Yale, designed by Shinichiro Abe, was dedicated to mark the centennial of Asakawa's appointment as an instructor of history at Yale.
Related pages
References
- ↑ "Kan'ichi Asakawa papers", Yale University Library
- ↑ Dartmouth College Catalogue, 1898-1899, p. 57.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Yamato Ichihashi et al. (1999). Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942-1945, p. 69.
- ↑ Mass, Jeffrey P. (1995). Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History, p. 15.
- ↑ Cohen, Warren I. (1996). Pacific Passage: the Study of American-East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, p. 42.
- ↑ WorldCat Identities: Asakawa, Kanʼichi 1873-1948
- ↑ See The Early Institutional Life of Japan; full-text book at openlibrary.org.
- ↑ DiscoverNikkei: "Asakawa bio"; retrieved 2012-11-25.
Further reading
- Kiang, Lindsey. (1964). A Withdrawal to Greatness: The Life of Kanichi Asakawa. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, Senior thesis. OCLC 14190248
- Tohru Takeda. (2007). "Kan'ichi Asakawa - Who Worked For World Peace." Sakyo Takaishi, JPS Inc. Template:Catalog lookup linkScript error: No such module "check isxn".
