Tetsuo najita biography sample

I was deeply saddened by the news of Professor Najita’s passing. Every time I thought of him, his charming smile would appear before my eyes. In late September 2019, I received a postcard from Honolulu, Hawaii, which read: “Dear Tao-san, Many thanks for your recent book. I am most impressed with the depth of your research. I have fond memories of the days we shared in Osaka. With best wishes, Tets Najita.” What I had presented to him was my book titled, When Christianity Met the Religions of China and Japan: Cultural Interaction about Ritual Bowing, Dignity, and Belief (西教東漸と中日事情―拝礼・尊厳・信念をめぐる文化交渉, 関西大学出版部 2019), and I was sincerely awaiting his critical comments.

The first time I got to know Professor Najita was at the September 1987 International Symposium on the early modern merchant academy Kaitokudō, held at Osaka University, whose library holds the academy’s collection that had originated in the 1720s. I was then a PhD candidate at the university’s Department of Japanese History, working on my dissertation on Kaitokudō with my advisor, Professor Wakita Osamu, as well as my mentor, Professor Koyasu Nobukuni (Department of Japanology). Professor Najita and I were on the same panel at the symposium, where I presented a paper on the atheist belief of the academy’s leading scholars including Yamagataka Bantō, who based his ideas on the Zhu Xi Neo-Confucian philosophy and modern Western astronomy. Professor Najita was on sabbatical at Osaka University that year, and Professor Koyasu began a translation with his students of Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan : The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka (which was later published as『懐徳堂―18世紀日本の「徳」の諸相』, 岩波書店1992). I therefore had many opportunities to chat with Professor Najita inside classrooms, the university guest house, and various restaurants. One day in spring 1988, I expressed my hope to learn about the Japanese studies programs at the leading univ

Prof. Emeritus Tetsuo Najita, whose work as an historian sought to recoup and to explore the agency of ordinary people, commoner-intellectuals in Osaka, and farmers in the modern period as they negotiated social and political forces of their time, died Jan. 11. He was 84.

“Tets was, without question, a complex, brilliant, creative, path-breaking and path-setting scholar,” said James Ketelaar, Professor of Japanese History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Divinity School and the College. “He was deeply committed to the importance of ideas in the creation and formation of the structure of the self itself as well as in the impact of those ideas on society.”

Najita, the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College, joined the Department of History at UChicago in 1969 and was a member of the faculty until his retirement in 2002.

“As a mentor, he offered an exemplary combination of kindness and rigor,” said Susan Burns, who was one of his many graduate students and now serves as the Professor of History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College. “One of my most treasured memories of him came after I finished my doctorate. I was an untenured assistant professor at a big state university, newly divorced, and raising a then-toddler daughter on my own, and he invited me to present my work at a graduate student workshop. It was, I felt then and now, his way of encouraging me to rise above my recent struggles and recollect the satisfaction that came from research and writing.”

“I am proud,” Burns added, “if still somewhat intimidated, to occupy his former office in the Social Science Building, the room where I consulted with him many times as a graduate student 30 years ago.”

Najita dedicated much energy to supporting the Japan Studies program and the Ce