Ichirō Inaba

Ichirō Inaba (稲葉 一郎, Inaba Ichirō, 3 May 1936 – 23 September 2017) was a Japanese historian of China and professor emeritus at Kwansei Gakuin University.

Ichirō Inaba graduated from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Letters in 1966.^[1] He studied under Ichisada Miyazaki, and his doctoral thesis was on official historians of the Six Dynasties.^[2] Following graduation, he lectured at a university for a year and two months before landing an assistant job at Ritsumeikan University, where he taught Chinese Historical Thought and Pre-Modern Chinese History after 1977. In October 1978, he visited China with a group of historians and archaeologists.^[3]

He was promoted to full professor in 1979, and a year later he joined the School of Humanities at Kwansei Gakuin University. He stayed there for over two decades before retiring in 2005.^[1]

Inaba's research focused on the historical and economic views of Chinese statesmen, historians and philosophers, including Sang Hongyang, Sima Guang, Mozi, Mencius, Xunzi, Han Fei, Yuan Jue, and Zhang Xuecheng.^[4] He wrote a chapter for Chinese Medieval History Research (中国中世史研究, Kyoto University Press, 1970^[5]) and contributed several entries to the western reference book A Sung Bibliography^[6] (French: Bibliographie des Sung, The Chinese University Press, 1978).

His own books include Chinese Historical Thought: A Study of Jizhuanti (中国の歴史思想―紀伝体考, Sobunsha, 1999) and A Study of the History of Chinese Historiography (中国史学史の研究, Kyoto University Press, 2006), which collected his papers from several decades.^[7]

He also authored a travel photography book titled Traveling in Jiangnan: Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai (江南旅情―蘇州・杭州・上海, U-Time, 2005), featuring photos from the Jiangnan region of China.^[8]

In 2017, Inaba died from acute subdural hematoma in Ikoma, Nara. He was 81.^[9]