Tetsuo Najita

Professor Tetsuo Najita is the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago. His research centers on the intellectual history of politics and political economy of early and modern Japan. Professor Najita has written on Tokugawa political and ethical thought, and analyzed the development of merchant ideology in Osaka in the eighteenth century. His current study focuses on commoner economic thought and practice from the mid-eighteenth century into the modern era. He examines commoner pamphlets on the why''s and wherefore''s of commerce as well as economic practice within cooperatives. Professor Najita is the recipient of the John King Fairbank Prize from his work, Hara Kei and the Politics of Compromise, and the Yamagata Banto Prize from his work, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan.