Nitobe Inazō

Nitobe Inazō was born in 1862 into a samurai family of the Morioka domain. As a student at the Sapporo Agricultural College he was baptised a Christian and resolved to become 'a bridge across the Pacific'. He studied at Johns Hopkins University in the United States and in Germany, and married an American, Mary Elkinton. He was a professor at Kyoto Imperial University, headmaster of the First Higher School and first president of Tokyo Woman's Christian University, and from 1920 served for seven years as Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations; his portrait appeared on the five-thousand-yen note. In 1899, while convalescing in America, he wrote Bushido in English to explain Japanese moral ideas to the West.