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新渡戸稲造（にとべ いなぞう）は、盛岡藩士の家に生まれた教育者・農政学者。英文著書『武士道』で日本人の倫理観を世界に紹介し、国際連盟事務次長として東西の懸け橋を志した。
Inazo Nitobe was born on August 8, 1862 by the old lunar calendar (September 1, 1862 by the modern calendar), the third son of Jujiro Nitobe, a samurai of the Morioka domain, in the castle town of Morioka (present-day Morioka, Iwate Prefecture). His father died when Inazo was five, and during the turmoil of the Meiji Restoration the Morioka domain was branded an enemy of the new government, so the Nitobe family lost its samurai stipend. At nine he moved to Tokyo to study English, and in 1877, at age fifteen, he entered Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University) as part of its second class, alongside the future thinker Kanzo Uchimura and the botanist Kingo Miyabe. Dr. William S. Clark, who had shaped the founding spirit of the college, had already left Japan, but his students remained deeply influenced by the ‘Covenant of Believers in Jesus’ he left behind; Nitobe was baptized as a Christian the following year, in 1878.
After graduating from Sapporo Agricultural College, Nitobe traveled to the United States at his own expense in 1884 to study economics and statistics at Johns Hopkins University. From 1887 he studied agricultural policy and agricultural economics at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Halle in Germany, earning his doctorate at Halle. In 1891 he married Mary Elkinton, a Quaker he had met in the United States. Back in Japan, he built a distinguished career as an educator, serving as a professor at Sapporo Agricultural College and Kyoto Imperial University, principal of the First Higher School, professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and founding president of Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. Between 1899 and 1900, while recuperating in California, he wrote ‘Bushido: The Soul of Japan’ in English. The book, which explained Japanese ethics to a Western audience, became an international sensation and was reportedly read with great interest by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1920, when the League of Nations was founded, Nitobe was chosen as one of its Under-Secretaries-General, the first Japanese national to hold a senior post at an international organization. Over his seven years in the role, he worked on initiatives such as founding the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, carrying onto the world stage the ambition he had voiced as a young student: to become a bridge between East and West. In 1933, as tensions between Japan and the United States were rising, Nitobe traveled to Banff, Alberta, Canada, to attend the Institute of Pacific Relations conference, delivering a speech on August 14 that appealed for mutual understanding between the two nations. He fell ill shortly afterward and died in Victoria, Canada, on October 15, 1933, at the age of seventy-one. His portrait appeared on Japan’s five-thousand-yen banknote from 1984 to 2004, and his lifelong pursuit of becoming a bridge across the Pacific is still remembered today as a symbol of international exchange.