| Ichirō Inaba | |
| Birth Date: | 3 May 1936 |
| Birth Place: | Osaka, Japan |
| Death Place: | Ikoma, Nara, Japan |
| Alma Mater: | Kyoto University |
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]