Ryūsaku Tsunoda

Ryūsaku Tsunoda (角田 柳作, Tsunoda Ryūsaku; 8 September 1877 - 29 November 1964) was a Japanese scholar and is known as the "father of Japanese studies" at Columbia University.^[1] He was directly responsible for developing the Japanese language and literature collection at Columbia's library.^[2] Prominent among the former-students who credit his influence as formative is Donald Keene,^[3] who had himself become a later Dean of Japanese studies in the United States.

Ryūsaku Tsunoda
角田 柳作
Ryūsaku Tsunoda in his Columbia University classroom
Born	(1877-09-08)September 8, 1877 Gunma prefecture, Japan
Died	November 29, 1964(1964-11-29) (aged 87) Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
Occupation	Japanese studies

Biography

Tsunoda was the youngest of seven children born to a family of peasants in Japan. He studied at Waseda University, and later developed interest in the United States. ^[4]

Keene's own perspective on Tsunoda was expressed in a lecture given at Waseda University in 1994:

"His vocation was teaching, not writing. His joy as a teacher lay in communicating knowledge directly and enthusiastically to his students. ... As one of his students, I feel it regrettable that Prof. Tsunoda is not known just because he did not publish anything."^[5]

Selected works

In an overview of writings by and about Tsunoda, OCLC/WorldCat lists roughly 50 works in 100+2 publications in 4 languages and 2,000+ library holdings.^[6]

This list is not finished; you can help Wikipedia by adding to it.

• Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories, 1951 (with L. Carrington Goodrich)
• Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vols. I-II, 1958 (with William Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene)