Thinkers Timeline

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese painter and printmaker of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest artist of the ukiyo-e tradition and one of the most influential artists in world history. He was born in the commoner district of Edo (modern Tokyo) to an artisan family. Apprenticed at fifteen to a woodblock cutter, he entered the studio of the print designer Katsukawa Shunsho at eighteen and spent his twenties learning the trade. He changed his artistic name over thirty times across his long career, each change marking a stylistic shift or a new artistic ambition. The name Hokusai, meaning north studio, dates from his middle years. He produced an enormous body of work: book illustrations, sketches, paintings, and the printed series for which he is most famous. In his early seventies he began the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the Great Wave off Kanagawa and Red Fuji — two of the most widely recognised images in the world. He also produced the Hokusai Manga, fifteen volumes of drawings covering every conceivable subject, from birds and fish to grimacing faces and imaginary creatures. He lived in poverty for much of his life, moved house more than ninety times, and continued working into his late eighties. He died at eighty-eight, lamenting that he had not been given another ten years of life to become a true artist.

Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945) was a Japanese philosopher and the founder of what is known as the Kyoto School — the first major tradition of Japanese philosophy to engage systematically with Western philosophy on equal terms while remaining rooted in East Asian thought. He spent most of his career at Kyoto University, where he developed a highly original philosophical system that brought together Zen Buddhist concepts of experience and nothingness with European traditions including Hegel, Kant, William James, and Husserl. His most famous work, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), is the founding text of modern Japanese philosophy and one of the most important philosophical works produced outside the Western tradition in the 20th century.

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and editor whose thirty completed feature films include some of the most influential works in the history of cinema. He was born in Tokyo, the youngest of seven children in a family descended from samurai. His older brother Heigo, a narrator for silent films, took him to see European and American movies and introduced him to Western literature; Heigo's suicide in 1933 marked Kurosawa deeply. Kurosawa had initially wanted to be a painter and studied Western art before entering the film industry as an assistant director in 1936. He learned his craft under the veteran director Kajiro Yamamoto and directed his first film in 1943, during the Second World War. After the war he emerged as a major figure in the revival of Japanese cinema. His 1950 film Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, bringing Japanese cinema to wide international attention for the first time. Over the following four decades he directed Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Ikiru, High and Low, Ran, and many other films, adapting Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Japanese sources, and producing original works set in both historical and contemporary Japan. He faced career setbacks in the 1970s, including a suicide attempt in 1971, but continued working into his late eighties. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1990 and died in 1998 at eighty-eight.

Taiichi Ohno (1912-1990) was a Japanese industrial engineer whose work at the Toyota Motor Company produced the Toyota Production System, a way of organising manufacturing that has since spread worldwide under names including lean manufacturing and just-in-time production. He was born in 1912 in Dalian, then in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where his father worked. He graduated from what is now Nagoya Technical High School in 1932 and joined Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a textile machinery company run by the Toyoda family. In 1943 he moved to Toyota Motor Company, the automobile manufacturer that the same family had founded. He would remain there for the rest of his career. He started as a shop-floor supervisor and rose through operational roles, eventually becoming executive vice president in 1975. His rise came through his practical work on the production line, not through the management hierarchy. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s, he developed the production methods that would make Toyota one of the most efficient and quality-focused manufacturers in the world. The methods were not written down in any comprehensive way for decades; they were transmitted through the practice of production workers and engineers trained by Ohno himself. Workshops and demonstrations — not textbooks — were his teaching methods. His short book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, published in Japanese in 1978 and in English in 1988, remains the most direct source for his ideas. Western interest in his work exploded in the 1980s when American manufacturers began realising that they had been outcompeted by Japanese firms using methods they did not understand. He retired from Toyota in 1978 and died in Toyota City in 1990.

Ikujiro Nonaka (born 1935) is a Japanese organisational theorist whose work on knowledge creation in organisations has made him one of the most influential management thinkers of the knowledge economy era. He was born in Tokyo in 1935 and grew up through the hardships of wartime and postwar Japan. He graduated from Waseda University with a degree in political science in 1958 and worked for nine years at Fuji Electric, where he saw first-hand how Japanese companies developed new products and managed learning across the organisation. In 1967 he left for California to pursue graduate study, earning an MBA and then a PhD from Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 1972. He joined the faculty of the Nanzan University in Nagoya, then moved to Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, where he spent most of his academic career and is now Professor Emeritus. He has also held positions at Berkeley, Harvard Business School, and the University of British Columbia. His most influential work is The Knowledge-Creating Company (1995), co-authored with Hirotaka Takeuchi, which introduced the SECI model of knowledge creation and drew extensively on cases from Japanese companies including Honda, Canon, and Matsushita. The book was one of the first major works to treat knowledge creation as a central strategic activity rather than as a by-product of operations. It drew on Japanese philosophical traditions as well as Western organisational theory, producing a synthesis that was distinctively grounded in its cultural context while addressing universal questions. Nonaka has continued publishing on knowledge management, leadership, and organisational learning, including The Wise Leader (with Takeuchi, 2011) and work on phronesis (practical wisdom) as a leadership capacity. He received the Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France in 2001 and was the first Japanese inductee into the Thinkers50 Management Hall of Fame in 2017. He has been instrumental in making Japanese organisational thinking accessible to global management thought.