Thinkers Timeline

Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese writer and lady of the imperial court. She is the author of The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel. She was born around the year 973 in Heian-kyō, the capital of Japan (modern Kyoto). Her real name is unknown. 'Murasaki' was probably a nickname taken from a character in her novel. 'Shikibu' refers to her father's position at the Bureau of Ceremonies. She came from a lesser branch of the powerful Fujiwara family. Her father was a scholar of Chinese. He recognised her talent and taught her things normally taught only to boys, including Chinese classical literature. This education would later shape her writing in important ways. She married a much older distant cousin, Fujiwara no Nobutaka, around her mid to late twenties. They had a daughter. Her husband died of an epidemic in 1001, only two years after the marriage. Murasaki was now a young widow with a young child. She probably began writing The Tale of Genji in the years just after her husband's death. Around 1005, her writing had attracted the attention of the powerful Fujiwara no Michinaga. He brought her to court as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Shōshi, the young wife of Emperor Ichijō. Murasaki served at court for years, kept a diary, wrote poems, and continued her novel. The exact year of her death is uncertain. Most scholars accept around 1014, when she would have been about 41. Some think she may have lived later, perhaps until 1025.

Eihei Dogen (1200-1253) was a Japanese Buddhist monk whose writings founded the Soto school of Zen Buddhism and produced one of the most original bodies of religious philosophical work in East Asian history. He was born in Kyoto into a high-ranking aristocratic family and reportedly lost both parents in early childhood — his father when he was two or three, his mother at seven or eight. These early losses are traditionally said to have awakened in him a deep awareness of impermanence that would shape his later teaching. At thirteen he entered the Tendai Buddhist monastic order on Mount Hiei, the great centre of Japanese Buddhist learning. He studied there for several years but grew dissatisfied with what he saw as the corruption and decline of Japanese Buddhism. Around 1223 he travelled to China, where he spent four years in Chan (Zen) monasteries seeking a genuine teacher. At Mount Tiantong he met Rujing, a rigorous Chan master in the Caodong (Soto) lineage, and under his teaching Dogen experienced the awakening he had been seeking. He returned to Japan in 1227 with Rujing's confirmation of his enlightenment and spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and establishing Soto Zen as a distinct tradition in Japan. He lived first at Kenninji in Kyoto, then founded Koshoji temple, and finally moved in 1243 to the remote mountains of Echizen Province, where he established Eiheiji — the monastery that remains the head temple of the Soto school. His magnum opus, the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), is a collection of ninety-five fascicles written over about twenty-two years, treating almost every aspect of Buddhist thought and practice with extraordinary philosophical depth and linguistic inventiveness. He wrote in Japanese rather than Chinese, a decision that made his work accessible to Japanese readers but also required him to invent much of the philosophical vocabulary he needed. He died at Kyoto in 1253 at age fifty-three. His influence on Japanese religion, aesthetics, and thought has been substantial; his international reception, particularly in the twentieth century, has made him one of the most studied Buddhist thinkers outside Asia.

Matsuo Bashō was a Japanese poet of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest master of haiku and one of the foundational figures in all of Japanese literature. He transformed haiku from a witty social pastime into a refined literary art form capable of profound spiritual and aesthetic depth. He was born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644 near Ueno in Iga Province (modern western Mie Prefecture). His father was a low-ranking samurai serving a local lord. Bashō later took the name Matsuo Chūemon Munefusa. As a young man he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, son of the local lord. Yoshitada shared his passion for poetry, and the two studied haikai together. Yoshitada died suddenly in 1666 when Bashō was about twenty-two. The grief-stricken Bashō left his samurai position and eventually made his way to Edo (modern Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. There he immersed himself in literary circles and by the 1670s had become a respected poet and teacher. In 1680 he withdrew from urban Edo to a small hut by a banana tree (bashō in Japanese), from which he took the poetic name by which he is now known. He took up the study of Zen Buddhism under the priest Butchō and adopted an increasingly ascetic life. From 1684 he began a series of long walking journeys across Japan, recorded in travel diaries that combined prose and haiku: Nozarashi Kikō (Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, 1684), Kashima Kikō (1687), Oi no Kobumi (Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1688), Sarashina Kikō (1688), and his masterpiece Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North, completed 1694). The last documented a 2,400-kilometre journey through northern Honshu in 1689 with his disciple Kawai Sora. He returned to Edo in 1691, set out again in 1694 for Kyushu, fell ill on the way, and died in Osaka on 28 November 1694. He was 50.

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.