was a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese academic, an historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. He was for many years a professor at the University of Tokyo

University of Tokyo

, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...

.

Career

Seiichi was a member of the faculty of the University of Tokyo. His contribution to Japanese historiography is measured in the effect his teaching and example produced in a younger generation of students.

Indonesian history

Prof. Iwao was considered a leading scholar in the colonial period of Indonesian history. His study of Japanese towns in South Asia before the Pacific War was published in . The research used documents of the Dutch East Indies Company in the archives of the Hague and Jakarta.

Japanese history

Prof. Iwao's research and writing covered a broad range, including his early work on Japanese emigrant communities in South Asia and his later work on the Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

 of national seclusion (sakoku

Sakoku

was the foreign relations policy of Japan under which no foreigner could enter nor could any Japanese leave the country on penalty of death. The policy was enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate under Tokugawa Iemitsu through a number of edicts and policies from 1633–39 and remained in effect until...

).

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Seiichi Iwao, OCLC

OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

/WorldCat

WorldCat

WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

 encompasses roughly 100+ works in 200+ publications in 7 languages and 1,500+ library holdings.

• 1940 – Nan'yo Nihonmachi no kenkyu (1940)
• 1943 – Early Japanese settlers in the Philippines (1943)
• 朱印船貿易史の研究 (1958)
• 朱印船と日本町 (1962)
• 鎖国 (1966)
• 近世の洋学と海外交涉 (1979)
• 荷蘭時代台灣史論文集 (2001)
• 1982 – Biographical Dictionary of Japanese History (1982), with Burton Watson
• 2002 – Dictionnaire historique du Japon, Vol. I; Vol. II(2002), with Teizō Iyanaga, Susumu Ishii, Shōichirō Yoshida et al.

Affiliations

• Japan Academy, elected 1965.
• Franco-Japanese Historical Society (Societe Franco-Japonaise des Sciences Historiques; Nichi-Futsu Rekishi Gakkai)
• Japan-Netherlands Institute (Nichi-Ran Gakkai)

Honors

• Imperial Academy, Imperial Academy Prize, 1941
• Order of the Sacred Treasure
  Order of the Sacred Treasure
  The is a Japanese Order, established on January 4, 1888 by Emperor Meiji of Japan as the Order of Meiji. It is awarded in eight classes . It is generally awarded for long and/or meritorious service and considered to be the lowest of the Japanese orders of merit...
  
  , 1970.