Background
Tsuda Sōkichi was born on 3 October 1873 in Gifu Prefecture.
津田 左右吉
Tsuda Sōkichi was born on 3 October 1873 in Gifu Prefecture.
He attended Tokyo Semmon Gakko, the forerunner of Waseda University.
After graduation served as a middle school teacher in various areas. In 1906 he joined a group headed by Shiratori Kurakichi of the South Manchurian Railway, a scholar of Chinese history, in carrying out historical and geographical surveys in Manchuria and Korea. He came under attack from the nationalists, and in 1940 four of his major works were banned.
In 1942 he was accused of violating the publication laws. He was found guilty of having profaned the dignity of the imperial house and was sentenced to three months in jail, but was acquitted in 1944.
During the prewar period, he served as a professor of Waseda University from 1920 to 1940 and lectured in the law department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1939; he was also a member of the Toyo Bunko from 1920 until the time of his death. In addition to his studies of Japanese history and thought, he also published works on Chinese Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He became a member of the Japan Academy in 1947 and received a Cultural Medal in 1949. In the years following the end of the war he took up an anti-Marxist position in his writings and activities.
Beginning with a work entitled Jindaishi no atarashii kenkyu in 1913 he published a series of philological studies of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, in which he argued that the accounts of the mythical period contained in these ancient works of Japanese history were in fact fabricated at a later period to lend legitimacy to the imperial line.