Ian Hill Nish CBE (3 June 1926 – 31 July 2022) was a British historian and academic. A specialist in Japanese studies, he was Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he taught from 1963 until his retirement in 1991. His scholarship relating to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japanese foreign policy and Anglo-Japanese relations in the twentieth century has garnered international renown.
Nish was born in Burghmuirhead, Edinburgh, on 3 June 1926, to David Nish and Marion née Hill. He was educated at George Watson's College.
World War II gave opportunity to many young non-Japanese to become specialists in Japanese studies, and Nish became one of them. His first encounter with Japan came around 1941 when he was still an Edinburgh schoolboy. His school announced a government program for volunteers who wanted to learn difficult Oriental languages, but he was too young then to apply. He was called up for service in the British Armed Forces in 1944, and completed infantry and artillery training after being transferred from the Royal Air Force. He was then posted to India with the Intelligence Corps. He put in for a crash course in Japanese and was accepted.[dead link] The School of Japanese Studies had been opened in an old mansion in Simla, and it later moved to Karachi. The program had strong courses in Japanese language, but nothing in Japanese history or the nature of Japanese society. With the end of the war and the end of the course in 1946, the "semi-linguists" were sent to the Southeast Asia Translation and Interrogation Center in Johor Bahru, British Malaya. The course graduates were given translation duties, and were used as interpreters for interrogations at Changi prison.
In 1947, within a few months of his graduation, Nish, serving in the rank of captain, was ordered to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. In Kure, Nish found himself in the headquarters of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center. Amongst varied duties in the Translation Section, he was assigned to translate regional newspapers. In that role, he and others were not called upon to draw on their knowledge of the older 'kanji' which they had learned, since a working list of 1,800 characters had been specified by the Ministry of Education for use in the press from New Year's Eve, 1946.
In 1948, on his return to the United Kingdom, Nish chose to pick up his interrupted honors degree in history at the University of Edinburgh, rather than starting a degree in Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He was awarded his M.A. at Edinburgh in 1951. In Japan, Nish had collected material on the Anglo-Japanese alliance which had been formalized in 1902. With that material in hand, he moved to SOAS to begin work on his doctorate under the supervision of William G. Beasley. He became a student member of the Japan Society of London and the China Society.
Nish's first academic appointment was to the history department of the University of Sydney. He spent six months in Japan on his way to Australia in 1957. He remembers that Sydney students at that time were becoming more interested in Japan. As he recalls, the courses in Asian history were ranked as popular during this period. Nish, who was the first editor of the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, stayed in Australia until 1962.
Nish joined the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1963 and remained there until his retirement in 1991. His research focused on Japanese foreign relations, including the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Russo-Japanese War, and Japan's relations with international institutions.
He was an instrumental figure in the establishment of the British Association for Japanese Studies in 1974 and later served as its secretary. He was president of the European Association for Japanese Studies from 1985 to 1988. He also chaired the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee from 1983 to 1991 and served on the council of the Japan Society.
Nish retired in 1991. He then accepted the position of honorary senior research associate of the Suntory Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). This position proved invaluable in enabling Nish to complete certain research projects which were crowded out by administrative chores during his last years of teaching. In 2001-2002, two volumes of his collected writings were simultaneously published in Britain and Japan.
Following a Japanese government initiative announced in 1995, Nish served as convenor of the British contributors to the Anglo-Japanese History Project, with Chihiro Hosoya as his Japanese counterpart. The project held conferences and workshops in Britain and Japan and produced six volumes covering political, diplomatic, economic, cultural, and strategic relations between the two countries.
To mark the centenary of the Russo-Japanese War, Nish compiled and introduced the eight-volume collection The Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5.
In 2016, at the age of 90, Nish published his final major work, the two-volume The History of Manchuria, 1840–1948: A Sino-Russo-Japanese Triangle.
Nish died on 31 July 2022, at the age of 96.
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Nish, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 200+ works in 300+ publications in 4 languages and 7,000+ library holdings.
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1994
1972
1966
Prof. Nish co-authored a number of Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) papers:
