Tadao Umesao

Tadao Umesao (梅棹 忠夫, Umesao Tadao, June 13, 1920 – July 3, 2010) was a Japanese anthropologist. A professor for decades at Kyoto University, he was also among the founders and the director-general of National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. A number of Umesao's theories were influential on anthropologists, and his work was also well known among the general population of Japan.

Tadao Umesao was born in 1920 in Kyoto, Japan. In 1943, he graduated from the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University. Umesao was initially educated as an animal ecologist, but as he conducted fieldwork with nomads in the steppes of Mongolia from 1944 to 1946, his interest shifted from animals to humans. He served as an assistant professor on the Faculty of Polytechnics at Osaka City University from 1949, achieving his doctoral degree from Kyoto University in 1961. In 1965, he took a position with his alma mater. In 1986, Umesao lost his eyesight due to a viral infection. He continued to write by dictation and to serve his profession. On his retirement in 1993, he was named professor emeritus at Kyoto University as well as at the National Museum of Ethnology. He died in 2010 at the age of 90.

In 1955, Umesao traveled through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, shattering his conventional dualistic image of the continent consisting of “Seiyo” (Occident) and “Toyo” (Orient), and inspiring in him the notion of the “Chuyo” (Mediant, or Middle world). These reflections led to the paper “Introduction to the Ecological Conception of the History of Civilizations” (1957), which ten years later was expanded into a book, An Ecological View of History (1967).

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