Marius Jansen


Marius Berthus Jansen was an American academic, historian, and Emeritus Professor of Japanese History at Princeton University.
He was born in Vleuten in the Netherlands to Gerarda and Bartus Jansen, a florist who moved his family to Johnston, Rhode Island in the fall of 1923. Jansen grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Princeton in 1943, having majored in European history of the Renaissance and Reformation. He served in the Army, studying Japanese and working in the Occupation of Japan. He took his PhD in History at Harvard in 1950 studying Japan with Edwin O. Reischauer and also China with John K. Fairbank. His dissertation dealt with the interactions of the two countries and was published as The Japanese and Sun Yat Sen in 1954.
He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1976. In 1999, Jansen was the first foreigner to be honored with the Distinguished Cultural Merit Award, given by the government of Japan.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Marius Jansen, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 300+ publications in 12 languages and 13,900+ library holdings.