John Weil Nathan (born March 1940) is an American translator, writer, scholar, filmmaker, and Japanologist. His translations from Japanese into English include the works of Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, and Natsume Sōseki. Nathan is also an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and director of many films about Japanese culture and society and American business. He is Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Early life Nathan was born in New York City and spent part of his childhood in Tucson, Arizona. He was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. His father was a painter, and his grandfather was a reporter at The Jewish Daily Forward. In 1961, Nathan graduated from Harvard College, where he studied under Edwin O. Reischauer. Career The summer after graduation, he worked at Nomura Securities in New York. He moved to Japan directly after, teaching English as a second language to native Japanese speakers at a newly opened English conversation school in Tokyo that had been funded by the Ford Foundation. He was also hired to teach English literature at Tsuda College, a school for young women. Nathan became the first American to pass the entrance exams of the University of Tokyo and be admitted as a traditional student. He lived in Tokyo for close to five years and departed Japan in 1966 to start a PhD program at Columbia University in New York. He dropped out of Columbia and began teaching a class in modern Japanese literature at Princeton University. In September 1968, Nathan moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had been appointed a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. The status the society conferred allowed Nathan to undergo oral examinations in candidacy for a PhD without having attended graduate school. Nathan would eventually receive a doctorate in Far Eastern languages from Harvard. Nathan accepted a full-time teaching appointment at Princeton University in 1972, resigning from the position in 1979. Nathan is currently Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He previously served as the Koichi Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at UCSB. Nathan's works focus on Japanese culture, Japanese literature, Japanese cinema, the theory and practice of translation, and the sociology of business culture. Nathan first met Yukio Mishima in 1963. In 1965, at the age of 25, Nathan translated Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell