[1] He studied under Ichisada Miyazaki, and his doctoral thesis was on official historians of the Six Dynasties.
[3] He was promoted to full professor in 1979, and a year later he joined the School of Humanities at Kwansei Gakuin University.
[1] Inaba's research focused on the historical and economic views of Chinese statesmen, historians and philosophers, including Sang Hongyang, Sima Guang, Mozi, Mencius, Xunzi, Han Fei, Yuan Jue, and Zhang Xuecheng.
[4] He wrote a chapter for Chinese Medieval History Research (中国中世史研究, Kyoto University Press, 1970[5]) and contributed several entries to the western reference book A Sung Bibliography[6] (French: Bibliographie des Sung, The Chinese University Press, 1978).
His own books include Chinese Historical Thought: A Study of Jizhuanti (中国の歴史思想―紀伝体考, Sobunsha, 1999) and A Study of the History of Chinese Historiography (中国史学史の研究, Kyoto University Press, 2006), which collected his papers from several decades.