[2] He started working for the Sumitomo Headquarters after his graduation in 1917 but in 1921 returned to the university when his supervisor Nitobe Inazō became the secretary general of the League of Nations.

However, Yanaihara's pacifist views and emphasis on indigenous self-determination, which he partly inherited from Nitobe – a Quaker and founding member of the League of Nations – came into a full conflict with Japan's wartime government during World War II.

[3] Yanaihara resumed teaching international economics at his alma mater, now named the University of Tokyo following the country's loss of the Second World War.

[4] For critical studies of Yanaihara's legacy, see Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: Redeeming Empire, by Susan C. Townsend (Richmond: Curzon, 2000); and The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, edited by Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1984).

"The Zionist movement," claimed Yanaihara, "is nothing more than an attempt to secure the right for Jews to migrate and colonize in order to establish a center for Jewish national culture."