Tetsuo "Tets" Najita (奈地田 哲夫, Najita Tetsuo, March 30, 1936 – January 11, 2021) was an American historian.

A nisei,^[1] Najita was raised in Hawaii. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1958, and was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.^[2][3] While in Grinnell, he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa.^[4] Najita completed a doctorate at Harvard University in 1965.^[5]

Upon finishing his studies, Najita began teaching at Carleton College.^[6] He left Carleton in 1966,^[6][7] and became an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin.^[8] In 1969, Najita joined the University of Chicago faculty,^[9] and was later named a Robert S. Ingersolll Distinguished Service Professor in History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations.^[10]

Over the course of his career, Najita received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981,^[11] and was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.^[12] Grinnell College honored Najita with an alumni award in 1998.^[2] Five years after his retirement from the institution, the University of Chicago inaugurated the Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture series in 2007.^[13]

Najita died at his home in Kamuela, Hawaii, on 11 January 2021, after a long illness.^[14]

• Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905-1915 (Harvard University Press, 1967).
• Japan: the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics (Prentice-Hall, 1974).
• Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: the Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
• Ordinary Economies in Japan: a Historical Perspective, 1750-1950 (University of California Press, 2009).
• Tokugawa Political Writings, (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period, 1600-1868: Methods and Metaphors, co-edited with Irwin Scheiner, (University of Chicago Press, 1978).
• Conflict in Modern Japanese History: the Neglected Tradition, co-edited with J. Victor Koschmann, (Princeton University Press, 1982).