Kotaro Tanaka

Kotaro Tanaka, who lived from 25 October 1890 to 1 March 1974, was a Japanese legal scholar and statesman who was a professor of commercial law at Tokyo Imperial University from 1923 to 1950. He served as the final Minister of Education under the Empire of Japan from May 1946 to January 1947, as a member of the House of Peers and later the House of Councillors, and as the second postwar Chief Justice of Japan from March 1950 to October 1960, becoming the first Christian to hold that position. He joined the International Court of Justice in 1961, where his dissenting opinion in the 1966 South West Africa cases arguing against apartheid was widely praised as an exposition of the concept of legal equality.