Shichirō Murayama

was a Japanese linguist who started his career lecturing at Juntendo University, and went on to become full professor at Kyoto Sangyo University. One of the world’s foremost authorities on the Altaic languages, he later made important contributions to the mixed-language theory of the origins of Japanese. Denis Sinor regarded him, together with Shirō Hattori, Samuel E. Martin, and Osada Natsuki as one of the four scholars who have done the most to throw light on the origins of the Japanese language.

Career Murayama spent much of the Second World War from 1942 to 1945 in Germany, completing post-graduate studies at Berlin University on Comparative linguistics and Altai languages under the supervision of Nikolaus Poppe with particular attention to written materials in the Mongolian language.