Takatoshi Ito, who passed away in September 2025, was a leading scholar of macroeconomics and international finance. This column, written by a group of friends and colleagues, outlines his many contributions in a lifetime of research, teaching, and policymaking in Japan, the US, and around the world. His work is particularly notable for challenging the widespread perception that standard economic analysis is somehow ill-suited for understanding the Japanese economy. Indeed, using the discipline’