James Philip Gabriel (born 1953) is an American translator and Japanologist. He is a full professor and former department chair of the University of Arizona's Department of East Asian Studies and is one of the major translators into English of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Gabriel was born in 1953 at Fort Ord, California. Gabriel earned an undergraduate degree in Chinese and a Master's in Japanese. He taught in Japan for seven years in the late 1970s and 1980s. He later completed a doctorate in Japanese at Cornell University.