The son of expatriate writers, Mark Peattie grew up in Santa Barbara, California. He earned a BA in history at Pomona College and an MA in history at Stanford University. After service in Asia and Washington, D.C. as a member of the U.S. Information Agency, Peattie returned to the United States and earned a doctorate in history from Princeton University. He taught at Pennsylvania State University, the University of California – Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For many years, Peattie was a research fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He was also a senior research staff member of the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace, before becoming a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.