Kuhara Mitsuru

In 1877, while Sakurai was in London, Tokyo University was created out of the School of Western Learning at which Sakurai had studied, as well as the School of Medicine. The new university comprised the faculties of law, science, literature, and medicine. In the same year Kuhara Mitsuru (1856-1919), Takasu Rokuro, and Miyazaki Michimasa (1852-1909), three students who had finished a chemistry course at the School of Western Learning that year, were considered to be the first graduates of the Department of Chemistry at the newly established Tokyo University. 

The first three graduates of the Department of Chemistry of Tokyo University, Kuhara Mitsuru, Takasu Rokuro, and Miyazaki Michimasa, formed the Tokyo Chemical Society in 1878, the year following their graduation. The Society played an important role in the dissemination of the periodic law in Japan. 

Unlike earlier times, in the 1890s more advanced textbooks of chemistry were translated into Japanese. For example, an introductory textbook of chemistry for college students. Introduction to the Study of Chemistry (1886) by Ira Remsen (1846-1927), chemistry professor at John Hopkins University, was translated into Japanese between 1893 and 1894 under the supervision of Kuhara Mitsuru and Shimomura Jun-ichiro. Kuhara studied organic chemistry at Johns Hopkins University under Remsen in the 1880s. This was not a direct translation, but rather the translation of the German version of Remsen s textbook Einleitung in das Studium Chemie) by Karl Seubert (1851-1942) into Japanese. The German version was expanded in the... 

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