Sakurai Joji

Joji Sakurai (1858-1939) is one of the leaders of science at the beginning of the Modernization period of Japan. He was selected as one of the students send abroad by the Japanese Government at the second selection and went to London in 1878 to study chemistry under the supervision of A. W. Williamson (1824-1904). When he returned to Japan in 1881, he was immediately appointed a lecturer and soon promoted to a professor of the Imperial University of Tokyo. 

His works are known in studies on osmotic pressures and vapor pressures of solutions, but he is much better known as the discoverer of glutamic acid extracted from sea tangle (Konbu, a seaweed, in Japanese) and the producer of the seasoning Aji-no-Moto (sodium glutamate). His wife, Sada, is a younger sister of the wife of Joji Sakurai. 

Y. Kikuchi, Redefining academic chemistry Joji Sakurai and the introduction of physical chemistry into Meiji Japan , Hist. Scientiarum, 2000, 9, 215-256. 

Shibata returned to Japan in 1913, one year before the outbreak of the First World War, and he was appointed associate professor at his alma mater. Fortunately, he was able to purchase the same medium-sized quartz spectrograph, E2, through the special favor of Joji Sakurai, the Department Chairman, and he actively began spectrochemical studies of metal complexes. This spectrograph was in use for more... 

On Sakurai, see Kikuchi Yoshi)mki, Redefining Academic Chemistry Joji Sakurai and the Introduction of Physical Chemistry into Meiji Japan, Historia Scientiarum, 9 (3), 215-242 (2000) and his unpublished PhD thesis, The English Model of Chemical Education in Meiji Japan Transfer and Acculturation, (The Open University, 2006). 

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