Asahina Shōjirō

Asahina Shōjirō ( Japanese 朝 比 奈 正 二郎 , proper spelling : Syoziro Asahina ; born June 10, 1913 in Bunkyō , Tokyo Prefecture ; † November 28, 2010 in Tokyo Prefecture) was a Japanese entomologist and especially odonatologist . His focus was on the one hand on the field of medical entomology and on the other on the genus Epiophlebia . He described 118 new species of dragonflies ; 110 of them are still recognized today. He also described five new genera that are still used today. Ten species were named in his honor.

Life

Asahina Shōjirō was born as the son of the pharmacologist and lichenologist Asahina Yasuhiko in the Sendagi district, Bunkyō district, Tokyo. He ran his first entomological collections as a toddler at the side of his father; later in school he already focused on dragonflies and carried out targeted collections in Hokkaidō , South Sakhalin and Taiwan , where he accompanied his father. He began studying zoology at the Imperial University of Tokyo in April 1935 and graduated in 1938 with a master's degree. The turmoil of the war first forced him to shift the focus of his subsequent doctoral thesis to medical entomology and to leave Japan in October 1939 for six years in the direction of Manchuria . During a short stopover in 1940, he married his wife Yoshioka Terue, with whom he lived in Mishima after his return in December 1945 , before moving back to his parents' house in Tokyo. In 1950 he became a member and in 1952 head of the Department of Medical Entomology of the National Institute of Health . He completed his doctoral thesis in 1953.

He was president of several entomological and zoological associations.

• 1967–1997 Society of Odonatology, Japan (Tokyo)
• 1971/2 Entomological Society of Japan
• 1959, 1971/2 Japan Society of Sanitary Zoology
• 1982/3 Japanese Society of Systematic Zoology
• 1981-3 Societas Internationalis Odonatologica

literature

• Joachim Hoffmann: 2013 - The year of remembrance for great odonatologists . In: Dragonfly News . No. 31 , February 1, 2014, ISSN  1437-5621 , p. 6-10 .
• Tsukané Yamasaki: In Memoriam: Syoziro Asahina (1913-2010) . In: Species Diversity . tape 16 , 2011, p. 81-83 .

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Asahina is the family name, Shōjirō the first name.