Kiyono Kenji

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Kiyono Kenji ( Japanese 清 野 謙 次 ; born August 14, 1885 in Okayama Prefecture , † December 27, 1955 in Meguro , Tokyo ) was a Japanese doctor, anthropologist and archaeologist. He is known in medicine for the discovery of vital staining and in archeology for his controversy about the origins of the Japanese. He also caused a university scandal through a theft offense. Kiyono was married to Fumi Yasuba, the daughter of the businessman and politician Yasuba Suenobu (1858-1930). The marriage remained childless.

Live and act

Kiyono was born in 1885 as the eldest son of Kiyono Yū, the head of the medical school in Okayama. His father was an expert in clinical medicine and, as such, an alumnus of Tokyo Imperial University and director of the Osaka Medical School and Hospital. Kiyono's grandfather Ichigaku had also worked as a doctor in Numazu-Han during the Edo period . Kiyono attended Kitano Middle School and then 6th High School. He wanted to become an archaeologist, but his father forbade him, so he studied medicine at the University of Kyoto .

After completing his studies in 1909, he became an assistant doctor at the pathologist Fujinami Akira and began researching body coloring. From 1912 to 1914, Kiyono studied with Ludwig Aschoff at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg as a foreign student. In 1914 he discovered sexual histiocytes . After his return to Japan, he lectured at the University of Kyoto, where he received his doctorate in 1916 and was appointed professor in 1921. In 1917 he was again in Germany and France for study purposes. In 1922 Kiyono was honored with the Japan Academy Award ( 帝国学士 院 賞 Teikoku gakushiin-shō ) for his research on body coloring .

In 1918 he took part in the excavations of the "Provincial Office" ( 国 府 遺跡 Kō iseki ) in Fujidera . At that time, human bones from the Paleolithic and human remains from Ainu graves were found and carried all over Japan . More than 1000 bones or fragments of cremated people were collected from the sites. From 1924 on, Kiyono worked as a pathologist with the bone finds. He found that the bones of the Ainu were different from those of the Jōmon population. In his opinion, there was a separate human species in Japan, which differed from the Ainu, the Stone Age man, who was the ancestor of both the Jōmon man and the Ainu. His investigations were based on skeletal finds from the period 5000 to 4200 BP of the Tsukumo site, which Kiyono had excavated from 1920 to 1922. He published these findings in a "treatise on the Japanese primitive man" ( 日本 原人 論 Nihon genjin-ron ), with which he derived the Jōmon Ainu theory (- 紋 人 ア イ ヌ 説 ) of the anatomist and anthropologist Koganei Yoshikiyo (1859-1944) , who taught at Tokyo University , disagreed. With the publication of the article “Stone Age Man of Tsukumo as the end of the Ainu” ( 津 雲 石器時代 人 は ア イ ヌ 人 な り やTsukumo sekkijidainin wa Ainu nariya ) following the publication in 1926 , a scientific dispute broke out in which Kiyono's theory was ultimately confirmed. In the same year he succeeded his former teacher Fujinami in Tokyo and rebuilt the medical institute's scientific collection, which was lost in a fire in 1924.

In 1938 a German-language summary of his research on body coloring appeared. In the same year he was released from his professorship because of a theft offense. Throughout his life, Kiyono had a pronounced passion for collecting folklore materials, books and documents that assumed bizarre, manic proportions. In 1938 it was discovered that he had stolen writings and old books from the Jingo-ji Temple in Kyōto. Because of its reputation, Kiyono was allowed to go in and out of the temple. On his way home on June 30th, he was run into a police checkpoint and ten books from the temple were found in his briefcase, revealing the theft.

It was then found that Kiyono had illegally taken home 630 documents from 22 temples in Kyoto and 1,360 books from his room at the university. In the trial he was sentenced to five years imprisonment with two years probation. This led to his dismissal and the demand that Hamada Kosaku resign as president of the university. From July 10, 1938, Kiyono was imprisoned in Kyoto for half a year. Immediately thereafter, a new election of the university president was scheduled. Even before the election could take place, Hamada Kōsaku died suddenly and surprisingly on July 25, which turned the incident into a university scandal. Kiyono was finally relieved of his duties on January 8, 1939.

He then lived near the Ryūsenji Temple in Meguro and worked part-time for the Japan Pacific Islands Association ( 太平洋 協会 Taiheiyō kyōkai ), which had been founded in 1938, and he campaigned as an anthropologist for the establishment of a Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere . He remained the mentor of his student Ishii Shirō , who carried out experiments on humans with the unit 731 in Manchuria . When his home in Meguro was destroyed, he moved to Kihara (now Miho ) in Ibaraki Prefecture , where he spent seven years in seclusion.

After the war he escaped court martial due to a secret agreement with America and worked as the director of a health research institute. During the war he wrote a treatise on the Japanese race based on his research into human bones of antiquity ( 古代 人 骨 の 研究 に 基 づ く 日本人 種 論 , published in 1949). This was followed in 1955 by the book “History of Japanese Archeology and Anthropology” ( 日本 考古学 ・ 人類学 史 Nihon kōkogaku jinruigaku-shi ) and in 1969 posthumous research on Japanese mussel heaps ( 日本 貝 塚 の 研究 Nihon kaizuka no kenkyū ). In 1953 he moved back to Meguro. Two years later he died unexpectedly of a heart attack.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c 清 野 謙 次 . In: 世界 大 百科 事 典 第 ２ 版 u. a. at kotobank.jp. Retrieved November 12, 2019 (Japanese).
  2. ↑ a b c Tamura: 京 大 展望 / 来 間 恭 氏 の 批判 の 批判
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Sugiyama: The Background of Unit 731 in the History of Department of Pathology ( 京 大 病理学 教室 史 に お け る ７３１ 部隊 の 背景 )
  4. ^ Daniel H. Temple, Christopher M. Stojanowski (Eds.): Hunter-Gatherer Adaptation and Resilience: A Bioarchaeological Perspective . Cambridge University Press, Cornwall 2019, ISBN 978-1-107-18735-1 , pp. 89 .
  5. ↑ Sugiyama: ビ ュ フ ォ ン の 博物 誌

Web links

literature

  • Taketoshi Sugiyama: 京 大 病理学 教室 史 に お け る ７３１ 部隊 の 背景 The Background of Unit 731 in the History of Department of Pathology, Kyoto University . In: Journal of Research Society for 15 years War and Japanese Medical Science and Service . tape 10 , no. 1 , 2009, ISSN  1346-0463 , p. 1–10 (Japanese, war-medicine-ethics.com [PDF; accessed November 15, 2019]).
  • Taketoshi Sugiyama: ビ ュ フ ォ ン の 博物 誌 . In: The Kyoto University Library Bulletin . tape 38 , no. 1 , 2001, ISSN  0582-4478 , p. 1–14 (Japanese, ndl.go.jp [PDF; accessed November 15, 2019]).
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Kiyono is the family name, Kenji the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Kiyono, Kenji
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 清 野 謙 次 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese doctor, anthropologist and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Okayama Prefecture
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 1955
Place of death Meguro , Tokyo