Sakurai Jōji

Sakurai Jōji while serving as acting president of Tokyo University, 1911-2.

Sakurai Jōji ( 桜 井 錠 二 ; * August 18, 1858 in Kanazawa ; † January 28, 1939 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese chemist and, from 1926, president of the Academy of Sciences ( 帝国 学士 ​​院 ), to which he was elected in 1898 had been.

Life path

Sakurai Jōji as a chemistry professor in the 1890s.

Sakurai Jōji, was born the sixth child of a low-ranking samurai. His childhood name was Sakurai Eitarō ( 櫻井 甚 太郎 ). Most of the siblings died young. The father died in 1863, the family finally impoverished during the abolition of samurai privileges in the early 1870s. He was particularly gifted by members of his native samurai clan, the Kagas, a side line of the Maeda .

At the age of 14, he moved with his mother to Tokyo to enroll in the Daigaku Nankō ( 大学 南 校 ) preschool of the later Imperial University , where he was particularly interested in chemistry. In 1876, when he was 19 years old, he was sent to London University to study this further . As a theorist, he adhered to the emerging theory of atomism . His investigations into mercury led to an improvement in Ernst Otto Beckmann's methods for determining the boiling point of solutions.

After his return in 1881, he started an academic career at the University of Tokyo, where he became only the second chemistry professor in the country after a year as a lecturer. At that time he also tried to standardize chemical terms for translations into Japanese. He married a Miss San Okada, also from the Kaga clan, in 1882.

The Nippon Kagaku Kai ( 日本 化学 会 ), the forerunner organization of the Chemical Society of Japan , he was since 1883. He and Nagai Nagayoshi had a long-standing academic dispute over the question of whether theoretical or applied chemistry was more important . The latter initially prevailed with his views. Sakurai was voted out of office in 1886.

He completed his doctorate ( hakase ) in 1887.

Since 1899 he was part of the international group devoted to the creation of an atomic weight table, which eventually earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow. In the years up to 1915 he also presided over several one-year terms of office of the chemists' association. He donated the sum collected for his 25th anniversary with the company. The honorary award, the Sakurai band ( 櫻井 褒 章 ), awarded from 1910 to 1947 was paid for from these funds .

During his career he was active in several research institutes and professional associations, also internationally. He resigned his professorship on his sixtieth birthday in order to show his support for a mandatory retirement age, the introduction of which was discussed.

He made his political career as an imperial member of the House of Lords in 1920 . From 1937 he served as vice president of the nationalist propaganda organization Nippon Bunka Renmei .

Honors

Appointments to a court rank were made, namely in the fifth level in 1897 and the third level in 1911. The " Order of the Sacred Treasure " ( Zuihōshō ), whose lower levels were automatically entitled to officials of the sōnin-kan class according to seniority, he received in 1901 in the 3rd class.

Since 1926 he was a member of the Privy Council , now in second rank . Sakurai was made a baron posthumously.

Literature and Sources

• Berend Wispelwey (Ed.): Japanese Biographical Archive; Munich 2007, ISBN 3-598-34014-1 , Fiche 291
• Obituary in: Cultural Nippon, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Apr. 1938)

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