Abstract
This chapter overviews the emergence and development phases of modern astronomy and astrophysics in Japan, mainly before WWII. In the beginning of the nineteenth century under the samurai regime of the Tokugawa Shogunate, shogunal astronomers started to learn Western astronomy through a Dutch translation of the book Astronomie by J.J. Lalande. After the Meiji Restoration (1868) the new government founded the University of Tokyo (1877), the first modern university in Japan, in which Tokyo Astronomical Observatory (TAO) also started in 1888. Terao Hisashi, who had gone to Paris to study the modern astronomy, became the first Director of TAO in 1888. The astronomy introduced by Terao into Japan was so-called classical astronomy. Two of Terao’s early students made Japan’s first internationally recognized achievements in astronomy, the discovery of the Z-term in the polar motion of the Earth by Kimura (Astronomische Nachrichten, 158, 234–240, 1902) and the discovery of asteroid families by Hirayama (Astronomical Journal, 31, 185–188, 1918).
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- 1.
The Meiji Restoration (1868) was a sort of revolution, in which, after small-scale civil wars, political power moved from the Samurai’s hands to modern citizens. In Japanese history, the Meiji Restoration is generally regarded as the turning point from a feudal world to a modern society.
- 2.
Actually in Japan, Christian evangelism had already begun soon after the landing of St. Francis Xavier in Japan in 1549. The Jesuit priests made full use of astronomy to demonstrate to the Japanese people the superiority of Christianity and the Western culture. They (mainly the Portuguese and Spanish) even attempted to build a few colleges in Japan to introduce the Christian doctrine to Japanese students, and elementary Western astronomy also was taught in these colleges—see Nakayama (1969), for the details.
- 3.
In case of Japanese names, in the text of this chapter the first name indicates the surname, and the second name is the person’s given name. Also, to distinguish persons with the same surname or to be in accordance with Japanese tradition, their given names are sometimes cited in the text and in references.
- 4.
The Mitaka campus is the same place where the present-day National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is located.
- 5.
Probably this was because after graduating from the University of Tokyo Hirayama Shin went to the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory, where he studied astrophysics and particularly solar physics.
- 6.
Astrophysics was referred to as the ‘New Astronomy’ at that time. According to Herrmann (1984) it was Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner, the German physicist and a pioneer of astronomical photometry, who first suggested the use of the term ‘astrophysics’.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Suzanne Débarbat of Paris Observatory, who informed me of the location of the remaining buildings of the Montsouris Astronomical School. I also thank Sakuma Seiichi and the late Yokoo Hiromitsu for providing me with some valuable information and literature.
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Nakamura, T. (2017). The Development of Astronomy and Emergence of Astrophysics in Japan. In: Nakamura, T., Orchiston, W. (eds) The Emergence of Astrophysics in Asia. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62082-4_2
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