The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 1 | Article ID 2637 | Jan 01, 2008

1

Japan's Wild Scientific Genius: Minakata Kumagusu

Roger Pulvers

Japan's Wild Scientific Genius: MinakataKumagusu

Roger Pulvers

The scientific term Minakatella longifolia G.Lister may be known only to biologists, butbehind the story of this slime mold—and of howspecimens came to be kept at the NaturalHistory Museum in London—is the life of one ofthe most fascinating men of Japan’s modernera: Minakata Kumagusu.

Minakata (right) in Port Saishu

A comprehensive exhibit of Minakata’s legacyin science and art, “Kumagusu’s Forests,” is onshow at the Watari Museum of ContemporaryArt in Aoyama, Tokyo. This exhibit, whichcloses on Feb. 3, offers a window not only onthe life and times of a flamboyant Japanesegenius, but also may serve as a guide to theJapanese rediscovery of their rapport withnature.

Let’s start with the most intriguing question:How did a person born in Wakayama in 1867

become a pioneer in his field of biology,recognized as such around the world? This is atime when Japan was barely emerging from 250years of self-imposed national isolation, a policythat created a scientific and technological gapwith the West of immense proportion. And onemore question: How could a man like Minakata,eccentric, feisty and volatile to the point ofbeing wild, turn himself into one of the mostrespected, even worshipped, figures of theMeiji intellectual establishment?

Minakata Kumagusu was born in 1867 as thesecond son in a family that ran a general store(zakkaya) in Wakayama City. Eventually hewould have five siblings. Stories of hisintellectual feats as a child are legendary. It iscertain that, while in primary school, he didhave the ability to throw himself into a task andkeep at it for weeks on end. He copied outseveral lengthy classics, including the 40-chapter Taiheiki, word for word. His earlydiaries show a marked talent for drawing, bothrealistic and imaginary. It was when still inprimary school that he began makingcomparisons between Western and Japaneseconcepts and myths.

APJ | JF 6 | 1 | 0

2

A warrior from the taiheiki

In 1884 he entered what is now the Universityof Tokyo, but unlike two classmates whobecame famous authors, Natsume Soseki andMasaoka Shiki, he flunked out after two yearsand returned to Wakayama. In fact, Minakataseemed to have an aversion to university life.Such an aversion did not deter him from hismonumental studies of nature, history and art,or from learning foreign languages. Somesources give him credit for mastering 19l a n g u a g e s , b u t t h i s i s n o d o u b t a nexaggeration. He probably, however, wasproficient in half that many, including, amongothers, English, which he wrote with near-native fluency, French, Spanish, Portuguese,Latin and Chinese.

In the early Meiji Era (1868-1912), virtually allpromise and property fell onto the shoulders ofthe eldest son. Kumagusu, being the secondson, was not specifically tied to his father’s

business. In addition, his father, Yahei, admiredhis son’s amazing intellectual prowess and hadnot prevented him from moving up to Tokyo tofurther his education.

Now Kumagusu, back home from Tokyo, wasintent on leaving Japan, and this at a time whenonly the very top echelon of the elite couldcontemplate such a journey.

On Dec. 12, 1886 he sailed on the steamship“City of Pekin” for the United States, arrivingin San Francisco on Jan. 7 of the next year. Hedid not linger on the West Coast, findingstudent life at Pacific Business College, whichhe had entered, tedious. It was to the study ofnature, not business, that he wished to dedicatehis life. In August of that year he found himselfin East Lansing, Michigan, where he gainedenrollment into Michigan State School ofAgriculture, today’s Michigan State University.

It was while there that he was assaulted,together with a couple of other Japanese youngmen, by a group of his fellow Americanstudents. The American boys were suspended,and that incident seemed to be over; until, thatis, the president of the university foundMinakata plastered one night in the corridor ofhis dormitory. The next day he found himself onthe road out of East Lansing.

(In fact, Minakata is known to have enjoyed hisliquor, going on binges later in life that couldlast over a week, during which he did notreturn home.)

His next stop was Ann Arbor, where he joined agroup of Japanese students studying at theUniversity of Michigan. His better judgmentstayed the hand that might have enrolled himthere. It was here that he began writing toWilliam Wirt Calkins (1842-1914), a retiredCivil War colonel and serious student of fungiand lichens. Calkins, who traveled often fromhis native Illinois to Florida to collect fungi,urged Minakata to go to the southern state to

APJ | JF 6 | 1 | 0

3

pursue mycology as a field of study. Minakatatook his advice, arriving in Jacksonville on May2, 1891. In September of that year he wentfurther south, to Cuba, where he collectedfungi and joined a circus. He followed thecircus, working in it as the elephant driver’sassistant, to Haiti, Venezuela and Jamaica. Idoubt that there is another biologist whocollected specimens when not driving anelephant. This circus was truly international,being composed of over 50 white, black andAsian people from Britain, the U.S., France,Italy, China and Japan.

On Sept. 14, 1892, after nearly six years in andabout the U.S., he sailed on the Britishsteamship “City of New York,” arriving inLiverpool on the 21st and immediately movingon to London. He notes in his diary: “Settledinto an inn at Euston run by Jews and spent thewhole first night studying my specimens…. Fordays, without money, without food, reading….”

It wasn’t long, however, before his presencecaught the eye of the illustrious Sir AugustusWollaston Franks (1826-1897), the first Keeper(i.e. curator) of British and Medieval Antiquitiesand Ethnography at the British Museum. By1893, Minakata had published the first of 50articles in the then popular-science magazineNature, “The Constellations in the Far East.”He was subsequently to become a regularcontributor to the weekly journal, Notes &Queries, an encyclopedia-like journal verywidely read in Britain at the time (and,incidentally, still going strong, now as anacademic periodical published by OxfordUniversity Press). His more than 300 articlesfor Notes & Queries range, in their subjectmatter, from astronomy, biology and zoology tofolktales and myths.

Augustus Wollaston Franks

Minakata was to spend a total of eight years inLondon, pursuing his studies and working atthe British Museum. After his return to Japan in1900, he would research slime molds,discovering a new genus, write prodigiously,and become the first truly modern ecologist ofJapan, an activist and agitator who fought toprotect the environment from just the sort ofdevelopers and nationalists who led Japan intothe most devastating war in its history.

During his eight years in London, from 1892 to1900, Minakata lived a hand-to-mouthexistence, moving from one dingy rented roomto another — even once living above stables onthe edge of Kensington Gardens.

Here's one typical diary entry from the time:

"Penni less , shared a t in o fAustralian rabbit with guestTakahashi. Cost, one shilling. Big

APJ | JF 6 | 1 | 0

4

tin and cheap, so buying andeating only this day after day."

He spent his time mainly at the British Museumcataloging its Oriental collection, and thisbrought in some money. He also did translationwork and dealt in Japanese woodblock prints.His "London Extracts," comprising 52 volumes,form a fascinating record of life in the Britishcapital at the end of the 19th century. In 1897he met and be f r iended the Ch ineserevolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. (He was tomeet Sun subsequently again in Wakayama.)

The British Museum

Minakata left England on Sept. 1, 1900, sailingfrom Liverpool and arriving in Kobe in the earlymorning of Oct. 15, dressed in what hedescribed as "a Western suit like a mosquitonet."

In his long absence from Japan, his father,Yahei, had died and his elder brother hadmanaged, in a few years, to fritter awayvirtually the whole of a generous inheritance.In 1906, Minakata married Tamura Matsue, thedaughter of a Shinto priest. The next year theyhad a son; and in 1911, a daughter.Minakata was soon to throw himself into thestudy of myxomycetes. Called nenkin inJapanese, these are fungilike slime molds, suchas ones he collected in the forests of Wakayamaand sent to Guilielma Lister (1860-1949) inLondon. She named Minakatella longifolia G.

Lister after him.

Drawing of Minakata’s room from his diary

A word on these intriguing molds. They werethought at the time to be neither plant noranimal , but something e lse that hadcharacteristics of both. They have an amoeboidphase but are also spore-forming — that is, theamoeboid phase aggregates to form a sporebody, and this requires some cellularcoordination, making them difficult to classifyas either plant or animal. (Minakata was a manattracted to the mysterious and the ambiguousin nature and life.) You may find slime moldsquite close to home, growing on wet grasscuttings from your lawn. The Minakata exhibitat the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art hasmany specimens and drawings of slime moldscollected by him on display.

APJ | JF 6 | 1 | 0

5

Slime Mold

The year that he married was a watershed yearfor Minakata in more ways than one. It wasthen that the greatest, and most significant,battle of his life began.

In 1906 the Meiji government issued the Edictof the Amalgamation of the Shrines, orderingthe dissolution of local shrines around thecountry and their merger with large, officiallysanctioned ones. Minakata saw this clearly, andrightly, as an attempt to politicize theinstitution of the shrine. In effect, it was anearly and giant step toward the establishmentof state Shinto, turning the animistic faith intoan ideology of nationalism.

To Minakata, local shrines, surrounded bysacred trees, were the symbol of genuineJapanese nature worship. He knew thatWakayama prefectural officials were hand-in-glove with developers (the kind of cozy tieupthat exists throughout Japan to this day), andthat trees formerly protected by local shrineswould be felled in a wholesale manner. Hepointed out that this would decrease the birdpopulation for lack of nest sites — and so leadto an increase in the insect population. Farmerswould then resort to using insecticides, whichin turn would get into the water and harm thelivelihood of both freshwater and inshorefishermen.

The result of the merger of the shrines was theformation of a link between the destruction ofnature and the eventual creation of a fasciststate. Ironically, those who supported that statein Japan's most disastrous-ever war sang thepraises of nature while simultaneouslydecimating it.Minakata created a mandala to demonstratethe interconnectedness of all naturalphenomena. He wrote of the "three ecologies":the ecologies of biology, society and the mind.By fusing these three into a world view thatnecessitated the conservation of nature, hestands as a global pioneer in the ecologymovement. His philosophy and actions canteach us a great deal today.

Minakata drawing of three monkeys

As for the latter — his actions — they weresometimes, in the thinking of the day, extreme.

APJ | JF 6 | 1 | 0

6

On Aug. 11, 1910, he barged into a meetingwhere of f ic ia ls were d iscuss ing the"development" of Wakayama timber, threw aportmanteau and a chair at some of them, andprotested vehemently against the travesty ofdestruction they were wreaking on his belovedforests. Fanatic, yes; passionate andcommitted, absolutely. And where did thisagitation opposing the greed and hypocrisy ofmuch "development" get him?

The police were called and Minakata wasarrested for "breaking and entering." In court,however, he was merely handed a suspendedsentence; after all, this celebrated native son ofWakayama had brought international renown tohis remote prefecture.

He wrote in his diary at the time:

"[The result of the official policy]would have been the laying towaste of every last native forest ofWakayama."

He was a flamboyant and iconoclastic man whostrove to honor what he saw as the nature-harmonious taboos of ancient Japan, embracingthem as he embraced his Western learning, asa methodology to husband, preserve and livewith nature. He was often seen dressed in nomore than a loincloth, carrying a hammer andan insect net, roaming the forests. (Minakatasuffered from hyperhidrosis, or excessivesweating, and often pranced about in hisnatural state.)

Minakata at 45 in 1910. Catalog of Exhibitat the Watari Museum

When Emperor Hirohito visited Wakayama in1929, Minakata was asked to deliver a lectureto him, apparently the first time this privilegewas ever afforded a commoner. After theEmperor left, with 110 specimens of slime moldin hand as an offering, Minakata wrote thispoem:

Oh breeze from the inletDo you realize the branches youare blowing through?This is a forest praised by theEmperor!

Minakata's life, from 1867 to 1941 (he diedexactly three weeks after the attack on PearlHarbor), spanned the greatest and mostdramatic era of change in the last 1,000 yearsof Japanese history. His "three ecologies" teachus that the fundament of scientific research is alove and respect for nature. To Minakata, whatthe eye sees, what the mind reasons and whatthe heart feels are one.

APJ | JF 6 | 1 | 0

7

On Minakata's death, the Emperor, who had ledJapan in its most fatal years of "development,"wrote of the island of Kashima in Minakata'snative province of Kishu (Wakayama):

When I gaze upon Kashima Isle,dim in the rainI think of the man that Kishu gaveto the world —Kumagusu Minakata

Minakata became one of the most heraldedheroes o f h is t ime. But h is greatestachievement may be that he lived his lifediscovering, protecting and fighting for thephenomena of nature that this country soassiduously and cynically destroyed in his dayand has continued to do so since. Minakata is,

in this sense, a heroic figure in more ways thanone.

This article is slightly revised from a two partfeature that appeared in the Japan Times onJanuary 13 and January 20, 2008. Posted atJapan Focus on January 20, 2008.

Roger Pulvers' latest book in English is Strongi n t h e R a i n(http://www.amazon.com/Strong-Rain-Selected-K e n j i -Miyazawa/dp/1852247819/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200795737&sr=8-2) ,acollection of translations of the poetry of KenjiMiyazawa, published by Bloodaxe Books, U.K.Author, playwright and director, Pulvers is aJapan Focus associate. His website is here(http://www17.ocn.ne.jp/~h-uesugi/).

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1852247819/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

Click on the cover to order.