Yasushi Nawa - Personal History

Personal History

Nawa was born in the Motosu District of Gifu Prefecture (present day city of Mizuho) and had a strong affinity to bugs even in his youth. In 1878, he entered into the Gifu Agricultural Learning Center (which later became the Gifu Prefectural Agricultural School and is now the Gifu Prefectural Agricultural High School) and stayed on at the school as an assistant after he graduated in 1882. On April 24 of the following year, 1883, he discovered a new butterfly in the present day Kanayama-machi in the city of Gero. He called the new butterfly the Gifu Butterfly (Luehdorfia japonica).

In 1886, Nawa entered into Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) and earned his junior high school teaching license in half a year, after which he began teaching at junior high and elementary schools in Gifu Prefecture. After a decade of teaching, he founded the Nawa Insect Research Center in 1896, where he studied protection of beneficial insects, extermination of harmful ones and termite control. Finally, in 1919, he establish the Nawa Insect Museum, which is currently located in Gifu Park in the city of Gifu.

Read more about this topic:  Yasushi Nawa

Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or history:

    “In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state.... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
    —E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)

    “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
    —F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)