Yujiro Motora (1858–1912)

Yujiro Motora was a Japanese psychologist who introduced experimental psychology to Japan less than a decade after Wundt’s establishment of experimental psychology at Leipzig in 1879.

Motora was born into a samurai family in Japan (Sato & Sato, 2005). While attending Doshisha English School, Motora developed an interest in philosophy and psychology, which eventually lead him to studying philosophy at Boston University in 1883 (Sato & Sato, 2005). He later attended John Hopkins University as a graduate psychology student under the direction of G. Stanley Hall (Sato & Sato, 2005). Hall and Motora published a paper together on skin sensitivity in 1887, making Motora the first Japanese psychologist to have their name on a scientific paper (Sato & Sato, 2005). Upon his return to Japan in 1888, Motora was appointed as a lecturer on psychophysics at the Tokyo Imperial University, where he included demonstrations of psychological experiments in his lectures (Sato & Sato, 2005). Between 1889 and 1891, he published a series of papers titled “Psychophysics”, which contained the content of these lectures, including topics such as sensation, psychophysical measurement of sensory thresholds, attention, reaction times, etc (Sato & Sato, 2005). He was appointed Professor of Psychology at the Imperial University in 1890 and published the first textbook on scientific psychology in Japan that same year, titled Psychology 

Although Motora introduced experimental psychology to Japan in 1888 with his lectures on psychophysics, the first formal experimental psychological laboratory was established by Motora and Matataro Matsumoto in 1903 at the Tokyo Imperial University (Oyama, 2001). Motora called it a “psychophysical laboratory”, and defined psychophysics as the study of psychological phenomena from a physical perspective. In 1910, the university’s department of psychology published the Photographic Album of Experimental Psychology, which demonstrated the instruments and methodology of 37 psychophysical experiments that were conducted at this laboratory (Oyama, 2008). Motora’s main areas of interest were psychophysics, especially “attention and visual and tactile senses, philosophical theory of the mind, and educational and clinical psychology” (Sato et al., 2016). He identified psychological factors that were relevant to the field of education and believed that the reason for poor school performance for most children was due to difficulty concentrating as opposed to mental deficiencies (Sato & Sato, 2005). In light of this, Motora developed a training method, which included a device that he invented to train children’s attention, and experimentally tested this method’s effectiveness (Sato & Sato, 2005). Moreover, in 1902, he and his students established the Association of Child Study (Sato & Sato, 2005).

In addition to bringing experimental psychology to Japan, Yujiro Motora extended the umbrella of psychophysics to encompass a variety of psychological phenomena, and made great strides in the field of educational psychology.

References

Oyama, T. (2008). Development of psychophysics in Japan. Japanese Psychological Research, 50, 183–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5884.2008.00374.x

Oyama, T., Sato, T., & Suzuki, Y. (2001). Shaping scientific psychology in Japan. International Journal of Psychology, 36, 396–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207590143000225

Sato, T., Mizoguchi, H., Arakawa, A., Hidaka, S., Takasuna, M., & Nishikawa, Y. (2016). History of “History of Psychology” in Japan. Japanese Psychological Research, 58, 110-128.

Sato, T., & Sato, T. (2005). The early 20th century: Shaping the discipline of psychology in Japan. Japanese Psychological Research, 47, 52–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5884.2005.00273.x