102 James F. Crow
Having passed the difficult entrance examinations, Kimura was admitted to the
prestigious National High School in Nagoya. There he was fortunate in having as
botany teacher, M. Kumazawa, a distinguished plant morphologist. Recognizing
Kimura’s ability, Kumazawa encouraged him to work in his lab. Cytology was of
central interest in Japan at the time and Kimura soon began a serious study of
lily chromosomes. Kumazawa also taught a course in biometry and for the first
time Kimura realized, to his pleasure, that there was a place for mathematics in
biology. He also enjoyed physics and his hero was the famous Japanese physicist,
Hideki Yukawa. Despite his work in mathematical genetics, Kimura never lost his
love of flowers. Much later, he used the royalties from a book we wrote together
[Crow and Kimura, 1970]to build a greenhouse and grow orchids.
While Kimura was in high school, Japan was deeply involved in World War II.
After finishing a war-shortened curriculum in 1944, Kimura was admitted to Kyoto
Imperial University. The best-known genetics faculty member was Hitoshi Kihara,
famous throughout the world for his studies on the evolution and cytogenetics of
wheat. One would expect that Kimura would have joined Kihara’s group in the
Faculty of Agriculture and studied cytology. At this time, however, students in
the Faculty of Science were exempt from military duty, so Kimura, at Kihara’s
instigation, enrolled in botany.
Although he was not directly involved in the war, Kimura’s life was not easy.
There was never enough good food and he disliked the troublesome military drill.
Fortunately, the war ended during Kimura’s first university year, and he was then
able to move to Kihara’s laboratory. Civilian life after the war, if anything, was
worse than before. On Sundays Kimura regularly visited a cousin who lived in the
Kyoto suburbs and had more and better food. He was a quantum physicist, and
the scientific talk was a welcome dessert for a much-appreciated meal.
Kimura’s first paper in Kihara’s lab was an analysis of the distributionof chro-
mosome numbers in successive generations of backcrossing[Kimura, 1950]. Kihara
was an enlightened leader and the world of population genetics can be thankful.
He recognized Kimura’s unusual mathematical ability, so he assigned no specific
duties and permitted him to study on his own. Kimura took advantage of this
opportunity and began a systematic review of mathematical genetics. Sometimes
this necessitated a trip to the library of the University of Tokyo, a long, slow
train ride, very hot in the summer. Kimura especially admired Sewall Wright
and, since there was no copy machine, he laboriously hand-copied Wright’s classic
63-page article[Wright, 1931]. It is fascinating to examine this copy, for Kimura
frequently added clarifying notes and already was thinking of alterative derivations
and mathematical improvements.
In 1949 Kimura joined the staff of the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima.
He immediately plunged into research and the first annual report, issued in 1950,
had five of his contributions. Nevertheless, it was a lonely time. No one in Mishima
understood the work and few cared for it. Furthermore, for Kimura, Mishima was
a rather uninteresting place; he missed the rich cultural life in Kyoto.
One person who did appreciate his work was Taku Komai, who had studied