Michiyo Tsujimura, born on September 17, 1888, and passed away on June 1, 1969, was a Japanese agricultural scientist and biochemist whose research focused on the constituents of green tea. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in agriculture in Japan.

There Is A Biography Of Michiyo Tsujimura.

Tsujimura was born in 1888 in Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture, now known as Okegawa. She graduated from the Tokyo Prefecture Women’s Normal School in 1909 and studied science at the Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School.

There, she was instructed by the biologist Kono Yasui, who sparked Tsujimura’s interest in scientific investigation. She matriculated from Yokohama High School for Women in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1913 and became a teacher there. She returned to Saitama Prefecture in 1917 to teach at Saitama Women’s Normal School.

Michiyo Tsujimura Profession

In 1920, Tsujimura began her research career at Hokkaido Imperial University as a laboratory assistant. At the time, the university did not admit female students, so Tsujimura labored for free in the university’s Department of Agricultural Chemistry’s Food Nutrition Laboratory.

There, she investigated silkworm nutrition before transferring in 1922 to the Medical Chemical Laboratory at the Medical College of Tokyo Imperial University.

The laboratory was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, so she transferred to RIKEN in October 1923 as a research student. He researched nutritional chemistry in the laboratory of the Ph.D. in agriculture, Umetaro Suzuki.

In 1924, Tsujimura and his colleague Seitaro Miura identified vitamin C in green tea. They published “On Vitamin C in Green Tea” in Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry. This discovery contributed to the expansion of green tea exports to North America.

Tsujimura isolated flavonoid catechins from green tea in 1929. In 1930, she extracted crystallized tannins from green tea. Her dissertation titled “On the Chemical Components of Green Tea” earned her a doctorate in agriculture from Tokyo Imperial University in 1932, making her the first woman to receive this degree. In Japan, to obtain such a degree.

In 1934, she isolated gallocatechin from green tea, and in 1935, she filed a patent for obtaining vitamin C crystals from vegetation.

Tsujimura retired from Ochanomizu University as a professor in 1955 but continued to lecture part-time until 1961. From 1955 to 1963, she was a professor at Jisun Women’s University in Tokyo, after which she became emeritus.

He received the Japan Prize of Agricultural Sciences in 1956 for his research on green tea, and she received the Fourth Class Precious Crown Order in 1968. He passed away in Toyohashi on June 1, 1969, at nearly the age of 81.

Source: Youths4success.com