From Takashi Tominaga

“Takashi-Kun,” I can still hear his soft, deep voice say. Yutaka or “Naitoh-sensei” is what I used to call him; it is something that never changed throughout the long time we knew each other. I first met him at the University of Tsukuba, as an undergraduate student in 1987. He was often asking me simple questions, like “Why do the colors of the rainbow number seven?” Did he think about physiology, cultural anthropology, or something else? I wondered what this great scientist was asking and could not find the meaning.

In the doctor course, he gave me the total privilege of taking over his electrophysiology rig; it had been built by his own hands for probably years. He gave me a one-day, hands-on training course on this setup; then I was allowed everything to improve (or destroy) the electrical circuits. He didn’t say anything, and I did not ask anything. He had a lot of handwritten memos about the designs, and I could use a new generation of operational amplifiers. After seven years of total freedom, we had built the fastest voltage-clamp amp for paramecium in the lab (and probably in the world). That was the most valuable experience I could have ever had in the graduate course.

One day in 1995, in his home at Tsukuba, he asked me to join him in a project showing a paper folder named “Project Don Quixote.” I took this offer immediately, and that was the start of a quest of the contractile vacuole physiology. He and Dr. Richard D. Allen were about to propose to NSF. I spent two years as a post-doc, a “Sancho Panza,” until forwarding the role to Tomomi Tani.

Naitoh-sensei was living in the next building of the UH faculty house. He said it was the first time he had lived alone, separate from his family. Every Saturday, my wife and I went to Daiei supermarket with Naitoh-sensei to buy groceries. He always bought a lot of fried fish, “Naitoh-sensei’s favorite.” He rarely complained about the food, probably because he spent his childhood in the post-war era but appreciated any foods like the occasional Gyoza-party in our apartment.

The big finding for him was the number of rainbow colors. There were six in Hawaii. I knew that it could be different in other cultures. Then, I realized that he was asking the number of colors in the rainbow, after all, believing that it should depend on a physical (or physiological?) law. That must be an appearance of his “childish” power of asking a question, and its pure and robust scientific mind still amazes me.

Years afterward, we had a chance to visit the University of Yamaguchi on Hori Manabu’s invitation. One day at the dormitory, I woke up and found Naitoh-sensei at the open deck very early in the morning in the still-chilly early summer. The auto-lock of his room made him stay outdoors almost the whole night. I was a bit worried about him because of his age (he was in his 80s), but he began explaining his new finding of the complicated sequence of cicadas’ voice. Regrettably, I can’t remember the theory. My astonishment in finding out his born naturalist spirit overwhelmed what he lectured to me in the next couple of hours.

The last email conversation from him to me was, “Such a smart solution is outrageous!” It was a reply to my mathematical explanation of how to calculate the degree of the phase of Venus (area of the sunlit portion of Venus). He was constructing his original formula to calculate the Venus phase on his photos taken with a digital camera on the roof of the care house. That makes me smile, remembering every conversation between us about science.

Naitoh-sensei, I miss such interactions very much.

2020-05-22 “Takashi-Kun,” Tominaga Takashi

2020-05-22