Fig. 1

Yoshizo Koyanagi (1880–1954). Yoshizo Koyanagi was born in the Tokyo area in 1880. He graduated from Kyoto Imperial University, one of the seven imperial universities founded after the Meiji restoration and modernization of Japan, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the twentieth century. These universities were established in Tokyo (1886), Kyoto (1897), Tohoku University in Sendai (1907), Kyûshû University in Fukuoka (1911), Sapporo (1918), Osaka (1931) and Nagoya (1939). In 1914, Koyanagi published the first article in Japanese on the disease that would eventually bear his name. He described two patients with all the characteristics of VKH disease. In 1915, he became the first Professor of Ophthalmology of Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, 300 km north of Tokyo. The lower part of the figure shows the title page of his ground-breaking article, which was published in the Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheikunde, in the German language. That article described 16 cases of VKH disease, where he revealed the natural course of the disease. At the time, to gain international exposure, Japanese authors mostly published in German journals, because the medical doctrine and structure were built on the German system; many professors and numerous doctors completed their training in Germany. Koyanagi passed away in 1954 and was buried in Sendai, after having been dissuaded from his wish to have his ashes spread in the Bay of Matsushima, off Sendai