Motora Yūjirō

Early life Motora was born into a samurai family in Sanda, Sanda Domain (modern day Hyōgo), to Yutaka Sugita and Suga (Motoyama) Sugita, and he had an older brother. He was attracted to psychology after reading a textbook written by physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter.

In 1883, Motora came to the United States to study philosophy and theology.

Work with G. Stanley Hall Dissatisfied with his education in Boston, Motora went to Johns Hopkins University to study under experimental psychologist G. Stanley Hall.

Beginning in the mid-1880s, Motora translated new theories of Western psychology – such as the James–Lange theory and Wilhelm Wundt's three-dimensional theory of feelings – for publication in Japan. Though he had translated Wundt's work, Motora came to believe that emotion was a product of only one dimension: pleasure versus displeasure. Motora earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1888.

Academic career Coming back to Japan after his doctoral studies, Motora became principal of the Tokyo Eiwa School. Shortly thereafter, he also took a part-time faculty position at Tokyo Imperial University. In 1889, Motora presented a lecture on evolutionary theory at the Tokyo Eiwa School, but the lecture ran afoul of their religious tradition established by Methodist missionaries. Motora resigned from the school, devoting his attention to lecturing full-time at Tokyo Imperial University.

In 1903, with the assistance of one of his former students, Matatarō Matsumoto, Motora set up Japan's first formal laboratory in experimental psychology at the university. They had a spare room in Motora's office building that could have been used for research, but the acoustics of the room created too much noise for psychological experiments, and soon Motora and Matsumoto converted a 12-room house from the school's pathology department into a psychology lab.

Motora was named a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Second Class.

Protégés Several of Motora's students became prominent academics. In 1906, Matsumoto established the psychological laboratory at Kyoto University, which was the second formal psychology lab in Japan. Chen Daqi, who came from China to study under Motora, was later responsible for the first Chinese psychology laboratory and psychology textbook.

Yoshihide Kubo studied with Motora at Tokyo Imperial University before going to Clark University, where Hall had become president. When he joined the faculty at Hiroshima University, Kubo adapted the Binet-Simon intelligence test for Japanese use. His study of intelligence was furthered by another Motora pupil, Tohru Watanabe, who created Japan's first group intelligence test. Hiroshi Hayami, who also studied under Motora, brought word of behaviorism to Japan. Later, Hayami became president of Keijō Imperial University. To prevent further damage to the department's reputation, Matsumoto removed all abnormal psychology lectures from the curriculum, focusing the department's teaching and research on psychological phenomena that could be measured through objective means. The other Imperial Universities also deemphasized the teaching of abnormal psychology through the 1930s.

Death Motora died in Tokyo on December13, 1912, at the age of 54. He had been sick with erysipelas for several months but had remained active in psychological research until just before his death. He and his wife had five children.