Noriko Kamakura

Noriko Kamakura (鎌倉 矩子; September 29, 1939 – June 16, 2023) :22 was a practitioner, researcher, and academic leader in occupational therapy. She was in the initial generation of people who became occupational therapists in Japan. She greatly influenced how occupational therapy developed in that country, contributing especially in clinical approaches to persons with central nervous disorders of executive functions. In addition, she explored function of the hand in enough detail to develop a system of taxonomies that can account for the vast majority of postures and movements of the hand.

Education 1958: Graduated from Nagano Prefectural Suwa Futaba High School. 1962: Graduated from the University of Tokyo with a major in health and nursing. In her third year, an impassioned lecture by an orthopedic surgeon on the need for physical therapy and occupational therapy in Japan left a strong impression. This encounter with a neurologically complex patient enkindled interest in an area that would become a major part of Kamakura's career: central nervous disorders involving higher functions. Kamakura saw a wider variety of patients, generally adults, than the predominance of cerebral palsy in the children she had seen at Seishiryōgoen. She worked most frequently with stroke patients, giving her ample opportunity to hone her skills and develop ideas for addressing problems of higher functions of the central nervous system. :v Since she had been working with children and adults with central nervous impairments, her interest in the hand went well beyond structural and kinesiological problems of the hand itself to include how brain damage could affect posture of the hand as well as speed, smoothness, and pattern of hand movements. As she put it, her interest was in what the hand does. The results led her to investigate more deeply just what it is that hands normally do. She first looked at excursion of the wrist when healthy people handled different objects, This series of studies, based on photographic and cinematic records of hands in numerous activities, lasted over a decade, ultimately yielding a system of taxonomies capable of precisely describing most normal postures and movements of the human hand.

Kamakura also engaged in studies on central nervous disorders of higher function, particularly apraxia and agnosia. She began with small numbers of patients, carefully analyzing their dysfunctions and attempting interventions targeted specifically at the problems she exposed. She then narrowed her investigative thrust to unilateral visual neglect, a problem frequently seen in left hemiparetic patients with lesions in the right cerebral hemisphere. She began those studies with an investigation to identify factors underlying the symptoms. Subsequently, she was to find that among patients with right hemispheric lesions, those who exhibited marked left-sided neglect had three notable characteristics. One was that the visual field that they covered when looking for something was relatively narrow as well as skewed to the right. Another was that their saccades were smaller in amplitude in all directions. And finally their methods of visual searching were more haphazard. From this Kamakura inferred that the unilateral neglect in these patients was not simply a neural block-out of the left visual field, but involved more general problems of neural dysfunction and of ability to attend to visual tasks. Understanding the scope of these patients' problems, she believed, would have implications in considering intervention.

(1986–2008) Academic Leader In 1986, Kamakura left the research institute to become a faculty member at the newly established Tokyo Metropolitan College of Allied Medical Sciences. Her decision was based in great part on encouragement to do so by the orthopedic surgeon who had inspired her in her undergraduate years (and who had also supervised her doctoral thesis). While at the Tokyo Metropolitan College of Allied Medical Sciences, she also published a book :195

1996: Service award from the Japanese Association of Occupational Therapists [日本作業療法士協会の協会表彰]