Sanzaburo Kobayashi

Sanzaburo Kobayashi (also romanized as Sansaburo) (小林 参三郎) (1863 1926) was a Japanese surgeon. He founded hospitals in Hawaii and Japan, and also founded the Seizasha Dojo.

Biography Kobayashi was born in 1863 in Harima, Japan to a family of pharmacists. In 1883, he began to study medicine under Matsumoto Jun. Once he was licensed to practice in Japan, he decided to study abroad. He studied at the Cooper Medical College, then practiced medicine in San Francisco. He also traveled to England and Germany, where he later learned bacteriology. He, fellow Cooper graduate Iga Mori, and Matsujiro Misawa opened a small hospital in central Honolulu in 1896. The hospital later expanded and moved to Liliha, a neighborhood in Honolulu, in 1899. It was called the Japanese Hospital, but is not to be confused with the Japanese Charity Hospital that was formed by the Japanese Benevolent Society and later became the Kuakini Medical Center.

In 1901 Kobayashi fell gravely ill, and called for someone to give him his last rites. Yemyo Imamura came and prayed for him. When Kobayashi got better, he was so influenced by Imamura that he converted to Shingon Buddhism. He and his wife Nobuko also started the Seizasha Dojo. They suggested that conditions like neurasthenia could be treated by sitting quietly in the seiza position following Torajiro Okada's "Okada-shiki seiza" (Okada-style seiza) method. They claimed that doing so would calm and purify the patient's thoughts.

Kobayashi died in 1926.

Selected bibliography