Yoshio Fujita

He served as president of the Astronomical Society of Japan from 1961 to 1963 and as president of IAU Commission 29 from 1970 to 1973. In 1994 he was elected president of the Japan Academy.

In 1950, Fujita began a 15-month stint in the United States at Lick Observatory and Yerkes Observatory. There he worked with George Herbig to obtain spectroscopic data and spent time blinking plates for Kuiper looking for asteroids. He then returned to Japan as a full professor, where he continued to work until he retired in 1969.

When World War II began, Fujita and the physics and astronomy departments and their students moved to Suwa, Nagano until 1945.

Fujita married Kazuko Nezu in 1941. They had three children.

In 1937 he was promoted to university lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University and collaborated with Toshio Takamine. Here he began his career-long work centered on spectroscopic studies of the sun, late-type stars, and carbon stars, and on improving instrumentation at the observatory.

In 1931, he became an assistant to Yusuke Hagihara at the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory (now the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan).

Fujita graduated high school in 1928 and went on to study mathematics and astronomy at the Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo). Between 1930 and 1931 he studied under the astronomers Yusuke Hagihara and Kiyotsugu Hirayama and executed an observational study of the spectrum of Eros at its close approach, using a small astrograph equipped with an objective prism. He graduated in the Department of Astronomy, Physics Division, in 1931.

Yoshio Fujita (藤田 良雄, 28 September 1908 – 13 January 2013) was a Japanese astronomer known for his contributions on spectroscopic observations of low temperature stars. He also served as president of the Japan Academy from April 1994 to April 2000.