Tanenari Chiba

Tanenari Chiba (1884 -1972) founded psychological laboratory of Tohoku Imperial University, Japan 1922 (Maruyama 1999) and was its first professor. He had studied under Wundt at Leipzig from 1921 to 1922 and modelled the laboratory on the German one. The main focus of study was consciousness.

Chiba had bought a large proportion of Wundt's library (some 16,000 books and papers)while on his travels and they are now housed in the University Library. Chiba was able to purchase the library for 20 000 yen (equivalent to about 70,000 US dollars ), despite stiff competition from American universities, because he received financial support from a charitable Saito family in Sendai. Chiba's calligraphic account of his triumph still survives in a Japanese style Sumi ink notebook called `Daifukucho' with his critical comment that ``Money circulates in the world temporarily, but the books would be treasure over thousands of years''.