Photograph of the bust of Mataro NAGAYO before restoration (長与又郎胸像の保存処置前画像)

Photo credit: Akihito Suzuki, Professor of History of Medicine, University of Tokyo.

Life, Restoration and Fake of the bust of Nagayo Matarō (1878-1941)
Akihito Suzuki

Nagayo Matarō (1878-1941) was one of the elite medical professors in Japan in the earlier half of the twentieth century.  His father was Nagayo Sensai (1838-1902), who was one of the founders of Western medical administration and education in Japan.  The son Matarō was a student of pathology at the Imperial University of Tokyo and taught by Yamagiwa Katsu'saburō (1863-1930), a great pathologist who demonstrated carcinogenesis.  After studying in Heidelberg, Nagayo became the Professor of the University of Tokyo, the Dean of Medical Faculty, and finally the Chancellor of the Imperial University of Tokyo from 1934-1938.  Nagayo's busts were sculpted twice in 1934 and 1937 by Hinago Jitsuzō (1892-1945), who was the leading sculptor of Japan.

Nagayo's bust sculped in 1937 welcomes you at the medical section of INTERMEDIATHEQUE, the public facility operated by Japan Post Co. Ltd. and the University Museum, the University of Tokyo. It is very close to the Tokyo Station.  The bust is elegant, academic, and bright finish on the surface.  (Fig.1)  This was actually the restoration and/or the fake.  The original had been damaged through decades and had a different color.  The present curators have to create a restoration which looks like the original, but not actually the restoration but a different fake.  Just like Leonardo's Last Supper, you meet a restored and/or faked bust at the INTERMEDIATHEQUE.  At the cover, you witness a new and original mixture of busts in the past and the present.

Another dimension is the existence of an almost identical but still undiscovered bust.  The bust had the identical shape with the restored bust in the museum.  But it is a bronze bust and the museum bust is cement (which was a fashionable material around that time).  The duality of the material was due to the political situation in the 1940s.  The Asia-Pacific War created serious lack of metal for war and the government asked people and various institutions to give metal to the military through the Revised Metal Collection Act (1943).  The University of Tokyo was asked to give the bronze busts of great professors to the government.  Nagayo's bronze bust was one of the asked items and there was a series of discussions between the University and the government. We do not know how the story ended.  Some guessed that the bronze bust was brought to the government and the cement bust was created as its substitute, but this story is somewhat unlikely.  The bronze bust was perhaps not given to the government and still somewhere in the University of Tokyo.  If you find the bronze bust, you might be excited at the final appearance of the original, but then you will have another original, another restoration or another fake.  That might be the essence of life, science, and power in the history and politics of Japan in the twentieth- and twenty-first century.