Dear Members of the Zoological Society

At its board meeting on Saturday, June 7, the Zoological Society of Japan received a recommendation for a candidate from the Zoology Education Award Selection Committee. Following careful deliberation, it was decided to confer the award to member Tatsuo Motokawa of the Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. 

Number of applications: 4
Education Award Selection Committee: Kiyokazu Agata, Yoshitaka Oka, Ryoichi Matsuda, Hiroyuki Takeda, Ryusaku Deguchi 

Reasons for recommendation to the board of directors 

Written by Tatsuo Motokawa (Professor at the Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Tokyo Institute of Technology), "Time of Elephants, Time of Mice" (Chuko Shinsho), since its first edition in 1992, has printed 820,000 copies and is a best-selling/long-selling book that still prints 10,000 more copies every year. There is no other zoology book that has been so widely read by the general public for this long. It was the first in Japan to introduce and explain biological scaling to the general public, making people clearly realize for the first time the importance of size and that time is not something measured only by clocks, thereby having a major impact on how Japanese people view nature. Expanding further on this biological view of time, Motokawa applied it to the time of human social life in "Time: The Biological Perspective and Human Lifestyle" (NHK Publishing, 1996), and then further developed his thoughts in "A Biological Theory of Civilization" (Shincho Shinsho, 2011), which reexamined modern society not only from the perspective of time but from a biological standpoint, tackling the various problems facing modern society from a biological perspective. This serves as a strong message from the fundamental field of zoology against the current state of science, where attention is focused solely on making life materially richer and more convenient through technology, thereby greatly appealing to society the importance of zoology. His educational activities for primary and secondary education are also wide-ranging. In addition to publishing textbooks, reference books, and picture books, he writes, composes, and performs biology songs, and has released a reference book with a CD to learn high school biology content through 70 original songs. Furthermore, he has given numerous guest lectures and intensive courses at elementary schools (20 schools), junior high schools (5 schools), high schools (46 schools), and universities (52 schools). Notably, his guest lectures taught through singing are a unique activity that conveys the fun of zoology to the next generation. In this way, while active as a front-line zoology researcher for many years, giving lectures every annual meeting of the Zoological Society of Japan, Motokawa has concurrently carried out outreach activities alongside graduate and undergraduate education. We hereby recommend him to the Board of Directors as a person fitting for the Zoological Society of Japan Education Award. 

Selection Committee Chairman Kiyokazu Agata