Thread by @hildabast

#tbt This is Toshiko Yuasa, the first woman physicist from Japan. It's 1940 & with her science prospects at home blocked by gender prejudice, she'd managed to get into wartime Paris to do physics research... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiko_Y…

...The drawcard in Paris was Marie Curie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie & her husband Frédéric. Yuasa was inspired by their papers on artificial radioactivity.
Here's Toshiko & Irène at the Joliot-Curie home in 1941... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ir%C3%A8n…

...Yuasa was born in downtown Tokyo in 1909, the next-to-youngest of 7 children. Her mother came from a long line of poets, in the family of a renowned 19th century scholar, Tachibana Moribe. Her father was an engineer & inventor who worked at the patent office...

...In 1931 she became the first woman to study physics in Japan, at the only university that accepted women students. Yuasa graduated in 1934, publishing her first paper that year too.
She'd applied to get to Paris before the war started & gained a degree there...

...When the Allies landed at Normandy, as a citizen of an enemy country, Yuasa had to leave. She went to Berlin, where she built a double-focusing beta-ray spectrometer. She got back to Japan just before the atomic bombs fell, via Trans-Siberian Railway, with her spectrometer...

...Under US occupation, Japanese scientists weren't allowed to study nuclear physics. So she taught young women scientists - 3 of whom became physics professors, & lobbied for the 1st women's university. In 1949 she returned to Paris to be able to research..

...Yuasa lived in Paris for the rest of her life, & celebrated in Japan. She became a chief researcher @CNRS. There's more on her work in theoretical & experimental physics here: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…
In 1962, she gained a PhD from Kyoto University for a thesis on beta-decay...

...Here she is in 1978, aged 68. She'd been coping with stomach cancer for a few years & died in 1980.
On the day she died, she heard a project she'd been promoting was funded: it was carried forward by Joliot-Curie's daughter & a scientist from Kyoto... archive.mith.umd.edu/gcr/text/text_…

...Yuasa also painted, wrote poems, popular essays about Paris, & advocated for French-Japanese collaboration. There's a prize in her name to enable young Japanese scientists to study in France.
More on her life: lib.ocha.ac.jp/archives/en/re… // 🧵 end