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Michiyo Tsujimura: Google Doodle celebrates Japanese scientist on her 133rd birthday

Michiyo Tsujimura's research focused on the components of green tea and found the answer to why tea tastes bitter when it is steeped for too long

Google on September 17, Thursday dedicated its Doodle to biochemist Michiyo Tsujimura on her 133rd birthday. Tsujimura's research focused on the components of green tea. Her research also found the answer to why tea tastes bitter when it is steeped for too long. Google has previously dedicated its Doodles to various personalities like Kadambini Ganguly, Angela Peralta, Ludwig Guttmann, Ildaura Murillo-Rohde and more.

Tsujimura was born in 1888 in Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture, Japan, and attended Tokyo Prefecture Women's Normal School. Later, she studied at Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School, where she was mentored by the biologist Kono Yasui, who inspired her to pursue her interest in scientific research. She graduated in 1913 and went on to become a teacher.

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While spending her early career in teaching science, Tsujimura dreamt of becoming a scientific researcher. Her dream came true in 1920 when started analyzing the nutritional properties of Japanese silkworms at Hokkaido Imperial University. She worked there as a laboratory assistant, at a time when the university did not accept female students. She worked at the Food Nutritional Laboratory of the university's Agricultural Chemistry Department in an unpaid position.

A few years later, she began researching the biochemistry of green tea at Tokyo Imperial University. When the laboratory was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, she was transferred as a research student to RIKEN in October 1923. She worked alongside Dr Umetaro Suzuki, known for discovering vitamin B1. 

“Their joint research revealed that green tea contained significant amounts of vitamin C, the first of many yet unknown molecular compounds in green tea that awaited under the microscope. In 1929, she isolated catechin, a bitter ingredient of tea. Then, the next year, she isolated tannin, an even more bitter compound. These findings formed the foundation for her doctoral thesis, ‘On the Chemical Components of Green Tea’ when she graduated as Japan’s first woman doctor of agriculture in 1932,” the Google Doodle page says. Tsujimura went on to become the first Dean of the Faculty of Home Economics at Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School in 1950. Okegawa City houses a stone memorial in her honor.

Fo her research on green tea, Tsujimura received the Japan Prize of Agricultural Science in 1956. She has also conferred the Order of the Precious Crown of the Fourth Class in 1968. She died at the age of 80 in Toyohashi on June 1, 1969.