In 1882, he joined a French government-organized observation of the transit of Venus on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, he also visited some observatories in the United States.

[2] Following his return, he became an assistant chief of staff for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

He helped found The Tokyo Academy of Physics and became its first principal.

He was a proponent for the romanization of the Japanese language, and in January 1885 he along with Masakazu Tomoya, Ryōkichi Yatabe, Yamakawa Kenjirō, Naokichi Matsui, Arikata Kumamoto, and Jirō Kitao, ˆfounded the Rōmaji-kai (羅馬字会, "Romanization Group").

In 1883, 17-year-old Japanese artist Kuroda Seiki studied French under Hisashi Terao, and passed the entrance exam for the French course at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages.