Masashi Tazawa (Japanese 田 沢 仁, Tazawa Masashi; born January 12, 1930, in Yokohama, Japan) is a botanist, notable for his physiological, biophysical and cell biological research on characean cells.
On August 15, 1945, at noon, the 15 year-old Masashi Tazawa and the other students of the Preparatory Course of the Naval Payofficer's School assembled in the auditorium to hear the Emperor's voice, which happened for the first time in history.
The Emperor told the people that he decided to accept the Potsdam Declaration issued on July 26, 1945.
Exhausted from training, Tazawa often cut classes at school, which resulted in getting poor grades.
Tazawa entered the Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science at Osaka University in 1950, at the age of 20.
The first chairman of the Biology Department, Professor Shiro Akabori, a distinguished protein biochemist, told the first undergraduate students at the entrance ceremony “Our new Biology Department places great emphasis on analyzing the biological phenomena on the basis of physics and chemistry.” Along this line, Akabori invited excellent biologists to be Professors in the new department.
Hideo Kikkawa, who was well known for his discovery that the pigment found in Bombyx eggs is formed in the tryptophan - kynurenine–3-hydroxykynurenine pathway, chaired the laboratory of genetics.
Professor Kikkawa proposed the so-called one gene-one enzyme hypothesis in 1941, of George Beadle and Edward Tatum.
Professor Kamiya who had stayed in William Seifriz’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania from 1939 to 1942, and who revisited the USA in 1950 on the invitation of Seifriz told his students after his return to Osaka that biology in Japan was at least ten years behind that of USA.
In order to finish the undergraduate course and to get a bachelor's degree, Tazawa had to do research for one year.
Since the trend of research in Professor Kamiya's laboratory was physically oriented, Tazawa asked him to be his mentor.