at
Tokyo Imperial University, 1951 Tanakadate was born in Fukuoka hamlet, in what is now part of the city of
Ninohe in the northern
Iwate Prefecture, Japan. He was the son of Tanakadate Inazo, a teacher of
Jitsuyo, a
martial art, and his wife, Kisei. Tanakadate studied English at
Keio-Gijuku University starting in 1884, and graduated from
Tokyo Imperial University in 1882 with a degree in
physics. He developed a way to write Japanese in the
Latin alphabet called
Nihon-shiki or Nippon-shiki in 1885, later becoming president of the Japanese Romanization Society. In the lead up to the
World War II, he advocated directly for Nippon-shiki over Hepburn, eventually resulting in its adoption as the official Romanization standard by the wartime government. He visited Europe many times, and from 1888 to 1890 worked with
Lord Kelvin at
Glasgow University in Scotland, and with others in
Berlin in Germany. Tanakadate travelled widely in Japan from 1893 to 1896, making a survey of
gravity and
geomagnetism for geophysical research with
Cargill Gilston Knott. He founded the Institute of Seismology at Tokyo Imperial University. The
International Latitude Observatory (sometimes called the Astro-Geodynamics Observatory) at
Mizusawa was founded in 1899 as he had proposed. Tanakadate was also an early proponent of
military aviation. In the
Russo-Japanese War, he was an advisor to the
Imperial Japanese army on the use of
hot air balloons for
military reconnaissance purposes. This led to the establishment of an aviation laboratory at
Tokyo Imperial University. At a 1907 conference in Paris on the metric system, Tanakadate saw a model of early fixed-wing airplane, and extended his stay in Paris to study further. He founded a department on aviation at
Tokyo University. ==Recognition==