Shinobu Ishihara

Shinobu Ishihara (1879 to 1963) was a Japanese ophthalmologist who created the Ishihara color test used to detect colour blindness, and he served as an army surgeon. He graduated in medicine in 1905 on a military scholarship, joined the Imperial Japanese Army as a doctor and later changed specialties to ophthalmology. At the Army Medical College he was asked to devise a test to screen recruits for abnormal color vision; his first charts were hand painted in watercolor and showed hiragana characters, and the numeral-plate test he published in 1917 became known worldwide. He also developed a Japanese visual acuity chart and a near point apparatus, and contributed to the study of trachoma and myopia. He was professor and chairman of ophthalmology at the Imperial University of Tokyo from 1922 to 1940, and received the Person of Cultural Merit distinction in 1961.