Several episodes, never printed except in Japanese, related to the young days of Yonezo Morino are documented. Stories highlight how his personal contacts with his teachers and colleagues and his studies and experiences in spectroscopy, quantum theory etc. had influenced his early works on gas-phase electron diffraction (GED).
KEY WORDS:Gas-phase electron diffraction; Raman spectroscopy; rotational isomerism; Yonezo Morino; San-ichiro Mizushima.
PROLOGUEIt is widely known that Yonezo Morino was the driving force in early studies of GED in Japan. It was indeed Morino et al. who published most of the papers on GED from Tokyo and Nagoya until other Japanese authors, who were mainly his one-time associates and students, followed him after 1950s [1].Morino contributed an article [2] to the book published by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) celebrating 50 years of electron diffraction, in which he included a brief introductory section on the early stage of his GED work. He also published several stories from his recollections as essays or records of his speeches, but most of the latter items were printed in Japanese. So the present article is intended to put forward a few of these anecdotes hidden behind his formal scientific papers [1].