In Memoriam: WGI Fellow Soichi Ichimura
Soichi Ichimura (Japan), long-time fellow at the Willibald Gebhardt Institute, has left us forever. The WGI, and Roland Naul in particular, enjoyed a decades-long friendship and connection with Soichi Ichimura. After completing his studies in psychology at the University of Illinois, USA, he became a university professor of sport psychology at the Institute of Sport Science at the internationally renowned University of Tsukuba in the 1970s. He worked at the University of Tsukuba until 2001. After his retirement in Tsukuba, he worked for another decade at the Department of Clinical Psychology at Seitoku University in Tokyo, starting in 2003.
Ichimura, with his excellent knowledge of German culture and language, visited Germany, became a member of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Sportpsychologie (asp)” (Working Group for Sport Psychology) and engaged in lively exchanges with colleagues at the University of Trier (Prof. Dr. Peter Schwenkmezger) and the German Sport University Cologne (Prof. Dr. Jürgen R. Nitsch). This was followed by numerous joint visits and sports science work in Germany at the WGI in Essen in the 1990s and, after 2010, also in Münster. Since the beginning of the German-Japanese symposia on sports science in January 1995 in Berlin, Soichi Ichimura has been a prolific supporter of these symposia and has actively co-organized almost all of them in Japan and Germany over the past 30 years, regularly contributing his own scientific papers in cooperation with Japanese and German colleagues (Roland Naul, Dieter Teipel, Bernd Strauß, Maike Tietjens). One focus of Soichi Ichimura’s studies was comparative cultural studies between Japanese and German athletes, with a focus on coping with stress and emotions such as anger and fear.
As a promoter of German-Japanese sport science, he was able to invite Dieter Teipel to the Institute of Sport Science in Tsukuba as a ‘foreign professor’. This enabled several joint international projects to be carried out and publications in German and Japanese to be produced. Soichi Ichimura’s scientific work also included translations of German-language textbooks on sport psychology and sport education into Japanese and reviews of German publications in Japanese journals. In these fields, he was one of the foremost experts on German sport science in Japan.
With the passing of Soichi Ichimura, not only has the WGI lost an outstanding Japanese sport scientist as a “fellow,” but we have all lost a friend and promoter of German-Japanese cultural and scientific exchange.