Ryugo Matsui (born 1964) is a Japanese scholar of comparative culture, a professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Ryukoku University, and director of the Minakata Kumagusu Archives. Born in Kyoto Prefecture, he left the doctoral program at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences before completing it and later earned a doctorate there through a dissertation. He taught at the University of Tokyo and was a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge before joining Ryukoku University. His research focuses on Minakata Kumagusu and the ways encounters with other cultures shaped Japanese intellectual life. He has spent many years examining Kumagusu’s books, correspondence, and reading notes. In “Minakata Kumagusu: Fukugan no Gakumon Koso,” a study of Kumagusu’s approach to scholarship from multiple perspectives, Matsui examines the relationship between the East Asian natural history Kumagusu encountered as a child and the evolutionary theory, anthropology, and folklore he studied in the United States and Britain. Through Kumagusu’s “London Extracts” and correspondence with the Buddhist priest Toki Horyu, he traces the development of the “Minakata Mandala,” which connected scientific inquiry with Buddhist thought. The book won the Kadokawa Foundation Academic Prize in 2017. His biography “Kumagusu-san, Sekai o Aruku.: Boken to Gakumon no Mandara e,” about Kumagusu’s travels and intellectual pursuits, follows his childhood in Wakayama, student life in America, journey to Cuba, research in London, and subsequent studies of slime molds and forest conservation work in Japan. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Matsui looks beyond anecdotes about an eccentric genius to reconstruct the daily pleasures of reading, travel, and observing living organisms through which Kumagusu developed his scholarship.
