Among our greatest pleasures and richest memories are the friends we make. Takashi was one of those life-long friends whose generosity and kindness impacted my life.

In 1985, I first met Yura-sensei at the Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) Heat Shock Meeting. His work on the bacterial heat shock response (HSR) and sigma 32 (RpoH) would shape how I would think about the regulation of the human heat shock response. Heat shock genes had only recently been discovered across all kingdoms from bacteria to humans and there was growing evidence that these newly identified heat shock proteins were also important in biological processes fundamental to life in all species. The suggestions that the HSR and heat shock proteins could be relevant to human biology and human diseases was subsequently highlighted in the November 1987 Banbury Conference at CSH to discuss possible roles for heat shock proteins in biology and disease. I remember well Takashi’s presentation at this meeting on the GroEL protein that was essential for bacterial growth above 20 °C and the proposed analogy with a mitochondrial homolog involved in assembly or maintenance of a structure in the mitochondria. It was at this Banbury Conference where I was able to spend more time talking with Takashi and to appreciate his encouragement, generosity, and kindness.

Shortly thereafter in 1990, Takashi organized the first meeting in Japan on the topic of the heat shock response—the Kyoto Symposia on Bioscience on The Role and Regulation of the Heat Shock Response. This was a wonderfully exiting meeting that was to have a lasting impact on the Japanese scientific community as research on protein dynamics and cell stress responses have now become among the most prominent and influential areas of biomedical research in Japan. This seminal meeting was the first in a series of outstanding meetings held in Japan on cell stress responses, molecular chaperones, and heat shock proteins and diseases on protein misfolding in aging.

For many years, Takashi served as the director of the Institute of Virus Research at Kyoto University where he trained a number of outstanding researchers including Koreaki Ito who has also contributed his memories to this volume on Takashi Yura. Upon retiring from Kyoto University in 1993, Takashi was invited to form the Heat Shock Protein (HSP) Institute in Kyoto where he continued a very successful research program. I remember a visit to his new institute in July 1993 where we discussed possible directions and a long discussion on eukaryotic cell stress responses. Takashi had the brilliant insight to recruit Kazutoshi Mori who was returning to Japan from his postdoc in Texas, where upon Kazu made the seminal discoveries on the transcriptional mechanisms of the unfolded protein response, that together with Peter Walter has received widespread scientific recognition.

In May 2000, upon Takashi’s second retirement from the HSP Institute, his friends and colleagues came together at CSH for a Festschrift on the Regulation and Function of Heat Shock Proteins to celebrate Takashi’s contributions. It was a particularly fitting and touching tribute that this retirement was marked by holding a scientific meeting that covered topics on protein folding and the regulation of the heat shock response.

However, rather than to even consider retiring, Takashi returned to the bench as a “super-postdoc” in Koreaki Ito’s laboratory at Kyoto University where he continued to make contributions on the bacterial heat shock response and the regulation of sigma 32 by the signal recognition particle and membrane targeting. In 2010, when Koreaki Ito and Kazuhiro Nagata moved from Kyoto University to form the Institute of Protein Dynamics at Kyoto Sangyo University, Takashi joined them as a “super-postdoc” to continue his research and to mentor the next generation of young researchers.

All throughout these years, I had the pleasure to meet frequently with Takashi to discuss science but as well as to enjoy a meal, and with my wife Joyce to enjoy the beauty of Kyoto. I close with a memory of Takashi from hanami (flower viewing) at the Kyoto Botanical Garden.

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At Cold Spring Harbor symposium. From left, Rick Morimoto, Betty Craig, Takashi Yura, and Kaz Nagata