He was born in Ono, a small port village of Kanazawa Japan, on December 7, 1925. He received a doctorate in the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Tokyo in 1954. He taught at Meiji University, Japan from 1954 to 1958. In 1958, he went to the United States to work in the Department of Materials Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He became a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering in 1966 before his retirement in 1996, and also held an appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
