It is widely acknowledged that the earth science – in the comprehensive sense in which the once diverse discplines (geology, petrology, palaeontology, seismology, paleomagnetics and geophysics) were united in one single branch – was formulated as a result of the plate tectonics revolution in the latter of the 1960s. So, the term “earth science” has been usually thought to denote that united, comprehensive discipline after that revolution.

In this paper, I would like to point out that as early as 1942 in Japan, some idea of the comprehensive discipline “earth science” already took shape in the minds of several geochemists (Yuji Shibata 1882-1980 and Ken Sugawara 1899-1982) around Nagoya University. The science school of the university was founded in 1942, and the new department of “earth sciences” was established in 1949. In this paper I will delineat three distinguished stages through which the department emerged and evoloved.

The first stage was the planning stage. The plan of founding new “earth sciences” department occurred to the mind of Sugawara in 1942 when he travelled with Shibata. The idea was to “modernize” geological studies with physics and chemistry, as he himself wrote in his autobiograpgy.

In the second, founding stage, the new schools (Kyoshitsu) were added on and new staff recruited. Beginning with structural geology school in 1949, petrology/mineralogy school (1950), geochemistry school (1951), geophysics school (1953), and historical geology school (1968) were added on. Journal of Earth Sciences, the first journal which has the title “earth science” in Japan, was published from 1953. However, still the barriers between the schools were high, as the name of the department and the journal “earth sciences” symbolizes.

The third, growth stage marked substantive developments toward “earth science”. A pioneering figure of this movement was Yasuo Shimazu (1926-) who advocated the “seamless” viewpoint in earth science. His book Evolution of the Earth appeared in 1967, which tried to go beyond morphology of the earth surface and inquiry into the evolution of the whole earth using the language of physics, while rejecting the traditional division of geology, geophysics and geochemistry. The year 1967 was exactly when the plate tectonics revolution was proceeding.