was a Japanese educator. He was a pioneer of education for visual and hearing-impaired people in modern Japan, and has been called "the De l'Épée and Gallaudet of Japan". He initially taught at the Taiken Primary School in Kyoto and began teaching deaf students there in 1873. His teaching methods were published in a governmental publication several years later. He founded the ''Kyoto Moain'' (later

Kyoto Kyoto ( or ; Japanese language, Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan's largest and most populous island of Honshu. , the city had a population of 1.46 million, making it t ...

Prefectural School for the Blind and Kyoto Prefectural School for the Deaf) in 1878, and developed the origins of

Japanese Sign Language , also known by the acronym JSL, is the dominant sign language in Japan and is a complete natural language, distinct from but influenced by the spoken Japanese language. Population There are 304,000 Deaf and Hard of Hearing people who are abov ...

. Furukawa was featured in a

Google Doodle Google Doodle is a special, temporary alteration of the logo on Google's homepages intended to commemorate holidays, events, achievements, and historical figures. The first Google Doodle honored the 1998 edition of the long-running annual Bu ...

on March 26, 2015.

References

1845 births 1907 deaths Japanese educators Educators of the deaf {{Japan-bio-stub