We studied the roots of Japanese environmental education, which is called conservation education, focusing on the key persons and movements from its beginning until the middle of the 1970s.
  Dr. Jukichi Shimoizumi first used the phrase“conservation education” in Japan and propagated it in the 1960s-70s, especially in teacher-training based on ecology and nature sensibility education. As he worked entirely within the education and research world, he could not gain an awareness of the parties concerned with the environmental problem and continued to have an optimistic view that the knowledge of nature would automatically lead people to conservation.
  Mr. Godo Nakanishi contributed toward creating the cultural basis and methods of conservation education through nature watching without the collection of organisms as specimens.
  Mr. Hitoshi Kaneda and Dr. Toshitaka Shibata established conservation education in the latter half of the 20th century in Japan. They developed methods of nature watching in the outdoors by way of ecological and ethical ideas, instead of the method of traditional nature education or science, such as collecting and making specimens. They promoted nature ethics and the belief that nature was of public concern, and emphasized the importance of conserving nature, using it wisely, and maintaining its productivity for the next generation. This idea was born in their conservation movement from the 1950s and the first proposal of sustainability.
  Dr. Kiyoshi Ogawa tried to innovate field watching for conservation from the 1960s. He presented field watching concerned with not only nature, but also with the regional environment including history, culture and human living environments. His idea was reproduced in conservation movements in rural and urban regions of Tokyo through the 1960s-1980s.
  This process of the establishment of conservation education in Japan shows the pioneering viewpoint of ESS, which has been regarded as the largest key phrase in environmental education in the world after the 1990s.