Japanese botanist with a special interest in the Himalayan flora. Hara, who became a professor of botany at the University of Tokyo, was interested in plants from a young age. In 1931 he published a list of plants found on the campus of his Tokyo high school, Gakushuin, from collections he had made while a teenager.

Hara's research in the first part of his career focussed on the origins of Japanese plants and their relation to the flora in adjacent regions. He produced many taxonomic papers based on field studies and much work relating to the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Between 1948 and 1954 he published three volumes on Japanese flowering plants, Enumeratio Spermatophytarum Japonicarum, which became a standard reference work in Japanese botany.

Hara's other research focus was the flora of the Himalayas. He organised four collecting expeditions to the mountain range in the early 1960s, visiting Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan in search of material. He compiled The Flora of the Himalayas (1966) based on this field work, and travelled again to Nepal in 1969 and 1972. A supplement to the flora appeared in 1971 and in 1976 his work on the botany of the region was recognised with the Prince Chichibu Scientific Prize. He was also elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society. Hara travelled to the British Museum in London to help with the compilation of An Enumeration of the Flowering Plants of Nepal (1978-1982) in the 1970s, a sojourn subsidised by the wealthy plant collector Adam Stainton. He was also editor of the first two volumes of the Flora of Eastern Himalaya.

In the latter part of his career Hara turned to continental China, initially making contact with Chinese botanists to establish cooperative working relations before carrying out field studies. In his last years as Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo, Hara was immobilised from the waist down by a degenerative disease. He nevertheless made two more trips to Bhutan and China in 1984 and continued to edit the Japanese Journal of Botany. He described many new plants, including more than 40 new Nepalese species and four new genera.

Sources:
H. Kanai, 1987, Newsletter of Himalayan Botany, 2: 1-4
S.B. Malla and P.R. Shakya, 1988, Newsletter of Himalayan Botany, 3: 1-7.