was a Japanese entomologist. He authored numerous texts and was one of the founders of entomology in Japan, responsible for training a generation of Japanese entomologists, and founding the journal ''Zephyrus''. He published numerous papers on the insects of

Micronesia Micronesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, consisting of about 2,000 small islands in the western Pacific Ocean. It has a close shared cultural history with three other island regions: the Philippines to the west, Polynesia to the east, and ...

and was especially interested in aquatic insects and erected the family

Helotrephidae Helotrephidae is a family of aquatic bugs found mainly in the tropical regions with many species in the Oriental Realm The Indomalayan realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms. It extends across most of South and Southeast Asia and int ...

along with W.E. China. Esaki was born in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

and grew up in

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of ...

. He went to Seventh Higher School Zoshikan (now

Kagoshima University , abbreviated to , is a Japanese national university located in Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. History The university was established in 1949 consolidating the following schools because of educational reform in occupied Japan. * - e ...

) and went to Tokyo Imperial University (now

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project b ...

) in 1920 and received a Ph.D. in 1930. He worked extensively on the heteroptera and focused on the Micronesian region. From 1923 he taught at the College of Agriculture, Kyushu Imperial University, Fukuoka. He left the next year and lived in Europe for about four and half years during which time he learned to speak German, Hungarian, Italian, French and Esperanto. He worked with G. Horvath on hemiptera at Budapest; in 1926, he worked at the Zoological Museum of Academy of Sciences of USSR in Leningrad. He married Charlotte Johanna Hermine Witte in Germany in 1928. They moved back to Japan in 1929 and he became a professor of entomology in 1930 at Kyushu University. His major contribution to entomology was the series ''Insects of Micronesia''. He also founded the Japanese journal ''Zephyrus''.

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