Kimura is asteroid #6233 and also known as 1986 CG. Kimura was discovered by Inoda Shigeru (伊野田 繁) and Urata Takeshi (浦田 武) at Karasuyama, Nasu, Tochigi, Japan. Kimura’s orbit is characterized by a semi-major axis of 2.79 Astronomical Units, an eccentricity of 0.18, a period of revolution of 1 706 days, and an inclination of 6.8 degrees. Kimura is a member of the Hirayama-family Dora.

Miyagi, Funakoshi and Matsumura aren’t named after the famous karateka (空手家). So the hope that the asteroid Kimura could be named after the famous jūdōka (柔道家) Kimura Masahiko (木村 政彦), inventor of the even more famous Kimura-lock, was little. Asteroids don’t use to be named after sportsmen. I nevertheless had to risk a look.

Kimura is named after the astronomer Kimura Hisashi (木村 栄). He lived from 1870 until 1943 and he, too, is so famous that the research was easy. A 28 km large impact crater on the Moon is named Kimura after this astronomer too. Far side of the Moon, southern hemisphere. The research conducted by Kimura Hisashi (木村 栄) aimed at predicting and finally preventing (at least the impacts of) earthquakes. This is still very far from becoming achieved. But Kimura Hisashi (木村 栄) already found some correlation between earthquakes and the Chandler wobble, discovered by Seth Carlos Chandler in 1891. This correlation is seen in the geographical latitudes, where earthquakes appear. Kimura Hisashi (木村 栄) was from 1899 until 1941 the director of the International Latitude Observatory in Mizusawa. He improved the description of the pole shift and introduced for this a mathematical term, which is known as the z term or Kimura term.

The family-name Kimura (木村) is translatable as wood village. This could hint to an origin of the family in a place, where people used to become lumberjacks traditionally. Kimura (木村) also is the name of a fictional woman in Marvel’s X-Men. She was introduced in 2005 and deceased in 2017. This is all much too late for being relevant here. Kimura (木村) was chosen as her name only because it is a frequent Japanese family-name. A Kimura disease also exists. This is an inflammatory disease of the neck, described first in China in 1937 and is still far from being understood.

Being able to calculate something long before it is understood became quite common in physics nowadays. Kimura Hisashi (木村 栄) introduced the z term or Kimura term in 1902. The name z term is because it added a dimension and changed a two-dimensional calculation into a three-dimensional calculation regarding the Eulerian nutation (Yes, these words exist. Remember that you are never better in astrology than you are in astronomy!) of the Earth. While an improvement in the calculation results could be seen immediately, an explanation for this was found not before 1970 in a paper by a Scientist named Wako. This explanation is that the calculation before used the model of a rigid Earth, while the z term considers that all materials, even if they are as hard as rock, still have some elasticity, which becomes relevant if the dimensions reach the dimensions of a planet. So Kimura indicates a non-obvious flexibility.