A bust of a Japanese anatomy teacher who was Chinese author Lu Xun's mentor was unveiled Tuesday in a Beijing museum dedicated to modern China's best-known and most important author — 103 years after the two first met in a medical school in Sendai.

Lu Xun (1881-1936), whose real name was Zhou Shuren, studied at Sendai Medical School, now the medical school of Tohoku University, from September 1904 to March 1906, and there met anatomy teacher Genkuro Fujino (1874-1945). Recalling his dedicated mentor, Lu Xun later described Fujino as one of the people who had moved and encouraged him the most.

When Lu Xun left the school, Fujino gave him a photograph of himself with the words "Sekibetsu (the sorrow of parting), Fujino," on the back.

In 2006, to mark the centenary of Lu Xun's departure from the medical school, Beijing's Lu Xun Museum and Fujino's native city of Awara, Fukui Prefecture, agreed to exchange busts of Lu Xun and Fujino. Awara unveiled on March 23 the bust of Lu Xun sent from the museum.

Zhou Lingfei, Lu Xun's grandson, attended Tuesday's unveiling ceremony at the Lu Xun Museum and read a speech written by his father, Zhou Haiying. Hitoshi Onishi, vice rector of Tohoku University, and a delegation from Awara led by Mayor Tatsuya Hashimoto, were among the Japanese representatives at the ceremony.

The unveiling of Fujino's bust in Beijing followed a Lu Xun exhibition which Tohoku University held toward the end of August.

On June 21, the university unveiled different busts of Lu Xun and Fujino, and then Chinese Ambassador to Japan Wang Yi attended the unveiling ceremony.

In another event in Beijing related to the unveiling of Fujino's bust, Izumi Omura, an economics professor at the university and head of its Lu Xun study group, disclosed the result of his recent studies — that the first Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto was based on a Japanese translation of the famous 1848 socialist booklet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Omura said that Chen Wangdao, who had studied in Japan, translated it into Chinese in 1920 from the 1906 Japanese translation by Toshihiko Sakai, a pioneer in Japan's socialist movement. He said this episode is related to the fact that during the Qing dynasty period and the early 20th century, many Chinese students came to Japan to acquire Western knowledge and technology, because after the Meiji Restoration, Japan had acquired such knowledge and technology faster than China.

Lu Xun was one such Chinese student, and Fujino helped and encouraged him. Every week he corrected notes Lu Xun took in his anatomy class, even correcting his Japanese grammatical errors. Lu Xun received such inspiration from Fujino that in 1926 he published a story entitled "Fujino Sensei" ("Professor Fujino").

Lu Xun's six anatomy notebooks are kept at the Beijing museum as a national treasure. Tohoku University has been given electronically created copies of the notebooks.

Although Lu Xun first wanted to serve the Chinese people through medicine, his ideas changed while studying at the medical school and he decided to serve them through literature, which he believed would help nurture independent and critical minds. Thus, he became an author known for his sharp criticism of social problems in China, which at the time was struggling to modernize and democratize itself.