The physicist Ukichiro Nakaya (1900–1962) is renowned in Japan for his contributions to snow and ice science and for his outstanding achievements as a writer and film maker. His meticulous field observations and his laboratory investigations led to seminal discoveries about snow crystals. Notably in 1936 Nakaya produced the world’s first artificial snow crystal created in a cloud chamber. This allowed him to determine the systematic dependence of snow crystal shapes on the conditions at formation, a result now summarized in the widely known “Nakaya diagram”. In the 1950’s Nakaya began collaborations with the US Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment investigating the properties of glacial ice, notably including fieldwork in Greenland during the pioneering years of the deep ice coring project there. Nakaya was a very prolific writer of essays published in Japanese magazines, and his essays were often republished in book collections, many still in print today. His writing for the general public about science has led to his reputation as “The Carl Sagan of Japan”, but his writing extended more broadly to many areas of culture. Nakaya was also a pioneer in making educational documentary films and he was instrumental in the formation of a major film studio in Japan.</p> <p>This article was initiated to mark Nakaya’s 125th anniversary year and aims to introduce his life and achievements to a broad international audience. We review Nakaya’s biography and highlights of his scientific career, and include some brief discussion of the Japanese cultural context for his scientific work. We recount some particularly dramatic aspects of Nakaya’s life which was shadowed by the great historical developments of his era, notably the Second World War. We also review his contributions to Japanese literature of his time. We sample a handful of Nakaya’s articles written for the general public in order to convey the scope and flavour of his literary <em>oeuvre</em>. We describe in detail two of Nakaya’s most ambitious magazine essays: “World of the Black Moon” and “World of the White Moon”, which are of particular interest as vivid first person accounts of middle 20<sup>th</sup> century research field trips (to Hawaii and Greenland, respectively). “World of the White Moon” is also notable for including a very early description for the general public of the issue of anthropogenic climate change.