Dr. Yaichiro Wakabayashi, celebrated mining engineer and famous mineral col lector, was born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, on August 30, 1874. Soon after his graduation in 1889 from the Imperial University of Tokyo (presently, the Univer sity of Tokyo), he entered the Mitsubishi Company, Ltd. and started his career as a mining engineer at the Arakawa Mine, Akita Prefecture. In 1909, he was promoted to Director of the Mine and held. the position and then that of the Director of the Yoshioka Mine, Okayama Prefecture, for about seven years altogether. He returned to the Head Office of the Company in 1916, since held the heavily responsible post of Chief Engineer both in the Mitsubishi Company and in the Mitsubishi Mining Com pany, and contributed greatly to the developments of the mining technology in the first half of this century in Japan. He retired from the Advisory Board of the Mitsu bishi Mining Company in 1928, and after having enjoyed the happy rest of his days surrounded by his mineralogical friends, he closed his life in Tokyo in 1943 at the age of sixty-nine.
Throughout these years of his activities, Dr. Wakabayashi loved minerals as much as his work; minerals and his work constituted a perfect unity, which will well account for the fact that, though his mineral collection is by no means so exhaustive as other well-known collections in this country, it possesses distinctive merit of its own. Most of the specimens were strictly selected for the collection, not merely by their beauty and rarity, but through the collector's deep and keen insight into their scientific value.
On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of his birth, Dr. Wakabayashi donated his entire collection to the Mineralogical Institute of the Imperial University of Tokyo so as to offer the members of the Institute daily access to these precious speci mens. In fact, in reply to this generous deed of Dr. Wakabayashi's, Professor T. Ito, then Director of the Institute, immediately motivated research activities on these specimens by publishing a catalogue of the collection as the first thing. The results of intensive studies he and his pupils subsequently carried out have since crystallized into such volumes as " Beiträge zur Mineralogie von. Japan ", Neue Folge I and II (T. Ito, 1937), " Japanese Minerals in Picture ", Vols. 1-4 (T. Ito, 1941), and " Wada's Minerals of Japan ", Third Edition (T. Ito & K. Sakurai, 1947).
The Wakabayasbi Mineral Collection was transferred in 1966 from the Miner alogical Institute to the University Museum then founded in the University of Tokyo. The collection at its present status consists of 1,932 specimens of 182 species includ ing varieties, which have been classified according to Dana's system, and about 1,000 more specimens which are still awaiting further investigations. According to a detailed survey one of us (M.B.) recently carried out at the Museum, some thirty species have been newly identified in the collection, among which we mention such new minerals as djurleite, stannoidite, ikunolite, parasymplesite and yugawaralite. It should specially be recorded in this respect that the new mineral Wakabayashilite named after Dr. Wakabayashi himself is contained in the collection, labelled as orpiment.
In consideration of the progress of our recent survey mentioned above, we lately came to the conclusion that in order to vitalize further studies of these minerals in this collection, it would perhaps be appropriate now to publish some short notes on them by giving a brief description to each of the well-established species, together with photographs of important ones. We have since been engaged in the preparation of this volume, only to realize how little we two know about the nature of these minerals, and though we managed to complete the manuscript, we must admit that this volume is in all probability infested with errors and defects. If anything true and useful are to be found in it, these should totally be ascribed to the assiduous and painstaking efforts of our predecessors. Therefore, we wish first of all to express our sincere gratitude to Professor T. Ito, M.J.A., for his outstanding achievements in this field of mineralogy and his constant encouragement given to us, which have indeed been the indispensable guide throughout the course of our present work, and for his special permission to reproduce in this volume a number of figures from his books. Our sincere thanks are also due to Dr. K. Sakurai and Dr. A. Kato who gave us many valuable suggestions. It is our great pleasure to extend our special thanks to Mr. Hidemichi Hori and to record here that all the photographs in this volume have been taken by his expert hand. Finally, we acknowledge the helpfulness of Mr. Masahiro Aoki and Mrs. Hitomi Bunno in giving us their assistance in the prepara tion of our manuscript.
November 1, 1973
Ryoichi SADANAGA
Michiaki BUNNO
