Dear colleagues,

I would like to inform you that there are numerous shell books published in
Japan after those by Habe and his associates, although many of these are
sort of reworks of the older ones and some are of dubious quality
(particularly those field guides having photographs taken in the field
contain many identification errors).

At present, the standard reference book of Japanese shells is:
"Illustrations of Animals and Plants, 8. Shells" edited by T. Okutani (with
nine other authors) published in 1986 by SEKAI-BUNKASHA. More than 2300
species of all classes of molluscs are illustrated and described. Okutani
(with Habe) published two volumes of "The Mollusks of Japan" (vol. 1: Sea
snails, vol. 2: Bivalves, (land and freshwater, my addition) snails, squids,
octopuses, etc.) in 1983 (revised edition in 1990) published by Gakken. I
must add that these two volumes were published in slightly different form in
1975 for junior level users but were upgraded for general use.

Because Okinawa is located in the Indo-Pacific faunal region, we have a
large number of tropical species that are not well-represented in the shell
books published for mainland Japan. Thus there are several shell books that
illustrated Okinawan molluscs, published locally. The Marine Parks Center of
Japan published a series of illustrated guide books of marine organisms of
Okinawa and Volumes 4 and 5 of the series are for marine molluscs (published
in 1988 by Shinsei-Tosho). Kubo, H. and T. Kurozumi published "Molluscs of
Okinawa" in 1995 by Okinawa-Shuppan.

There is no English descriptions on any species in the above books but you
can find Latin names for each species.

Masashi Yamaguchi

-----Original Message-----
From:   Jiongtao HUANG [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Friday, January 21, 2000 6:55 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Japanese shell book

Hi, everyone,

I am so pleased to hear you are interested in Japanese shell book.
I have almost all of Japanese shell books.
But some items have been become very expencive.
I don't have "The Seashells of the World I and II" which was
wrote by Shikama and Horigoshi, in 1963, 1964.
They are so good books which have many pictures of shells.
And the descriptions of the shells are also interesting.
In Japan, the shell books are not be published so frequently.
So every Japanese collectors use the Kira's book and Habe's book which
They are even re-printed by 57 times!
I hope many new shell books will be published in the future. Especially
in Japan.

By the way, my site has been updated.

http://www.soft.ics.keio.ac.jp/~huang/cgi-bin/seashells.cgi

Best wishes,


-
Jiongtao
http://www.soft.ics.keio.ac.jp/~huang/

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