>         An excellent querry and one I have wondered about myself. The son,
> Prince Masahito, has his name appended to several species along with
> Habe and Kuroda. I know that the Emperors collection was reputed to be
> one of the finest in the world. I imagine its future, at least, will be
> in Tokyo Museum.

The emperor Showa's collection (he is not referred to as Hirohito here, but
by his formal title) is housed in the Showa Memorial Institute in Tsukuba,
north of Tokyo. This is a specially-built annexe of the Science Museum
Tokyo, and contains a laboratory as well as the collections. It is not open
to the public, though visiting scientists can go and see it. I am due to go
up there and photograph all the molluscan types next month for use in our
forthcoming plates volume. The old emperor's collection, while certainly
large, is not particularly wonderful; there are a lot of hydroids and such
in bottles, as well as fish and other marine bits and bobs. He was more
into soft corals and hydroids than shells, I think. It was the custom among
collectors in the old days to send him shells, and he was chummy with some
of the more prominent amateurs; Ryosuke Kawamura, whose vast collection is
now in the Science Museum Annexe in Shinjuku used to see him regularly
(Kawamura, as founder of JCB - Japan's first and largest credit card
company - could afford to build a fair old collection), and of course
Tadashige Habe and Katsura Oyama (himeself the scion of an aristocratic
family, which he almost bankrupted buying up malacological libraries from
Europe in the fifties) were regular visitors to the Royal Lab at Hayama.