Japan’s extremely complex geology and mineralogy has fascinated me ever since I
worked in that remarkably civilized country in the 1980s, and it is still my favorite
destination for holidays and mineralogical R&R. Part of its attraction was the
challenge: Japan is one of the more difficult countries for American and European
mineral collectors and museum curators to get information and specimens. In spite
of the large amount of mineralogical research done in Japan, very little that is
relevant to amateur collectors or museum curators is published in european languages.
Museums, private collections and dealers’ catalogues outside Japan display a
horrifying level of erroneous labeling on their japanese specimens.
So in the year 2000 I started collecting information on japanese mineral
species - all of them, not just the famous stibnites and Japan-twinned quartz,
but even all the microscopic ugly ones that delight systematic species collectors.
Tony Nikischer (Excalibur Mineral Company) thought it would be a good idea to
publish this information in english as a book, and he volunteered to pay the
publishing costs; Dr. Jeff Weissman agreed to take lots of color photographs of
rare japanese minerals. Little did we realize how much data would be needed to
make such a book anywhere close to comprehensive; by 2003 it had already surpassed
500 pages of text, not including the several hundred photographs, but still
ludicrously far from meriting the label “comprehensive”, and I accumulate new
data faster than I can type it into the computer, and new specimens accumulate
faster than anyone has time to photograph.
Quality of the data has been an ongoing source of frustration. I hunt through
the literature in english and japanese (and occasionally even find interesting
tidbits in german); search out japanese specimens to describe in museums both in
Japan and abroad, and in private collections and on dealers’ tables at shows; I
mercilessly interrogate collectors and dealers at japanese shows (and I’m sure
some dealers, collectors and curators there already classify me as a pest!);
and I visit many japanese localities myself. The data is nevertheless often
unreliable, due in part to the language barrier. Japanese locality names are
notoriously difficult to render in our alphabet, being based on kanji ideograms
depicting meanings rather than phonetic sounds. (Western readers will be surprised
to hear that reading japanese locality names is often difficult for the Japanese
themselves, and even the transliterations given by Japanese mineralogists in
english-language journal articles can occasionally be wrong.) For example a realgar
“Saimoku mine” label (wrong reading) turned out to be the Nishinomaki mine
(correct reading); specimens from the “Hakumaru mine” (wrong reading) are from
the Shiromaru mine (correct reading) and sometimes the only way to find out for
sure which name is correct is to hunt up a local person to ask, which can be
time-consuming and expensive! Apart from the difficulty of determining the
correct reading of a kanji locality name, another common source of error has
been duplication of localities because one reference lists it under a mine name,
another reference uses the name of a hill or hamlet, or an old obsolete name for
the mine, and subsequent references wrongly assume all these are separate
localities (which of course is a problem in the literature of many countries,
not only Japan). Another source of error has been overly optimistic local species
collectors who show me “rare” minerals they have field collected and, after
entering a description under the appropriate locality, I discover it was really
some common mineral, misidentified. (I’m rather fanatical about analyzing rare
things, which often leads to grief. As my philosophical friend Kotaro Watanabe
points out, the happiest systematic collectors are the ones who never analyze
anything and just trust whatever the seller wrote on the label.)
So, as an experiment, I am making a small part of this work available to preview
on the internet, in the hope that my Japanese friends, and anyone else with an
interest in japanese specimens, will write to me with corrections, criticism and
more information. And if you have a japanese rock and want to know whether the
label is correct, write to me too – Some things can even be learned from erroneous
information (Ask any police detective!), and you might get your label straightened
out as a free public service. It must be stressed that only a relatively small
part of the available information is on this site, so don’t despair if your
favorite species isn’t mentioned yet; most of the references, the locality
glossary, and much of the geological information and mining history, remain to
be integrated into the text. So click here and start reading; See whether your
favorite japanese specimens are mentioned!
(Note that species are listed in alphabetical order and that within each
species section the localities are arranged by alphabetical order of their prefecture (state).)
