The 1993 Joseph A. Cushman Award for Excellence in Foraminiferal Research was presented to Prof. Yokichi Takayanagi. Prof. Takayanagi was born in Tokyo but grew up and received his education in Sendai, the most populous city in northeastern Japan. His scientific career started when he majored in geology and paleontology at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Faculty of Science, Tohoku University, and came under the influence of Dr. Kiyoshi Asano. His long and outstanding teaching career began immediately after graduation in geology and paleontology at Tohoku University. He joined the faculty at Tohoku University, receiving a full professorship in 1974, a position he held up to his retirement in 1990. He has continued teaching at Ishinomaki Senshu University and he still maintains an active research program with colleagues at Tohoku and Hokkaido Universities, as well as scientific cooperation with foreign colleagues (such as myself). During 40 years of teaching, Prof. Takayanagi has inspired and promoted the careers of a large number of students, many of whom have already achieved distinction in the academic world and industry at home and abroad. Not a few overseas scholars came to Sendai to study micropaleontology at Tohoku University under his guidance. His long and distinguished career, however, had already begun while he was still an undergraduate. In the year of his graduation, he published his first paper on Pliocene smaller foraminifera from western Sendai, shortly followed by more than ten papers on Neogene and Holocene benthic smaller foraminifera, published in the early 1950s, and several papers on Cretaceous to Cretaceous/Paleogene foraminifera, published in the late 1950s. Among them are challenging studies on the distributional ecology of Holocene benthic smaller foraminifera which are suggestive of unique features of his later scientific activities. At the same time, he developed a strong interest in the monographic work on Cretaceous benthic foraminifera of Japan, and was able to produce his major scientific achievement in the 1960s.

Professor Yokichi Takayanagi's scientific career is, on the whole, characterized by pioneering the way for researching smaller foraminifera in Japan. A significant synthesis of his research on foraminifera was made in 1960, under the title "Cretaceous foraminifera from Hokkaido, Japan" (Science Reports of the Tohoku University, Sendai, Second Series (Geology), vol. 32, no. 1), for which he was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Science. In 1965, he was also awarded the scholarship Prize of the Palaeontological Society of Japan for outstanding contributions to the study of Cretaceous foraminifera.

His first research trip abroad was to Stanford University, where he spent one year for foraminiferal research in 1961. He subsequently visited the Philippines and Taiwan for geological and paleontological reconnaissance in 1964. Since then he has been abroad once or twice every year to participate in international symposia, congresses, and workshops, including the International Geological Congress, the Pacific Science Congress, SCOR, IPOD, and ODP, and so he has consistently presented his up-to-date work to an international public.

After receiving his doctorate, he made efforts to modernize the study of Japanese micropaleontology, although his concentration at that time was largely in the monographic work of Japanese benthic smaller foraminifera. There are many trial studies that Professor Takayanagi ran in association with his students and other collaborators. First of all, in the 1960s, he expanded his research to include the study of planktonic foraminifera. During this period, he published several papers on biostratigraphy using of planktonic foraminifera and expanded the range of his interest over their origin/development, paleoecology/application, wall microstructure, paleogeography, and geographically, to California (Putah Creek subsurface section) and the Philippines.

In the 1970s, Prof. Takayanagi produced more than 70 publications, including six textbooks, and served as the editor of several books. During this period, he concentrated his attention particularly on the integrated microbiostratigraphy of the Neogene rather than the Cretaceous, employing datum planes defined among various groups of planktonic fossils in association with magnetostratigraphy and radiometric data, with the aim of establishing world-wide correlations and its application to a wide range of scientific subjects, including geohistory, stage problems, and the origin of the Sea of Japan. In addition to these new pursuits, he continued in the latter part of this period to publish several papers regarding Cretaceous microbiostratigraphy. He also wrote more than 20 review articles, covering topics in paleoclimatology, paleoenvironments, and paleoceanography.

In the 1980s, he moved on to "the Ocean Characteristics and their Changes," a multi-disciplinary project supported by the Special Project Research, Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of the Government of Japan. Prof. Takayanagi took charge of one division, "the Paleoenvironments on the Ocean Bottom During the Quaternary," in cooperation with many scientists in various fields, including his colleagues and students. During the course of this study, he first examined planktonic foraminifera from the surface of seafloor sediments from 180 stations in the marginal area of the Northwest Pacific, relating them with such environmental parameters as water temperature, salinity, and water depth, with an idea to formulate transfer function unique to the Northwest Pacific. In the later part of this work, Prof. Takayanagi managed to acquire material from an exploratory petroleum well, Sk-1, drilled in the shallow-waters off the coast of Kashima, toward the central part of the Main Island and examined the entire length of the well for sedimentology and micropaleontology, invoking transfer functions to numerically evaluate the paleoenvironments for the last several hundreds of thousands of years. Even in his other research of land sections, he often took care to have his assistants with him to construct the framework of high resolution integrated biostratigraphy by combining datum planes defined among various groups of microfossils and assessing its significance for paleoceanography.

At the end of the 1980s, Prof. Takayanagi brought together two monumental works: "The Checklist and Bibliography of Post-Paleozoic Foraminifera Established by Japanese Workers, 1890-1986" (Takayanagi and Hasegawa, 1987, Tohoku Univ.) and "The Foraminifera from the Japanese Islands" (Takayanagi and Ishizaki, 1989, Toko Publ. Dept., Sendai). These compendia represent the achievements of a century of study of foraminifera in Japan, and have raised the study of foraminiferal paleontology to a new level, thus encouraging further advances in the field.

In addition to an impressive research career, Prof. Takayanagi also helped shape paleontological studies in Japan with his administrative skills. He served as chairman of his institute for the greater part of the period from 1974 to 1987. At the same time he has filled many other important administrative positions at Tohoku University, as well as being active in many professional societies. He has been a councilor of the Palaeontological Society of Japan since 1971, the Editor-in-Chief of its journal "Fossils" for many years, and served as President of the Society from 1977 to 1978. In the meantime, he was a councilor of the Tohoku Geographical Society since 1987, and the Geological Society of Japan from 1975 to 1976. He has been or was a member or a liaison of some 25 national and international committees or commissions, including the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (International Council of Scientific Unions), the International Union of Geological Sciences, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the Liaison Committee for Paleontology, and the Liaison Committee for Physical Oceanography (Science Council of Japan), IPOD, KAIKO, and ODP. In addition to these numerous activities, he has served as either an editor or a foreign correspondent for Journal of Foraminiferal Research, Micropaleontology, Revista Espanola de Micropaleontologia, and Marine Micropaleontology.

Professor Yokichi Takayanagi has produced an amazing volume of excellent research that is summarized in more than 200 publications. These range over wide fields of earth science, but foraminifera have been his special interest; his studies of these creatures have earned him widespread recognition as a world-class investigator. This is represented by the following foraminifera taxa named after him: the genus Takayanagi and such species as Eggerella takayanagii; Epistominella takayanagii, Guttulina takayanagii, Nonion takayanagii, Pararotalia ? takayanagii, Psamminopelta takayanagii, and Chilostomelloides yokichii. Along with this, as a teacher, he maintained standards of excellence that have strongly inspired and promoted the careers of numerous students, disciples, and associates. As an administrator, he has launched, reformed, and influenced many organizations and journals.

Most recently, Prof. Takayanagi was the key organizer for Benthos '90 held in Sendai, Japan, and also co-edited a very fine proceedings volume from that conference. Prof. Takayanagi and the writer are presently putting together a colour atlas of all the available Neogene foraminifera described by Japanese workers in the last 100 years, hence Prof. Takayanagi is remaining very active. In electing Prof. Yokichi Takayanagi for the 1993 Cushman Award, the Directors of the Cushman Foundation have formally recognized his outstanding contribution to foraminiferology to which he has dedicated and continues to dedicate his enormous energy.

DAVID B. SCOTT
Center for Marine Geology
Dalhousie University

* Most of the factual material for this career summary was taken from an article written by Kunihiro Ishizaki, a longtime associate of Prof. Takayanagi, which was published in Science Reports of Tohoku University, v. 60, no. 2 (1990).

Journal of Foraminiferal Research, v. 24, no. 3, p. 145-147, July 1994