The subjective assessments of the affinities for the Japanese Neogene species illustrated in this paper are detailed in the taxonomic section, but we summarize some of the findings in this section.
In this paper we describe 145 species: 80 species that in our opinion appear to be distinct species, 47 that are junior synonyms of older forms described in either the Japanese or European literature, and 18 species about which we were unsure.
We disagreed among ourselves about the placement of some species, but that is the nature of subjective taxonomy; these differences in opinion between the authors are discussed under those species. Some specimens were too badly preserved for us to make a precise identification.
Two species that we describe are prominent in North Atlantic deep-sea faunas: Tosaia hanzawai Takayanagi (often confused with Eggerella bradyi Cushman) and Epistominella takayanagii Iwasa, which has previously been called a variety of names, all of them incorrect.
At least two Japanese species names are senior synonyms of some common North Atlantic forms and therefore take precedence over them: Cassidulina sagamiensis Asano and Nakamura (1937) is the valid name for Islandiella islandica Nørvang (1945) and Pseudononion japonicum Asano (1936b) is the valid name for Nonionella atlantica Cushman (1947).
One species that we must discuss here even though we did not photograph or examine the types is Eponides nipponica (Kuwano) (Matoba 1967). This particular species is a problem because the author is deceased. Although Scott retrieved Kuwano's holotypes from the National Science Museum, many of his specimens, including Eponides nipponica, were not in the slides because the slides did not have cover slips. Takayanagi discussed the issue with Matoba, who assured us he had seen Kuwano’s original type and had actually encouraged him at the time to publish his then-unpublished species in the 1967 paper. Subsequently, many workers have used the name E. nipponica for a common species in the North Atlantic, which is certainly Eponides weddellensis (Earland 1936), by others referred to Alabaminiella. Because Eponides nipponica is a junior synonym of E. weddellensis, the latter should be used as the valid name for this common deep sea species.