It became obvious fairly quickly that we could not photograph every Japanese Neogene type. Even the ones within Tohoku University were not always present or were broken beyond any recognition. There were also quite a large number of species described at other places by workers now either retired or deceased and unfortunately many of these holotypes are either lost or taken home by individual workers, not placed in a national museum. Hence some species that may be familiar to western workers are not illustrated in our collection simply because we could not obtain specimens. We apologize in advance for some of these omissions. We were fortunate to obtain some specimens from the National Science Museum (Tokyo, Shinjuku Branch) which we did illustrate and discuss here.
We did not include some foraminiferal groups in this publication because the species are usually relatively rare and there is no agreement in the field about their taxonomy. These groups include all the unilocular forms (e.g., Fissurina, Oolina, Lagena), the miliolids, and most of the polymorphinids. In addition, most of these species are too small to be adequately photographed with the SLM system.
We tried to limit our project to photographing original holotypes. However, some holotypes are more than 70 years old and have been etched by previously used mounting techniques. This has made some specimens difficult to base species identifications on, but we have included them because they are holotypes. In these cases we have included the comments of Hasegawa and Takayanagi describing some of the distinguishing features that are not visible on the holotypes.
Sometimes more than one specimen on a slide was labeled as "holotype". For those, Scott selected a "syntype" for illustration that he thought was most representative of the specimens.