I wish to express my gratitude to the late Mr. Fumon Hayashi, the late Professor Kazuro Hanihara of the University of Tokyo, Dr. Bin Yamaguchi, Emeritus Researcher, of the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, the late Professor Hajime Sakura of the Sapporo Gakuin University, and Emeritus Professor Yukio Dodo of Tohoku University for guiding me at various stages of my research in physical anthropology.  I would also like to thank Ms. Akiko Nakatsuka for her technical assistance in collecting a great amount of data used here, and many other colleagues for their various kinds of help.

    I am also grateful to Salford Software Ltd. and “kito” for kindly providing their very useful software, FTN77 and CPad, respectively, via the Internet.

    Finally, I thank my wife, Yoshie, for her constant help and for having had a long wait for me.