午夜剧场

It all started when I was in high school. In the biology club, I helped my advisor with a survey on the distribution of bryophytes. At the time, an invasive species of liverwort called *Lunularia cruciata* was rapidly expanding its distribution in suburban areas across the country, and our entire school was involved in a survey to investigate the situation. As I helped, I became fascinated by the beauty and intrigue of bryophytes, which were surprisingly unknown even to people knowledgeable about plants and nature, and I began to study them.

When you specialize in something like bryophytes, which are not directly useful to human life, people often ask, "Why?" "How come?" or "What got you started?" So, I find myself giving this explanation every time. When I say I've been interested since high school, people either think I'm quite eccentric or are strangely impressed, but it wasn't as if I was single-mindedly dedicated to bryophytes from the start. I thought I was making flexible career choices at each stage, such as choosing my department or going to graduate school, but a combination of various coincidences and circumstances led me to drift into the path of bryophyte research.

Although my encounter with them was by chance, bryophytes are fascinating, albeit unassuming, organisms. In particular, the beauty of bryophytes is something I want many people to know about. While the carpets of moss spreading across Japanese gardens and subalpine forest floors are beautiful, this "collective beauty" is not all. The appeal of bryophytes also lies in the intricate "structural beauty" of their stems and leaves when viewed up close with a hand lens, and the "microscopic beauty" at the cellular level observed with transmitted light through a light microscope. You can enjoy them by viewing them in the field, by getting close and peering at them, and by taking them home to enjoy under a microscope—bryophytes offer three kinds of enjoyment in one. Biologically, they have many unique features not found in other plants, and I believe they are organisms that expand the possibilities of plant science.

My specialty is bryophytes, but at 午夜剧场, I use this expertise as a foundation to introduce the incredibly broad diversity and long evolutionary history of the biological world in my lectures. In our daily lives, we may not often be conscious of the fact that the world, from right under our feet to the farthest corners of the Earth, is teeming with diverse organisms, and that we ourselves are sustained within the complex and delicate balance of these living things. For all the students who will take on leading roles in society, I hope you will acquire a rich perspective on nature and life that is not just a fantasy, so that you can confront issues such as environmental problems.

(Interview conducted in December 2013)

*Profile and position are as of the time of the interview.