Origins of Japanese primatology and Kinji Imanishi

My first mentor, Kinji Imanishi (1902–1992), was the founder of Japanese primatology. He was a bio-social anthropologist as well as ecologist, zoologist, entomologist, Himalayan mountaineer, explorer, and philosopher. His primary interest was the structure of the biological world, including human society (Imanishi 2002; Japanese original published in 1941).

From 1932 to 1942 he made several geographical and anthropological expeditions to Sakhalin, northern Korea, Mongolia, and northeastern China. From 1944 to 1945 he established the Seihoku (Northwestern) Research Institute at Choukakou and studied the ecology of pastoralists and their livestock in Mongolia. He returned to Japan at 1946 after the end of the Second World War in 1945 (Saitoh 1989). Finding no funds to conduct research outside of Japan, he began a study of the society of free-ranging horses indigenous to Japan at Toimisaki Point, Miyazaki Prefecture, in 1948. He identified and named each horse and investigated grouping patterns and social interactions among them.