Department of Forest Botany

This department’s herbarium, also known as TOFO, houses more than 140,000 specimens of woody plants and other 45,000-odd of items. These were collected primarily from Japan and partially from East Asia and other places; they include some 300 type specimens and related historical collections. The department’s first holdings were the collections of Mitsutaro Shirai (1863–1932) and Seiichiro lkeno (1866–1943), former professors in the Institute of Botany (College of Agriculture, Imperial University of Tokyo) and ca.700 specimens collected from China by E. H. Wilson, A. Henry and other British before 1901 which include type specimens of some important Japanese tree species (Fig. 1), as well as wood specimens collected by Mitsunaga Fujioka (1885-1955) in the Laboratory of Forest Utilization (Department of Forestry). Taizo Inokuma (1904-1972) in the Laboratory of Forest Botany (Department of Forestry, Faculty of Agriculture, The University of Tokyo) also contributed with plant and wood specimens from New Guinea and overseas University Forests which were located in Sakhalin, Korea and Taiwan.

As a result of continuous studies on Japanese forest tree species by this department, five volumes of “The Illustrated Important Forest Trees of Japan” (1964-1976) with species descriptions, color illustrations, distribution maps and essays were authored by Satoru Kurata (1922-1978) who succeeded to T. Inokuma. He also named more than 400 species, varieties and hybrids of ferns and built a Pteridophyte herbarium including more than 250 type specimens, which is one of the best in the country in the sense of its wide coverage of taxa and localities. The wood specimens (Fig. 3) and permanent preparations of wood tissue for anatomical studies comprise about 20,000 items covering important timber species of the world.

At present, only the 60,000 herbarium specimens of dicots are housed in UMUT. The conifers, bamboos, ferns and wood specimens are housed in the Department of Forest Science, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Type specimen of Prunus tenuiflora Koehne collected by E.H. Wilson in 1900	Kurata, S. (1964) Illustrated Forest Trees in Japan, Vol. 1
	Wood specimens

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