Yoichiro Hirase (1859-1925) was among the first wave of Japanese amateur scientists to emerge in the late Meiji Era (1868-1912). Their goal was to collect, describe and classify Japan’s flora and fauna using Western methods and references, often under the guidance of visiting teachers from abroad. Hirase’s early mentors in his study of mollusks included the Americans John T. Gulick (1832-1923) and Marshall R. Gaines (1839-1924), both of whom lived in Japan for extended periods. A convert to Christianity, Hirase learned English to a high level and became a well-known figure in the foreign community in Kyoto. Conversations with Gulick around his groundbreaking work on evolution among the land snails of Hawaii and the Pacific Islands inspired Hirase to investigate the terrestrial mollusks of Japan with similar questions in mind.

As an established and successful trader in seeds and agricultural supplies, Hirase had both financial resources and a nationwide network of clients whom he could recruit to collect and send him specimens. He also dispatched his own employees on collecting expeditions to the ends of the Japanese Empire, from Taiwan in the south to Sakhalin in the north, to the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands and into Korea and China. With the help of his American friends he established an international business as a specimen shell dealer, providing the first such service for overseas buyers and quickly dominating the market for Japanese shells.

Hirase also supplied scholars overseas with study material that they described as many hundred species new to Western science. Chief among his collaborators was Henry A. Pilsbry at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, with whom Hirase co-authored the descriptions of roughly 300 new species between 1902 and 1909. Several others also described species based on material received or purchased from Hirase during this period, continuing the tradition of dealers encouraging science that stretched back to the eighteenth century.

At the height of his activity, Hirase opened his Conchological Museum in Kyoto (1913) and published The Conchological Magazine (1907-1915) as well as several books. His chief assistant was Tokubei Kuroda (1886-1987), whom he had hired at age 15 and who subsequently built on more than twenty years’ service with Hirase to become the doyen of Japanese malacologists and collectors.

His business and science apart, Hirase was also a keen artist and gifted calligrapher. His large house in Kyoto incorporated both traditional Japanese and contemporary Western architecture and featured a glass-roofed artist’s studio. His first art book, Kaigara Danmen-zuan (1913), was a collection of patterns for fabrics and wallpapers that he created by cutting shells and arranging their sections in geometric layouts. Starting in the 1880s, a strong enthusiasm for Japan’s artistic traditions arose among early resident foreigners such as Edward Morse, Ernest Fennollosa and William Bigelow, who sought to reverse the growing neglect of traditional art forms caused by rapid westernization. They particularly admired the achievements of pre-restoration woodblock artists in the Ukiyo-e genre, collecting classical works and commissioning new ones.

Many of the classical print works were compendia of flowers, birds, insects and other natural entities, often posed as in life with vivid color and detail. Encouraged by his friends’ interest, and possibly also the local revival of woodblock printing through the growing Shin-Hanga movement, Hirase undertook to produce a new ten-volume work that would illustrate a thousand shells using traditional methods for both the printing and binding.

The figures were drawn and colored by students in Kyoto from shells in Hirase’s own collection. Working in collaboration with his publisher, the Unsodo company, Hirase quickly produced the first three volumes, which appeared in 1914 and 1915. They were bound in orihon or “concertina” style, with boards covered in silk. For the title, Hirase chose 貝千種, three Chinese characters meaning, in order, “shell”, “thousand” and “kind”. The conventional reading of the second and third ones is sen shu, and as that reading was given in Unsodo’s 1915 English catalog, Kai Senshu is the published title of the work. However, the classically trained Hirase was likely alluding to the alternative reading chigusa, which was in wide use in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to mean a “compendium” or “treasury” of flowers or other natural things, and this reading is also commonly used in Japan.