A buttercup plant: Japanese library edition. Tell me more, please.

August 8, 2017 9:12 AM

Record 1,000,000,000 (one billion) in OCLC's WorldCat is a plant in the buttercup family. The original entry in Chiba University repository is (both Japanese and English versions) mostly in Japanese, which unfortunately I don't speak. Struggling with Google Translate. Can you provide more information in English on this particular plant and/or catalog entry?
posted by Wordshore to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

Best answer: I don't read/speak any Japanese either, but I think I have it figured out.

The meta-data is fairly minimal no matter what language, and it's pretty clear to me that that this item was never cataloged down to species level (or if it was it was lost).

The alt title is simply "Ranunculus sp." The full title in Japanese is just キンポウゲ属, which is exactly the Japanese characters used to represent the genus Ranunculus, see ja.wikipedia entry here, en.wikipedia entry here. The line below the family name (Ranunculaceae) is the name of the collector, "萩庭丈壽 ", i.e. "Hagi Kazuyoshi".

Below that is the collection place, It was collected in Shibecha, Hokkaido. It was collected on 1974/7/23. The two fields below that are just two different reference numbers in two different systems. The final line is "remarks" and google translate spits out "Supplemented by preparation cooperation association", my guess is that's some sort of acknowledgement of what institutions supported or funded the collection.

The tweeter did kind of flub it though, Ranunculus is a genus, not a family, the buttercup family is Ranunculaceae. Saying "in the buttercup family " is not wrong, but it sort of implies that it's not a simple buttercup (every Ranunculus sp. can be safely called a buttercup.) E.g., you could say your rose bush is "a plant in the rose family", but most people would just call it a rose.

So what we have here is simply a buttercup, picked in July of '74, pressed for science, scanned in later. Which type of buttercup, some experts may be able to determine by inspecting the specimen, but probably the best you'd get is an educated guess. Perhaps someone who really cares can track town Kazuyoshi and see what kind of project this was collected for, but since both of those can be surnames (I think) and the original works may well be in Japanese, I can't turn up much with google scholar.

Sometimes a buttercup is just a buttercup :D
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:56 AM on August 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I think it's part of a collection associated with Dr. Joju Haginiwa of Chiba University.

If you do a Google search for Haginiwa Dataset or Google Images search for "萩 庭 丈 壽" you can see other specimens from the collection.
posted by adiabatic at 11:26 AM on August 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: 原著和名: ヤンバルガラシ ハマガラシ
Original/Japanese name [Yanbarugarashi Hamagarashi]

科名: Ranunculaceae = キンポウゲ科
Family name: Ranunculaceae = Kinpouge family [but see other commenters for botanical expertise, which I don't have]

採集者: 萩庭丈壽
Name of Collector: Niwaba Jouju*

採集地: 北海道 川上郡 標茶町 (北海道 釧路 標茶町 )
Collection Site/Location: Hokkaido Prefecture, Kawakami District, Shibecha Town (Hokkaido Prefecture, Kushiro Subprefecture, Shibecha Town)

採集日: 1974/7/23
Collection Date

整理番号: JH000276
Entry Number (for organization/curating)

国立科学博物館整理番号: TNS950276
Entry Number in the National Museum of Nature and Science System

備考: DB作成協力会による補足あり
Notes: Support from DB [database?] Creation Support Committee

*Japanese names can have individual variations in reading (i.e., the same Chinese characters are not always read the same; hence why other commenters read the name as Haginiwa Kazuyoshi etc.); this "spelling" comes from https://www.hanasanpo.org [for some technical reason I can't paste the full url here, but the site has a blog post describing Prof. Niwaba's extensive efforts in botanical collections.]
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 1:36 PM on August 8, 2017 [4 favorites]

Best answer: There are hundreds of Ranunculus species, some of which have all kinds of varieties that can be variable and hard to distinguish from each other. If that's a herbarium specimen, I would have expected it to be identified beyond just the general genus level of Ranunculus. It does look like a buttercup, as opposed to water-crowfoots or lesser celandine or spearworts, which are all Ranunculus species as well but have various distinctive leaf shapes.
posted by Azara at 3:14 PM on August 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ok, so I did a little more Googling.

I think the collector's name is Jouju Haginiwa. [Haginiwa is the surname/family name. In Japanese convention, the surname is listed first.]
(Source: http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/creator/6314.html)

The DB group mentioned in the Notes section may refer to the project named after him at Chiba University, the Haginiwa Hyouhon (Specimen) Database. It's described in a newsletter at http://opac.ll.chiba-u.jp/da/curator/900116115/curatorletter_7.pdf and cited in the national library database at ss.ndl.go.jp/ [link borked; search for 萩庭標本データベース作成協力会].
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 4:29 PM on August 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Also, Googling for the Japanese name ヤンバルガラシ gets a bunch of photographic results--and a blog entry that identifies it as "Coronopus integrifolius = Lepidium englerianum"...
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 4:37 PM on August 8, 2017 [1 favorite]