An interview with Hiroya Kawanabe

When Eugene K. Balon first suggested publishing the present special volume, Tamotsu Iwai and Masahide Yuma asked me to inverview Hiroya Kawanabe. This was presumably because Kawanabe and I were associated in many ways for a long time, as students attending the same lectures and exercises, as young researchers involved in surveys of the ayu fish, lakes Naka-umi, and Biwa-ko, as co-authors of several papers, as joint revisers of some dictionaries, as commensals in pubs, and so on. Kawanabe loves classical music, literature, and hot-spring baths.Actually, this is not the record of an interview by me of Kawanabe. During our frequent chats in coffee shops and nomiya pubs in Kyoto and Otsu, I picked out several topics and sent questions incorporating them to Kawanabe. I received written answers from him, rearranged them together with questions, added some comments and further questions, and rendered these for his consideration. The narration in the form of an interview was thus prepared. M.J. Grygier of the Lake Biwa Museum and G.C. Kearn of the University of East Anglia took the job of revising the English, for which we are grateful. I should add one thing. Kawanabe always addresses people as san in Japanese, not sensei – a very common way to refer to professors and teachers – and he himself likes to be called san. So, I adopted -san as a suffix for the names of people throughout his narration.