In this time of year of 2018, I have recieved a special prize (called "Distinguished Service Prize") from the authorized committee of the Sedimentological Society of Japan (SSJ), for which I have no word to express my cordial thanks to all of the office members of the society. I am extremely happy to have this prize, and I thought that I should say thanks to all of the students and graduates, members of SSJ. In stead of saying thanks, it will be more fruitful to all of them to write something on the sedimentary geology, particularly based on my own experiences of the studies during my own academic works in these years. Fortunately, I have found my notes each of them being filed, and stored in a study room of my home. They were compiled at the time of my original paper had published, for example, 1957, 1959 and so on. I had read many papers mainly foreign papers written in English or German. Imagine that in 1950’s we have no copymachine or photo-copier, all the information, which should be memorize, had to be hand-written in my notebook. Most of the table, map, figure, were recorded in the notebook. It had been time-comsuming work for the students, and I has been clearly reminiscent of my old days by reading these notes. By referring them, I would like to describe the essential part of my papers published. It will contain the fundamental idea, e.g. of Kolmogorov, or those of German geologists. Topics treated in this paper are exclusively concerning the sedimentary geology; however, related sciences are so wide in their fields covering petrology, mathematics, chemical kinetics and so on. I believe that my notebooks are reminiscent of what I read, and what I thought, at the time of my research works on each subjects described herein.

In February 1990, a seminar titled “Seismic Stratigraphy: Fundamentals and Practical Application” as the Distinguished Lecture of American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) by Professor Peter Vail was held in Japan. The concept of sequence stratigraphy introduced in the seminar gave a huge impact to the attending petroleum explorationists who had desired to learn seismic stratigraphic interpretation method. Those explorationists and their colleagues in Japanese petroleum development companies, who recognized the effectiveness of sequence stratigraphy through the seminar, had started to apply sequence stratigraphic concept and reinterpret their own seismic profiles promptly. However, they also felt a sort of embarrassment in the validity of sedimentological interpretation of seismic profiles without direct geologic proofs and discussion of sedimentary processes under relationship to eustatic changes of sea-level. At the same time, some Japanese sedimentology researchers who had started pioneer studies had been strongly interested in the contents of the seminar, and turned rather affirmative eyes to the tendency of the explorationists. Almost simaltaneously to the seminar, Sedimentological Society of Japan, Tsukuba Association for Strata, Japanese Association for Petroleum Technology, and Geologial Society of Japan provided several study sessions and symposia energetically within a few years, and sedimentology researchers and petroleum explorationists had been researching and exploring with utilization of sequence stratigraphic concepts together in competition each other. Japanese petroleum industry and relating government organizations also supported such activities in a timely manner. As a result, Japanese industry and academia have worked on sequence stratigraphy rather lead the world and contributed to develop sequence stratigraphy.