Brace and Seguchi 2005.6


65

Kazuro Hanihara
1927–2004

Kazuro Hanihara, born in Fukuoka Prefecture on 
the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, was 
one of the major figures in biological anthropology in 
Japan. He was especially prominent among Japanese 
anthropologists for his work in dental anthropology, 
and he regularly voiced his gratitude to that legendary 
embodiment of dental anthropology, Albert A. Dahlberg 
of Chicago, for contacts, encouragement, and access to 
dental collections. Among his many contributions was 
his construction of a measuring device that allowed the 
researcher to give precise figures for the depth of the 
lingual fossa in a shovel-shaped incisor.

Hanihara gained both his undergraduate, 1948-1951, 
and his graduate, 1951-1956, training in anthropology at 
the School of Science of the University of Tokyo. Early 
in his graduate career, he worked for the American 
military forces at Kokura Camp in Fukuoka Prefecture 
at the task of identification of American soldiers who 
had died during the Korean War. This not only gave him 
practical experience in forensic anthropology and in the 
recognition of anatomical features of people of largely 
European ancestry but, at least as important, it made 
him comfortable with communicating in the English 
language.  Not only was he able to discuss matters in 
effective English, he could lecture in the language with 
comfort and ease. Much of his anthropological work 
was published in English, and much of the writing 
was primarily done by himself and needed only minor 

editing by a native English speaker. This quickly earned 
him international recognition that he was to retain for 
the rest of his life.

In 1956, he became an assistant professor in the 
Department of Legal Medicine at the Sapporo Medical 
College on the northern island of Hokkaido. His use 
of Mahalanobis D2  distances, discriminant functions, 
and Q-mode correlation coefficients gave the cachet of 
statistical sophistication to his work, and in 1958, the 
year he earned his Doctor of Science degree from the 
University of Tokyo, he was promoted to Associate 
Professor at the Sapporo Medical College. The very next 
year, as a Fulbright Exchange Scholar, he served as a 
Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, a role 
he filled again in 1968. In 1969, aided by a Leverhulme 
Visiting Fellowship, he was a Visiting Professor at the 
University of Adelaide in Australia where he studied 
the dentition of the northern Australian Aborigines.  
He also served as a Visiting Professor at Arizona State 
University in 1984.

Because of his initial professional location on 
Hokkaido, he became involved in questions concerning 
the identity of the Ainu and their relations to the 
prehistoric inhabitants of Japan and to the majority of the 
non-Ainu Japanese. He clearly recognized the similarity 

Fig. 1. Kazuro Hanihara (right); his wife, Kazuko (center); 
and Keiichi Omoto (left) at a dinner gathering in the 
Hanihara home following the end of a workshop titled 
“The Origin and Past of Homo sapiens sapiens as Viewed 
from DNA—Theoretical Approach” that took place on 
December 14-17, 1993, in the International Institute for 
Advanced Studies, Kyoto, Japan. Dr. Hanihara was the 
workshop convenor and IIAS Vice-Director. (Photograph 
courtesy of Christy G. Turner II.)

Fig. 2. Kazuro Hanihara:  1924�2004.



66

Book Review
DENTAL FUNCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY:  HOW 
TEETH WORK.  By Peter W. Lucas.  New York: 
Cambridge University Press, 2004.  372 pages, 7 
chapters, 2 appendices.  $130.00  £75.00

Occasionally in science a novel treatment of a familiar 
subject opens new vistas for exploration and thought. 
This is the case with Dental Functional Morphology by Peter 
W. Lucas.  Part dental anthropology and part physics, 
this book challenges long held paradigms regarding 
the morphology of mammalian teeth.  Viewed from the 
perspective that physical characteristics of food drive 
selection of tooth form, Lucas presents a well thought 
argument revolving around how dental morphology has 
evolved in response to the fracture properties of food.

The adage “if you don’t eat, you die” can be altered 
using Lucas’ view to “if your teeth don’t efficiently 
fracture foods and reduce particle size to that which is 

of the Ainu to the prehistoric Jōmon. Despite his use of 
sophisticated statistics, however, his conclusions savored 
more of preconceived notions than of anything that 
derived from the actual metric data. Without actually 
using odontometric data to test the idea, he debunked 
the old suggestion that there was a “Caucasoid” element 
in the Ainu. As with so many Japanese who want to 
believe that they are descended from the prehistoric 
inhabitants of the archipelago, he tried to push the 
idea that the Jōmon played a role in the ancestry of 
the Japanese which they did to a varying extent.  He 
recognized the fact that most Japanese looked more like 
mainland East Asians than Jōmon-Ainu people, and he 
suggested, in the absence of archaeological support, that 
massive population movements from that mainland 
had been responsible.  His estimate was that more than 
a million people moved from Northeast Asia to Japan 
during the time between 300 BCE and 700 CE, a guess 
that has made more than a few prehistorians uneasy 
and doubtful.

In 1972 he returned to the University of Tokyo as 
Professor of Anthropology in the School of Science 
where he remained until reaching the mandatory 
retirement age of 60.  Starting in 1987, he began what 
was to be a lifelong affiliation with the International 
Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.  Actually, 
he was one of the major figures involved in setting 
up that Research Center in the first place.  In order to 
make the case to Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone 
for the establishment of that Center, Hanihara traveled 
to America in the spring of 1985 and visited a series 
of Universities to gather expressions of support for 
the project. His efforts were highly successful, and 
this points out one of the most prominent aspects 
of Kazuro Hanihara. He was a marvelous organizer 
and administrator and was a successful chairman of 
a Museum and Department as well as a long series of 
committees. Not only was he admirably well-organized, 
but he exuded a manifestation of graciousness and 
charm that clearly nurtured his success.

Hanihara was probably most known for his proposal 
of a “Dual structure model for the population history of 
the Japanese” first published in 1991. In this, he proposed 
that the prehistoric Jōmon of Japan were derived from 
Southeast Asia which he sometimes referred to as 
“South Asia” although this did not mean the Indian 
sub-continent as that designation has usually implied.  
He suggested that a mixture of Jōmon and Northeast 
Asians gave rise to the Ainu on the one hand and the 
modern Japanese on the other. The difference between 
the two, he proposed, was the result of microevolution 
in situ.  The Jōmon themselves he regarded as qualifying 
as perfectly good “Mongoloids” although this was 
not supported by any kind of metric demonstration. 
The idea that the Ainu represent the continuity of the 
Jōmon with a bit of input from eastern Asia is indeed 

supported by an analysis of common variance, and the 
idea that the Japanese largely represent the morphology 
of eastern Asia tempered by a trace of Jōmon form in 
increasing amounts the farther east one goes in the 
archipelago is also supported by the variance figures.  
However, the role of microevolution in leading to the 
Ainu/Japanese differentiation has no basis, and there 
is no evidence supporting a Southeast Asian locus of 
origin for the Jōmon themselves.

Last but not least, Kazuro Hanihara was enormously 
helpful to visiting scholars who knew little or no 
Japanese. Whether he agreed with the interpretation 
of the results of their work or not, he was unfailingly 
gracious and supportive. He figured out bus and train 
schedules, helped people get to the right stations, he met 
planes, and made hotel reservations, and many more 
much appreciated acts of generosity and assistance. For 
those of us who counted him as a friend, his passing 
leaves a real sense of loss.

C. Loring Brace
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI, 48109 USA

and

Noriko Seguchi
Department of Anthropology
University of Montana
Missoula, MT, 59812 USA