the modern “Collection”. Some species no longer appear in the modern “Collection”, while they were mentioned in the original “Collection” (Table 2-1-3).

Expression of Japanese poems has been changed, because of development of techniques as literature, changes of awareness and feeling toward natural subjects, and changes in the environment. Environmental changes significantly affect to Japanese poems, because poems reflect environmental factors. For instance, the modern night sky has become so bright that stars become less visible. Environmental noise has become so loud in our everyday life that it has become difficult to enjoy songs of birds such as White’s Thrush. Some species become regionally endangered, while they used to be so close to us that they appear in poems.

Traditional culture is the emotional anchor for the people of the region, promotes community cohesion, and plays important roles of forming a regional community in which people feel senses of belonging. Culture has a value that cannot be replaced by a monetary value. In order to protect and take over the culture to the future, it is important to conserve the environment and biodiversity that serves as a background for traditional culture.

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# Modern “Kagyu-Ko” The Study on the Word of Snail

Japan has an extremely wide variety of regional names referring to snails. Kunio Yanagita's, who is father of folkloristics in Japan, wrote the book "Kagyu-ko" (1930. "Kagyu" means snail, "Ko" means thinking or study). In this book, he points out that the distribution of snail names as dialect words forms concentric circles with the center in Kyoto, the capital of ancient Japan. He inferred that over a long period of time these names referring to snails gradually spread concentrically from the inside to the outside.

According to the Japanese Linguistics Map (1977. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics), regional names related to snails are sorted into “name-kuji”, “mai-mai”, “tsumuri”, “tamakura”, “katatsumuri”, “dendenmushi”, “deero”, “tsunodashi”, and other isolated word forms. Overall, when variations of these words are included, approximately 470 types of names have been confirmed. Words such as “name-kuji” and “mina,” which refers to shellfish in general, first became popular, and then names such as “katatsumuri” and “mai-mai” became used, and now it is thought that “dendenmushi”, which is widely used mainly in the central region of Japan, is one of the newest word forms. This means that on the opening line of the lyrics of “Snails,” one of the school songs, “dendenmushi” is being sung about in parallel with “katatsumuri”.

Snails are species familiar to Japanese and deeply are rooted in our everyday life and culture. In addition, there are recently several reports that are interesting from the perspective of biodiversity.

In relation to Japan’s terrestrial molluscan species including snails, 732 species and subspecies have been identified, and the majority of those are endemic to Japan. This diversity is due to the geographical isolation, caused by barriers such as mountainous landscape and many islands. On the Ogasawara Islands, which is an archipelago including over 30 subtropical and tropical islands, geographical isolation drives further speciation of terrestrial molluscan species and causes remarkable diversity.

There is another report about snails which points