Takayoshi Kano
Initially in his career, he assisted Toshisada Nishida in his work on the chimpanzees of the Mahale mountains in Tanzania. In the conclusion of his report, he suggests that In 1973, Takayoshi Kano conducted this survey, covering a large area of several hundred kilometers on bicycle, when he visited a number of remote villages unaccustomed to non-Africans, some which were hostile. He eventually came upon the village of Wamba, where the villagers were more welcoming, and he could hear bonobo calls from the forest. Unlike the area near Lake Tumba visited by Nishida, there was no tradition  of hunting chimpanzees for bushmeat here. It took over a year of effort by Kano and his assistant, Suehisa Kuroda, before they could habituate the first group of bonobos in the area, provisioning them via a sugarcane patch. The chimpanzees in the area have little fear of humans, because of a local legend, that the humans and bonobos were cousins. In the local language Bongando, one of the words for the bonobo is "elia", or "missed" - the bonobos are thought to have "missed" becoming human, or have been "blocked" on this path. Kano was among the first to comment extensively  on the sexual practices among the Bonobo, particularly the use of sex as a mechanism for reducing tensions within the group. Kano's work motivated a large group of researchers to work at Wamba, many of them from Kyoto and other institutions in Japan. He was among the movers for the founding of the Luo Scientific Reserve in 1990. The group was forced to pause its work several times - during the anti-Mobutu outbreak in 1991-92, and a major disruption after the Tutsi rebellion and war from 1996 to 2002. Kano's main work, "The Last Ape: Pygmy Chimpanzee  Behavior and Ecology", was translated from Japanese into English in 1992.