For the 60th birthday of Eiichi Nakamura.

In the beginning, Eiichi was the latest in a striking line of ingenious Japanese organic chemists. In their hands, meticulous attention to detail in the tuning of reagents and conditions has given the community a cornucopia of reliable synthetic procedures of great utility. A substantial segment of the name reactions of the second half of the 20th century are Japanese; the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is one recognition of this remarkable line of fine chemists. Eiichi Nakamura s stay in the Stork group put him on a like trajectory.