This book is a product of my long-term activities in both education and research. Its publication was made possible by a financial support supplied by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. As for education, I was told for the first time in 1985 to teach soil dynamics in Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. I collected experimental and field findings from many publications and made a small series of handouts. Since computer technologies were not well advanced in mid 80s, the handouts were products of cut-and-paste in the physical sense. Many pages were even handwritten. Afterwards, I started to teach the same subject in 1995 at University of Tokyo. Since then I have added more information from field investigation and laboratory tests as well as analyses. It has become possible to put all in an electronic media that makes teaching easier. Readers can find that this book includes Japanese writing among English text. This is because I use this text for teaching in Tokyo. The main aim of this book is a collection of data which is useful in understanding the state-of-art technology and its application to new topics. Understanding the fundamental issues is important because practice makes use of many assumptions, hypotheses, and way of thinking. It has been my policy to show reasons why practice employs those ideas by showing experimental and field backgrounds. This idea does not change even today.
