Matuyama Motonori was born at Uyeda (now Usa) in Oita prefecture Japan on October 25, 1884, a son of a Zen abbot, Sumie (Sumiye) Tengai.

In 1926 he began collecting basalt specimens in Manchuria and Japan, and in 1929 published a paper showing that there was a clear correlation between the polarity and the stratigraphic position.

[8] Matuyama served the Kyoto Imperial University as dean of the Faculty of Science from June 1936 until December 1937; he retired from teaching in 1944 and was made professor emeritus in 1946.

[2] "The Japanese geophysicist Motonori Matsuyama (1884–1958, as spelled and pronounced but mistransliterated in his own publications and others as Matuyama) was the first to document clearly from basalts in the Genbudō (basalt caves), Japan,[6] the reversed magnetic polarity interval from 2.58 to 0.773 Ma that we now call the Matuyama Reversed Polarity Chron."

This was finalized in 2020, when the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences officially ratified the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) defining the base of the Chibanian Stage and Middle Pleistocene Subseries at the Chiba section, Japan, using the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal as a marker.