IntroductionStrong interactions acting between baryons, the nucleonnucleon (NN) interaction among others, play a basic role in building nuclei. Because of its importance enormous efforts, both experimental and theoretical, have hitherto been paid to understand the nature of the NN interaction. The quantum chromodynamics (QCD) [1] is nowadays believed to be a fundamental theory of the strong interaction. From this modern view, Yukawa's meson theory [2] for the nuclear force is regarded as an effective description of the interaction of the composite nucleons, governed by the strongly nonperturbative dynamics of quarks and gluons. A recent lattice QCD calculation [3] confirms this view by producing both the short-range repulsion and medium-range attraction for the three-quark plus three-quark (3q-3q) configuration. Further studies in this direction have to be made for a quantitative description of the nuclear force.The compositeness of baryons was exploited in the 1960s in a spin-flavor SU 6 quark model to understand their groundstate properties. It was in the late 1970s that the QCDinspired constituent quark model was initiated for the study of the NN interaction [4,5]. Here the dynamics of the 3q-3q system was formulated in a microscopic theory called the resonating-group method (RGM). The inputs needed in the RGM are a quark-quark potential and a wave function ansatz for the baryons. The asymptotic freedom of QCD and the color confinement of the baryons are important ingredients to be reflected in the quark-quark potential. The former is modeled by the color analogue of the Fermi-Breit (FB) interaction, that is, the dominant one-gluon exchange interaction, and the latter is expressed by a phenomenological confinement potential that is assumed to be flavor independent. It has become vital to supplement the mesonic degrees of freedom for a realistic description of the medium-and longranged parts of the baryon-baryon interactions.The quark-model baryon-baryon interaction has been extended by the Kyoto-Niigata group [6] to cover all pairs of