RESEARCH SUMMERIES

9. WILHEM G. SOLHEIM II, 519 Ulukanu Street, Kailua, Hawaii who retired at the end of the 1991-92 academic year from the University of Hawaii writes:

I am still planning to be active in the field for a few weeks to a few months each year. I will be giving a paper entitled, "The Nusanto and Prehistoric Contacts among the peoples of Southeast Asia, South China, Korea, and Japan" at the Austronesian symposium in Taiwan the end of this year. Then probably return to Guam for a conference and on to the Philippines for two or three weeks of fieldwork near Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao with Father Jamie Neri. My primary research interest at this time is the Nusantao Maritiem Trading Network.

Hanihara Kazuro, a senior Japanese physical anthropologist with the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Paul Benedict and I are in the middle of preparing a book entitled The Origin of the Japanese for translation into Japanese and publication in Japan. Hanihara has published several reports on the source of the Jomon, and earlier, population being Southeast Asia, and Benedict has published on Japanese being an Austro-Tai language. Japanese archaeologists, for sometime have been looking for the origins of the Yayoi around the mouth of the Yangtze, which, according to my definition is Southeast Asian. The one element in our book that is new is my proposing the Nusantao Trading Network explains how the elements of Southeast Asian culture came to Japan, with a Japanese (Yayoi) homeland between the mouth of the Yangtze and the Shantung peninsula, the area I also consider the source of Southeast Asian culture to become a part of the foundation of Chinese culture. A friend in Japan and one of my students here who reads Japanese and Chinese have been coming up with considerable ethnohistoric information about water people along the China coast and in Korea, Japan and the Ryukyus with numerous Southeast Asian cultural elements distinctive of the land based peoples surrounding them. What is needed is present day studies of the languages of these peoples and much more ethnographic information about them as there is very little known in recent studies.