About the First Synthetic Research of the Culture of Rice-cultivating Peoples in Southeast Asian Countries
In 1954 Nihon Minzokugaku Kyokai marked the 20th anniversary of its founding and launched a series of commemorative projects to address “urgent and important issues in the field of Ethnology”. The First Synthetic Research of the Culture of Rice-cultivating Peoples in Southeast Asian Countries was one of these studies. The current president and chairman of Nihon Minzokugaku Kyokai were Keizo Shibusawa and Masao Oka respectively, and under them was formed the committee for the First Synthetic Research of the Culture of Rice-cultivating Peoples in Southeast Asian Countries.
According to the prospectus for the first research written in March 1957, Masao Oka served as the chairman, and the team was comprised of the following members: Toichi Mabuchi, Yoshiro Shiratori, Toshio Kawabe, Nobuhiro Matsumoto (team leader), Erin Asai, Ichiro Yawata, Keigo Seki, Nobuto Miyamoto, Asahitaro Nishimura, Tatsuro Yamamoto and Reiichi Gamo.
The area of focus for the first study was intended to be the countries around the Mekong River basin in mainland Southeast Asia, namely Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, however the study in Vietnam was abandoned due to the political situation at the time. The second research, conducted in 1960, focused mainly on Indonesia, while the third research on India and Nepal was carried out in 1963.
The first research, which is the subject of this project, spans a period of approximately eight months from the advance team’s departure from Japan on 28 August 1957 to the return of the last group on 28 April 1958.
| Team leader | Nobuhiro Matsumoto |
| Agriculture group | Hideo Hamada, Jukyu Cho |
| Linguistic group | Erin Asai |
| Ethnology group | Toshio Kawabe, Keiji Iwata, Tsuneo Ayabe |
| Archeology/ History group | Nobuhiro Matsumoto, Junzo Shimizu, Teruya Esaka |
| Technology culture group | Ichiro Yawata |
| Local participation | Itaru Wada, Yoneo Ishii |
| Yomiuri Shimbun news/ photography/ film group | Kojun Isato, Takeshi Fukushima, Osamu Ishida, Seiju Sakurai, Yoshikazu Ito |
The main outputs of the first research were a book edited by Nobuhiro Matsumoto (1965) and published by Yurindo entitled Indo-Chinese Studies: Synthetic Research of the Culture of Rice-cultivating Peoples in Southeast Asian Countries (1), as well as a book aimed at a general readership edited by the Synthetic Research Group of the Culture of Rice-cultivating Peoples in Southeast Asian Countries (1959) and published by Yomiuri Shimbun entitled Travelling the Mekong: Searching for the Origins of the People. In addition, a round-table discussion on the Synthetic Research of the Culture of Rice-cultivating Peoples in Southeast Asian Countries was published in two parts in issues 22 (3-4) and 23 (3-4) of Minzokugaku-kenkyu (Japanese Journal of Ethnology) in 1959, and other individual papers were published in various different outlets.
A large number of photographs taken in the field and items collected by the members of the group at the time of the study still remain, and many of them are currently stored at the National Museum of Ethnology. This project mainly focuses on the photographs taken in Thailand during the first research.