Postscript : Japanese Anthropological Scholarship on Malaysia

After the destruction of World War II, the American discipline of anthropology, rather than the German ethnology, which had been the dominant scholarly tradition in Japan before the war, was gradually introduced into Japanese academic circles.However, it was still unimaginable that Japanese anthropologists should conduct field work outside Japan, mainly because of the lack of foreign currency available for overseas expenditure.Thus, in its early days, anthropology in Japan lacked the core of the discipline, that is, fieldwork, although some Japanese sociologists engaged in Japanese rural community studies with funding from American foundations.It was only in 1957 that two research expeditions were dispatched to continental Southeast Asia by the Japanese Society of Ethnology and Osaka City University.Unfortunately,neitherofthemvisitedMalaysia.Thesituationbegan to change slowly in the 1960s, especially in the latter half.After the above expeditions returned, ,Kyoto University launched a systematic endeavoUr to promote the scientific study of Southeast Asian societies and nature.The University oMcially established the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) in 1965, two years after its activities in Malaysia had begun using much-disputed funds donated by the Ford Foundation.The Center aimed at an integrated area studies program which included the natural sciences as well as the social sciences.The first Malaysian project was organized by the late Dr. Joji Tanase, in which several researchers participated.It included not only anthropologists but also sociologists, historians, Sinologists, Islamicists, and psychologists.They were later joined by agronomists, a soil s.cientist, an agricultural engineer, and a medical doctor.