This paper documents the institutional, disciplinary, and methodological backgrounds to the earliest fieldwork conducted by the pioneers of Japanese anthropology, archaeology, and art history including Torii Ryûzô, Yagi Sôzaburô, and Sekino Tadashi. These pioneers are all well known as the first Japanese scholars to carry out systematic surveys of art/archaeological remains as well as collecting ethnographic data in the Asian continent. More significantly, their research abroad was inspired by their backgrounds in the imported Western disciplines of Victorian anthropology which had relied on the "cultural comparative" method. In the late nineteenth century, many Japanese intellectuals had much admired, read, and even studied with British and French social scientists who had advocated that only a detailed comparison of contemporary world-wide indigenous/primitive peoples' customs, life-styles, religions, morals and oral traditions, myths and legends were key to understanding the evolution of man, the origins of races and cultures, and the spread of prehistoric peoples and customs. Thus, Japanese archaeology, ethnography, and art history like their European counter-parts were the main disciplines that have directly contributed to the systematic collections, classifications, and study of primitive artifacts, ancient remains, and documents that are still on display at Japan's imperial museums and their former colonial branches from Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan.
      The founders of the Tokyo Anthropological Society in 1884, led by Tsuboi Shôgorô, along with his disciples and colleagues including Shirai Kôtarô, Satô Yûtarô, Fukuya Umetarô, Koganei Yoshikiyo, Miyake Yonekichi, and Yagi Sôzaburô were all "scientific" men of nineteenth century Meiji Japan. Hence, they were keenly aware that Japan's military victories over China and Russia provided excellent opportunities for them to test out their earlier arm-chair theories concerning the much debated origins of Japanese race, culture, and its civilization. Thus, the Tokyo Anthropological Society became the first private organization to dispatch their young apprentice, Torii Ryûzô to conduct the fieldwork abroad in Manchuria (1895), Taiwan (1896), the Kuriles (1899), South China (1902-3), Mongolia (1906-7) and the Korean peninsula (1910). Before Torii's fieldwork, Japanese Jinshuron (Who are the Japanese?) debates mostly rested on rehashing myths and legends gleaned from the ancient texts of the Kojiki and Nihonshoki. However, when Torii's letters from the field came filtering in monthly from exotic corners of the Asian continent, that reported on the finds of shell-mounds, stone-tools, dolmens, and kofun remains, all "similar" to that of Japan, such news were eagerly anticipated by the members of the Tokyo Anthropological Society.
      From then on, art, archaeological, and ethnographic discoveries from Siberia, China, and Korea became the most important material evidence that soon became incorporated into revised racial theories concerning the mixed origins of Japanese civilization descended from the prehistoric ancestors of the nomadic tribes of the Paleo-asiatics, Tungus, Møngols, and ancient civilizations of Bronze Age China and Three Kingdoms' Korea.
      This paper is devoted to introducing, describing, and analyzing the earliest field reports, photographs of ethnographic peoples, and material collections of prehistoric artifacts and burials that were published in the issues of the Tokyo Anthropological Society dating from 1890's - 1910's. I will especially focus on how the opening up of the Asian continent to Japanese fieldwork and the 1910 annexation of Korea permitted the first systematic art and archaeological surveys, excavations, and analysis of prehistoric pottery, settlement patterns, and burial classifications which to this day have served as the most important chronological framework for cross-dating Japan's ancient remains.