During the period 1948–1949, the author of this article visited Sarawak to study the social structure of the Chinese community in Kuching. After a lapse of 32 years, an investigation based on published materials has been made to assess social mobility within various dialect groups in Sarawak and to compare the present situation with that of 30 years ago. As a result of advances in communication and the extension of marketing, the successive layers of middlemen, in whom social and political power was invested, have been forced out and a new elite recruited from minor groups has emerged. The focus of the ethnic Chinese has gradually shifted from their traditionally narrow, localized interests to the welfare of the country in which they have settled. This trend can be seen in Chinese communities throughout the world.

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“Multihousehold compound” is the concept presented by Koichi Mizuno on the basis of his survey as the core structure of the social system of the village. It is a kin grouping composed of two or more households of parents' and their married daughters' families, and its structural features are their living together in a compound, joint farming, and close cooperation in daily life. This type of group appears as a phase of the family developmental cycle, which is characterized by uxorilocal residence and an inheritance pattern which emphasizes female devisees.
 Having surveyed the village for six months in 1981, we have found that some of the points made by Mizuno are misleading: (1) the compound is not intrinsically related to such a grouping; (2) the native concept of sum, which is not mentioned at all by Mizuno, is used by the villagers to represent close kin relationships; (3) close kin in this category are strongly expected to help each other in various aspects of daily life; (4) the parent-daughter cooperative relationship is basically one of the cooperative relationships among sum and is closely related to the uxorilocal residence rule; (5) although the parent-daughter relationship is the salient feature of the cooperative system, the system is not restricted only to that relationship; (6) the close kin relationship is intrinsically dyadic with flexible bilateral features; and (7) the pattern of inheritance reflects this relationship.

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Yonaguni Island, located at the southwestern end of the Ryukyu Islands, has a humid sub-tropical climate. Information on traditional rice culture on the island prior to the introduction of the socalled Horai rice, the new high-yielding varieties bred in Taiwan in the 1930s, was collected by interviewing old farmers, and the characteristics of rice culture were compared with those in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
 Wet-rice fields on Yonaguni Island were classified into three groups according to their water and soil conditions : rain-fed (tinchida), inundated (minta), and muddy or swampy (kāda). The technical components characterizing the rice culture of the island varied widely with the locational conditions. For land preparation, for example, the dominant method in each group was as follows: tilling and levelling by hand only in kāda; tilling by wooden hoe and by cattle-trampling, and levelling by harrow in minta ; and tilling by plough, preventing seepage by cattle-trampling, and levelling by harrow in tinchida. The traditional cropping season of wet rice prior to the adoption of Horai rice, with which double cropping of rice was established, differed from that of the mainland of Japan. Wet rice was generally transplanted in January and February with two-month-old seedlings and harvested in June and July. This cropping season was favoured by the rainfall during the northeastmonsoon season, commencing in October, and could avoid danger of typhoons between July and September. A similar cropping season can be found in Taiwan and the east coast of the Philippines as well as throughout the Ryukyu Islands. The local varieties replaced by the Horai rice had the following morphological characters: long culm, long panicle, low tillering-capacity, long awn, black or brown husk, large grains, etc. These characters are considered to resemble those of local varieties grown in the Southeast Asian archipelago, which belong to the so-called bulu or javanica type.
 Traditional rice culture on Yonaguni Island thus appears to have been characterized by components common to rice cultures of the Southeast Asian archipelago, and is consequently thought to have had a close genealogical relation with this region, as indicated by the practice of cattle-trampling and the similarity of rice varieties and cropping season.

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Mangroves in India, Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are reviewed with respect to species composition and distribution. Human activities affecting the vegetation are also described.

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