Peat Swamp Forest is a unique ecological unit found almost exclusively in Insular Southeast Asia. Ecologically, the peat swamp area has been the least favorable environment for human habitation. Economically, the area and its forest has had no goods or valuables to attract people from outside. Thus it has remained uninhabited.
 The situation has changed since the mid-nineteenth century. Beginning with Singapore's expansion and its demand for forest resources, the progress of “modernization” has led people to seek unrealized, hence untouched, resources in the area.
 Today, the area is being widely, rapidly and unrestrictedly reclaimed for new resources, mostly as farmland for commercial coconut cultivation. The policies or norms of development in this area, which has hitherto had no long-lasting relation with human activity, lie open to criticism.

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Introduction: The society of Sabah, Malaysia holds particular interest for a Japanese observer. Because of a growing concern in Japan for health and conservation of the natural environment, consumption there of the products of cocopalms and oilpalms is increasing. Malaysia is the largest producer of oilpalms in the world, and Sabah, the third largest producer state of oilpalms in Malaysia, is still expanding its plantations. The oilpalm plantations concentrated in the Tawau area were first opened in the 1910s by Japanese croppers of abaca. Thus, the developmental history of the plantation economy in eastern Sabah is of special concern for Japanese. In the countryside of Sabah, in the coastal areas in particular, there are a number of small kampungs of fisherman, most of whom migrated from the Philippines. In the oilpalm plantations, on the other hand, the majority of the labourers are Bugis farmers from Sulawesi. Sabah is a state of immigrants. This is quite impressive for these Japanese who believe, erroneously, that their country is ethnically homogeneous. Thus, observation of Sabah society would have an educational effect for ordinary Japanese.
 I. This chapter tries to explain the efforts made by Sabah leaders since independence to create a new, single Sabahan national identity.
 II. The reality, however, is a multi-ethnic society, and some state documents recognize this crucial fact. The Department of Statistics, Malaysia, Sabah Branch, Annual Bulletin of Statistics, 1989 defines Pribumis of Sabah as follows : Kadazan, Kwijau, Murut, Bajau, Illanum, Lotud, Rungus, Tambanuo, Dumpas, Maragang, Paitan, Idahan, Minokok, Rumanau, Mangka'ak, Sulu, Orang Sungei, Brunei, Kadayan, Bisaya, Tidong, other Indigenous Malay, Indonesian Sino-native, Native of Sarawak, Native of Philippines and Cocos Islanders. This list of ethnic groups includes almost all the inhabitants of insular Southeast Asia. The Sabah government on one hand tries to create a unified Sabahan national identity, but on the other includes all the ethnic groups as their own “Pribumis.” This is the situation in which the State of Sabah now stands.
 III. In the coastal areas, which consist overwhelmingly of mangrove swamps and attols, there are small fishing villages. Some of the inhabitants still live in house-boats (lepa-lepa) and move between the Sulu Islands and the east coast of Sabah. A distinction is also drawn between Bajau Darat and Bajau Laut. The majority of inhabitants of the squatter area in Sandakan are from Mindanao and Sulu. There are also a number of Filipino immigrants working in pasar-ikan in Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan and Tawau.
 IV. Cocos Islanders: Cocos Island is an isolated attol off west Java in the Indian Ocean under Australian government. Three Kampung Cocos were noted in east Sabah. The villagers are Malay muslims who migrated in the postwar period.

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Indonesia's rural weaving industry, which had developed into a factory production system in the mid-1960s, declined rapidly from the end of the 1960s because foreign companies and Chinese-Indonesian capital invested massively in the textile industry.
 Faced with crisis, the rural weaving industry in the area surveyed created a new division of labor in the survey village in the mid-1970s. Cheaper products made of lower quality thread were channeled by village traders to low income strata in urban and rural areas across the country. Former factory managers became traders who organized a sub-contracting system with weavers by supplying them with thread, and petty traders now buy weaving products. All weavers in the village are now petty commodity producers.
 The dominance of petty commodity production in place of the factory production system can be explained firstly by the preference of low strata households who wish to be economically independent and self-employed rather than simple waged laborers. More important, however, is the fact that the factory production system cannot be maintained economically. Faced with the difficulty of securing abundant cheaper thread and enough working capital, the traders can operate more flexibly than the factory managers, whose fixed costs are too high.
 The division of labor in the village is based upon the economic differentiation of the villagers. Weavers who are landless and near-landless continue to weave with minimal working capital, and have a multiplicity of occupations, consisting of petty commodity production and wage labor, including labor in the urban informal sector.

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A distinctive feature of development economics has been the attempt to understand the process of migration from rural areas to urban areas under natural population increase in less developed countries. But it has to be noted at this point that the share of manufacturing in wage employment in the whole industry is generally quite small; it is around 10 percent in Philippine case. This situation arises because the government has introduced import-substitution industries and capital-intensive technology, and advanced countries are influenced by the new protectionist wave.
 On the other hand, the labor force in the traditional sector, such as agriculture or fishing, is quite extensive. Labor out-migration has been slow and the growth rate of the traditional sector correspondingly high in the Philippines, probably as high as that of the manufacturing labor force. The traditional sector accounts for a significant proportion of total employees in rural areas. However the land-frontier in the mainland of the Philippines has reached the point of near exhausion.
 Nevertheless, the fishing-frontier of Palawan province has absorbed migrants from other regions, especially Visayas. This research is based on fieldwork conducted in a fishing village of Palawan province, Southern Tagalog region, from April to May 1991. Males predominate among migrants and young people migrate more readily than older ones. While labor movement does occur from cities to this fishing-frontier, more frequent is a progression in which inter-rural migration rather than rural-urban migration plays a large part in this case. Most of migrants are skilled in fishing or agriculture, but from the early 1980's some employees in the modern sector with no experience of fishing started to migrate.
 Information networks are created and maintained by streams of migration. Migrants from specific regions often cluster in the same village neighborhoods, because it allows them to exchange information about job opportunities and living conditions at the frontier.
 From the viewpoint of labor absorption, the role of public financial assistance for motorizing fishing boats is important for the rural development. It has allowed fishermen to hire more employees and improve the productivity of fishing. However, aquatic resources will be limited for more migrants in the future. It is necessary to assist villagers to start fishery processing industries and feeding fish, in addition to motorizing fishing boats.

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