Nobuto Miyamoto

Institute of Ethnology of the Imperial Taihoku University was founded in 1928. It is Taiwan's first professional academic institution of anthropology. It was then chaired by Professor Utsurikawa Nenozo, the first Japanese academic to have earned doctorate from the Harvard University in the U.S. The assistant Miyamoto Nobuto is graduated from Keio University in Japan, specializing in Oriental history. Having followed Utsurikawa's courses of anthropology in his college years, he came with him to the newly established university in Taipei in 1928 and became his assistant. In the 1930s, Institute of Ethnology took the aboriginal tribes as its focus of exploration. In the examination process, it was mostly Utsurikawa who took charge of directing the interviews, and Miyamoto was in charge of taking photos. So there remain many precious photos and videos from the ethnography field studies of the period. After the Second World War, there have been several transformations and changes of title in the institution, which is the predecessor of today's department of anthropology of the National Taiwan University.