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Yosihiko Sinoto, senior anthropologist at the Bishop Museum, will be honored tomorrow for a distinguished new title as "Knight of Tahiti Nui." Bishop Museum
anthropologist to
receive honorStar-Bulletin staff
The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii and the Joseph Heco Society of Hawaii are sponsoring a reception for Sinoto, one of the Pacific's leading anthropologists, at 5 p.m. at the cultural center.
In a ceremony in Tahiti on June 29, Gascon Flosse, president of French Polynesia, pinned a medal on Sir Yosihiko Sinoto as Knight of Tahiti Nui, Order of the Grand Chevalier.
Sinoto holds the Kenneth Pike Emory Distinguished Chair in Anthropology at the Bishop Museum. He first went to Tahiti with Emory in 1960 and has since explored and excavated the Society Islands, Marquesas, Tuamotus and others to study ancient settlements and artifacts, migration patterns and Polynesian cultural ties.
He led a campaign to restore abandoned marae (temples) of French Polynesia and led a movement to establish a cultural and environmental conservation district on the island of Huahine.
In 1977, he discovered the preserved remnant of an ancient deep-sea voyaging canoe.
"For many years you have undertaken some important research programs on the life and origin of our people," Flosse said in a letter to Sinoto. "These undertakings have allowed us to better understand the origin of our ancestors and their life patterns.
"Due to your contribution, a big page of our history was written."
As members of the Joseph Heco Society of Honolulu, Sinoto and his wife, Kazuko, also are involved in tracing and writing the history of about 100 Japanese nationals who reached Hawaii's shores before the first organized Japanese immigrants arrived in 1868.
The society has submitted a manuscript on "Observations of the First Japanese to Land in Hawaii in 1806" to the Hawaiian Historical Society for review and possible publication in the Hawaiian Journal of History. Sinoto in 1995 was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the government of Japan for efforts to preserve records of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii.