Reply #2: Yes, and there's probably an Austronesian element in Japanese culture

[Lydia Leftcoast]

or at least in Okinawa. Yonaguni, the southernmost island of the Okinawan chain, is less than 100 miles from Taiwan. Okinawans tend to look more like Taiwanese aborigines than they do like mainland Japanese.

Some years ago, I read an account of the peopling of the Pacific Islands from a linguistic point of view, and I do remember that New Zealand and Easter Island were the last places reached by the Polynesians. The Polynesians (as a subgroup of the Austronesians) started out in Samoa about 2000 years ago and branched out. The Hawaiians came via Tahiti and the Marquesas, or so the article said.