Tsuboi Shogoro was a pioneer of anthropology in Japan. As a student at the University of Tokyo in 1884, he founded the Anthropological Society (later the Tokyo Anthropological Society) with his peers, and he later became the first professor of anthropology at Tokyo Imperial University. In the same year, 1884, he was also involved when pottery later called “Yayoi pottery” was found at Yayoi-cho, Hongo, Tokyo.
He argued that the pit-dwelling sites and pottery of Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands were made by an indigenous people who lived there before the Ainu, corresponding to the little people of Ainu legend, the Korpokkur, and carried on the “Korpokkur debate” with the anatomist Koganei Yoshikiyo and others who rejected the idea. He died in 1913 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he had gone for an international conference.
