Tectonic positioning of the Islands of Japan in the Mesozoic Asian fron tier and its relation to the regional geology of eastern China

The Islands of Japan have evolved through convergence between continental and oceanic plates along active continental margins since the Late Paleozoic.Before the opening of the Sea of Japan as a back-arc basin in the Miocene,the islands were a part of the Asian continent.So its geological history is extremely precious for replenishing the late Phanerozoic tectonic evolutionary records of Eastern Asia.Based on recent research results obtained by Chinese,Japanese,Korean,French and Russian geologists,the au-thors proposed the following views :(1)The main part of the islands of Japan is the extension of the Central Asian orogenic belt along strike and represents the accretionary history of the Mesozoic Asian conti-nent from the Korea Peninsula southwards.(2)The geology of the Fujian-Guangdong coastal area indi-cates that the main Jurassic subduction-accretionary complex,distributed from Shikhote-Alin to Palawan,could also occur beneath the large cover of Mesozoic volcanic rocks and that the Changle-Nan'ao meta-morphic belt along the coast of Fujian Province is postulated to be a part of the Palawan block or West Philippine block and its history seems similar to the Kurosegawa belt.(3)The Hida metamorphic belt is considered to be an eastern extension of the Triassic suture zone between the Sino -Korean and Yangtze plates proposed by Japanese geologists,implying that the Hida Marginal Belt could be a composite oro-genic belt where the Central Asian orogen merged with the Qinling-Dabie orogen and that the Sino-Ko-rean and Yangtze cratons tapered off successively between them.