Speaking of such things, here’s one correspondence that was obscure enough even I didn’t notice until I happened to spot all the right pieces on the same day.
Now, it’s important to note that Kanatai is not, by and large, known for a particular abundance of solar imagery, and thus also not for sunrise imagery. It’s not the local Land of the Rising Sun, even if its geographical position were right (it isn’t) or if the shape of Eliéra would allow for it (it doesn’t).
But if you should happen to dig through my pile of scribbled maps and notations about ethnies and population migrations, you would discover that the majority of the islands that would later be known as Kanatai were settled by the Kanaé-lin people, a close relative of the Makaé-lin of the Upperside’s Cyrsan islands.
Both the Kanaé-lin and Makaé-lin ethnies are lumeneldrae. For those of you who don’t remember your eldrae racial divisions, there are eight (up from six) racial groups, of which three, the eseldrae, lumeneldrae, and seleneldrae are the big ones, making up around 75% of the total population at around 25% each. (Those names mean, roughly, “Star People”, “Sun People”, and “Moon People”.)
The lumeneldrae are characterized by being the least pale of the eldrae subraces (skin tones ranging from golden darkening to rosy copper), with dark blue or green eyes, and hair colors ranging from pale silvery-white, through burnished gold, down to dark red.
So here’s the final piece. In an extension of the metaphor, the two tails of the lumeneldrae hair-color bell curve started referring to themselves as “sunrise eldrae” and :“sunset eldrae” - and, in a note I don’t even remember making which might have been for some reason as trivial as “hey, islands full of redheads, that’s cool”, I seem to have suggested that most of the latter went with the Makaé-lin when the peoples split.
Which by statistical inevitability means that most of the former and their genetics went with the Kanaé-lin.
So. To sum up, Kanatai is not the Land of the Rising Sun. But it is the Land of the People of the Dawn, belike.
(Having gone to the trouble of writing this out, I hope my accidentallying this amuses you even half as much as it does me.)