This was an interesting article that I came across in Discover Magazine - by Jared Diamond, who wrote the famous book "Guns, Germs and Steel" on his theory regarding the origins of the Japanese people. It is over 10 years old (dated 1998) but still worth reading. Unearthing the origins of the Japanese is a much harder task than you might guess. Among world powers today, the Japanese are the most distinctive in their culture and environment. The origins of their language are one of the most disputed questions of linguistics. These questions are central to the self-image of the Japanese and to how they are viewed by other peoples. Japan’s touchy relations with its neighbors make it more important than ever to strip away myths and find answers.
The search for answers is difficult because the evidence is so conflicting. On the one hand, the Japanese people are biologically undistinctive, being very similar in appearance and genes to other East Asians, especially to Koreans. As the Japanese like to stress, they are culturally and biologically rather homogeneous, with the exception of a distinctive people called the Ainu on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Taken together, these facts seem to suggest that the Japanese reached Japan only recently from the Asian mainland, too recently to have evolved differences from their mainland cousins, and displaced the Ainu, who represent the original inhabitants. But if that were true, you might expect the Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language, just as English is obviously closely related to other Germanic languages. However Japanese is quite different from Korean and using linguisitic analysis shows that it split off from Korean more than 4,000 years ago. How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan’s presumably ancient language and the evidence for recent origins?
The article spends quite a deal of time going over the findings of Japanese archaeology and the ancient Jomon and Yayoi cultures and makes fascinating reading, but when brought to a final conclusion is a little anti-climatic but convincing, nonetheless. (A little bit like saying it is neither theory A or theory B but something in between A & B but I will let the reader judge for themselves). Another interesting point is that is little known is that the ancient Jomon culture were the first peoples to invent pottery - over 12,700 years ago - before the Middle East and it is an enduring mystery how a people on the periphery of the world were the first to do it. Usually innovations start of in the major landmass before spreading to the outlying islands.
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