Ri Han-Jae called to North Korean team

Re: Old history

WOW.... thanks for the info. Hyuk you are genius!!

 

Im not trying to pull off a sensitive topic here but is it true that many Japanese ppl are actually ashamed that the Japanese King is a Korean descendant and that is this why the Japanese Royalities actually veil their traditional virtues/culture/ect? I read that in a National Geographic (the one about Mount Fuji) somewhere how the ways of life of the king and all that is actually a secret. just wonderin.

 

Matsu,

I do not know what passport Ri used, but the ban on travel to NK for Japanese CITIZENS would not apply to him now, would it? It stands to reason that if Japan sees NK as the kingdom of Joseon, that the NK passport would be interpreted as such. Bottom line, I don't know.

If you want to argue this point, then do it with Kim Myung-Soo, since he is the one who provided this information to me. I do not know what convoluted gray area this falls in, but the Japanese gov't has little credibility in this regard.

I tend to believe a sociology doctorate over a layman.

 

Well, Matsu, although I really want to believe the majority of Japanese fans welcome Ahn, I felt it was the other way around when I visited Yahoo Japan message board. People there seem to be very upset that Shimizu signed him. Maybe the more casual soccer fans have interest in him but the real hard-core fans (who really counts) don't. But again, it's just my impression after visiting the message board.

I really enjoy your posts. Keep it coming!!

 

I don't know what your definition of "almost all" is, but 10,000 remaining in Japan after 244,000 were conscripted into the Imperial Army, and 1,200,000 taken as forced laborers would qualify as almost all returning to Korea. Less than 1% remained in Japan.

As for the dictionary definition of Kita Chosen, it does not prove anything as far as the legal definition. Words and terms take on meanings as they are practically used. I'm sure the same dictionary defines Daikanminkoku as "South Korea."

For example, did you know that most Koreans consider the term "Chosenjin," or "Senjin" to be an insulting term for a Korean? It simply means Korean (Joseonin or Seonin), but it has come to mean an insult because it was spoken with scorn in the colonial period. Many Koreans are surprised when I tell them that Chosenjin simply means Joseonin. They think it means something like, "Joseonnom," which would roughly translate to "Chosenyarou."

Another example, why is it considered rude to call a foreigner a gaijin (woe-in), but it is consider proper to say gaikokujin (woeguk-in)? It is a matter of intent, isn't it? By the same token, it would be silly to say that the definition of Kita Chosen is "That northern region of the country that legally returned to being considered the kingdom that existed prior to Japanese colonization," when it clearly is referring to the communist country that is located north of South Korea.

I want you to understand that I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I do feel that your view of Japan-Korea relations is a bit rosy. To give a bit of background, I lived in Japan for more than two years, I have Japanese friends who consider me close enough to reveal their "honne," and not just their "tatemae." They have told me what they have observed, and also how their views were shaped.

I do think that most Koreans have the wrong impression about Japan. Most young Japanese impression of Korea is probably best described as indifferent ignorance. I have seen many people use insulting terms without knowing the origins. For example, point-and-shoot cameras are commonly called bakachon cameras. Many Japanese do not know that -chon is an abbreviation of Chosenjin. These are cameras that are so simple to use that even dumb Koreans can use them. If I recall correctly, the Japanese gov't banned the use of this term to prevent a diplomatic conflict.

I think that perhaps you are placed in a position of overrepresenting the positives due to the overwhelmingly negative posts from Koreans. I know first hand that Koreans can be very racist, so recism is a blight on humanity, not just Japanese. I believe that the circumstances that led to Japan's militarism can happen anywhere, and is not some unique failing of the Japanese people.

I try to be fair and impartial, and if I have not been in any way, I apologize. I see this forum as a medium for exchange, and I look forward to learning from others in areas that I lack.

Take care,
Hyok

 

Japanese Origins

Okay, here is an article I lifted from Discover magazine. It makes for very interesting reading. I will post it in two parts, since it is too long in its entirety.



Japanese Roots
By Jared Diamond
Just who are the Japanese? Where did they come from and when? The answers are difficult to come by, though not impossible—the real problem is that the Japanese themselves may not want to know.

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 rising dominance and 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 (because Anglo-Saxons from the continent conquered England as recently as the sixth century a.d.). How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan’s presumably ancient language and the evidence for recent origins?

Archeologists have proposed four conflicting theories. Most popular in Japan is the view that the Japanese gradually evolved from ancient Ice Age people who occupied Japan long before 20,000 b.c. Also widespread in Japan is a theory that the Japanese descended from horse-riding Asian nomads who passed through Korea to conquer Japan in the fourth century, but who were themselves—emphatically—not Koreans. A theory favored by many Western archeologists and Koreans, and unpopular in some circles in Japan, is that the Japanese are descendants of immigrants from Korea who arrived with rice-paddy agriculture around 400 b.c. Finally, the fourth theory holds that the peoples named in the other three theories could have mixed to form the modern Japanese.

When similar questions of origins arise about other peoples, they can be discussed dispassionately. That is not so for the Japanese. Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of history based on the earliest recorded Japanese chronicles, which were written in the eighth century. They describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to Earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 b.c. To fill the gap between 660 b.c. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other equally fictitious emperors. Before the end of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito finally announced that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this chronicle account. Unlike American archeologists, who acknowledge that ancient sites in the United States were left by peoples (Native Americans) unrelated to most modern Americans, Japanese archeologists believe all archeological deposits in Japan, no matter how old, were left by ancestors of the modern Japanese. Hence archeology in Japan is supported by astronomical budgets, employs up to 50,000 field-workers each year, and draws public attention to a degree inconceivable anywhere else in the world.

Why do they care so much? Unlike most other non-European countries, Japan preserved its independence and culture while emerging from isolation to create an industrialized society in the late nineteenth century. It was a remarkable achievement. Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences. They want to believe that their distinctive language and culture required uniquely complex developmental processes. To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.

What makes it especially difficult to discuss Japanese archeology dispassionately is that Japanese interpretations of the past affect present behavior. Who among East Asian peoples brought culture to whom? Who has historical claims to whose land? These are not just academic questions. For instance, there is much archeological evidence that people and material objects passed between Japan and Korea in the period a.d. 300 to 700. Japanese interpret this to mean that Japan conquered Korea and brought Korean slaves and artisans to Japan; Koreans believe instead that Korea conquered Japan and that the founders of the Japanese imperial family were Korean.

Thus, when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as “the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity.” For the next 35 years, Japanese occupation forces tried to eradicate Korean culture and to replace the Korean language with Japanese in schools. The effort was a consequence of a centuries-old attitude of disdain. “Nose tombs” in Japan still contain 20,000 noses severed from Koreans and brought home as trophies of a sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Not surprisingly, many Koreans loathe the Japanese, and their loathing is returned with contempt.

What really was “the legitimate arrangement of antiquity”? Today, Japan and Korea are both economic powerhouses, facing each other across the Korea Strait and viewing each other through colored lenses of false myths and past atrocities. It bodes ill for the future of East Asia if these two great peoples cannot find common ground. To do so, they will need a correct understanding of who the Japanese people really are.

Japan’s unique culture began with its unique geogra-phy and environment. It is, for comparison, far more isolated than Britain, which lies only 22 miles from the French coast. Japan lies 110 miles from the closest point of the Asian mainland (South Korea), 190 miles from mainland Russia, and 480 miles from mainland China. Climate, too, sets Japan apart. Its rainfall, up to 120 inches a year, makes it the wettest temperate country in the world. Unlike the winter rains prevailing over much of Europe, Japan’s rains are concentrated in the summer growing season, giving it the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zones. While 80 percent of Japan’s land consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture and only 14 percent is farmland, an average square mile of that farmland is so fertile that it supports eight times as many people as does an average square mile of British farmland. Japan’s high rainfall also ensures a quickly regenerated forest after logging. Despite thousands of years of dense human occupation, Japan still offers visitors a first impression of greenness because 70 percent of its land is still covered by forest.

Japanese forest composition varies with latitude and altitude: evergreen leafy forest in the south at low altitude, deciduous leafy forest in central Japan, and coniferous forest in the north and high up. For prehistoric humans, the deciduous leafy forest was the most productive, providing abundant edible nuts such as walnuts, chestnuts, horse chestnuts, acorns, and beechnuts. Japanese waters are also outstandingly productive. The lakes, rivers, and surrounding seas teem with salmon, trout, tuna, sardines, mackerel, herring, and cod. Today, Japan is the largest consumer of fish in the world. Japanese waters are also rich in clams, oysters, and other shellfish, crabs, shrimp, crayfish, and edible seaweeds. That high productivity was a key to Japan’s prehistory.

From southwest to northeast, the four main Japanese islands are Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, and Hokkaido. Until the late nineteenth century, Hokkaido and northern Honshu were inhabited mainly by the Ainu, who lived as hunter-gatherers with limited agriculture, while the people we know today as Japanese occupied the rest of the main islands.

In appearance, of course, the Japanese are very similar to other East Asians. As for the Ainu, however, their distinctive appearance has prompted more to be written about their origins and relationships than about any other single people on Earth. Partly because Ainu men have luxuriant beards and the most profuse body hair of any people, they are often classified as Caucasoids (so-called white people) who somehow migrated east through Eurasia to Japan. In their overall genetic makeup, though, the Ainu are related to other East Asians, including the Japanese and Koreans. The distinctive appearance and hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Ainu, and the undistinctive appearance and the intensive agricultural lifestyle of the Japanese, are frequently taken to suggest the straightforward interpretation that the Ainu are descended from Japan’s original hunter-gatherer inhabitants and the Japanese are more recent invaders from the Asian mainland.

But this view is difficult to reconcile with the distinctiveness of the Japanese language. Everyone agrees that Japanese does not bear a close relation to any other language in the world. Most scholars consider it to be an isolated member of Asia’s Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages. Korean is also often considered to be an isolated member of this family, and within the family Japanese and Korean may be more closely related to each other than to other Altaic languages. However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features and about 15 percent of their basic vocabularies, rather than the detailed shared features of grammar and vocabulary that link, say, French to Spanish; they are more different from each other than Russian is from English.

Since languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged. By counting common words and features, linguists can estimate how long ago languages diverged, and such estimates suggest that Japanese and Korean parted company at least 4,000 years ago. As for the Ainu language, its origins are thoroughly in doubt; it may not have any special relationship to Japanese.

After genes and language, a third type of evidence about Japanese origins comes from ancient portraits. The earliest preserved likenesses of Japan’s inhabitants are statues called haniwa, erected outside tombs around 1,500 years ago. Those statues unmistakably depict East Asians. They do not resemble the heavily bearded Ainu. If the Japanese did replace the Ainu in Japan south of Hokkaido, that replacement must have occurred before a.d. 500.

Our earliest written information about Japan comes from Chinese chronicles, because China developed literacy long before Korea or Japan. In early Chinese accounts of various peoples referred to as “Eastern Barbarians,” Japan is described under the name Wa, whose inhabitants were said to be divided into more than a hundred quarreling states. Only a few Korean or Japanese inscriptions before a.d. 700 have been preserved, but extensive chronicles were written in 712 and 720 in Japan and later in Korea. Those reveal massive transmission of culture to Japan from Korea itself, and from China via Korea. The chronicles are also full of accounts of Koreans in Japan and of Japanese in Korea—interpreted by Japanese or Korean historians, respectively, as evidence of Japanese conquest of Korea or the reverse.

The ancestors of the Japanese, then, seem to have reached Japan before they had writing. Their biology suggests a recent arrival, but their language suggests arrival long ago. To resolve this paradox, we must now turn to archeology.

The seas that surround much of Japan and coastal East Asia are shallow enough to have been dry land during the ice ages, when much of the ocean water was locked up in glaciers and sea level lay at about 500 feet below its present measurement. Land bridges connected Japan’s main islands to one another, to the Russian mainland, and to South Korea. The mammals walking out to Japan included not only the ancestors of modern Japan’s bears and monkeys but also ancient humans, long before boats had been invented. Stone tools indicate human arrival as early as half a million years ago.

Around 13,000 years ago, as glaciers melted rapidly all over the world, conditions in Japan changed spectacularly for the better, as far as humans were concerned. Temperature, rainfall, and humidity all increased, raising plant productivity to present high levels. Deciduous leafy forests full of nut trees, which had been confined to southern Japan during the ice ages, expanded northward at the expense of coniferous forest, thereby replacing a forest type that had been rather sterile for humans with a much more productive one. The rise in sea level severed the land bridges, converted Japan from a piece of the Asian continent to a big archipelago, turned what had been a plain into rich shallow seas, and created thousands of miles of productive new coastline with innumerable islands, bays, tidal flats, and estuaries, all teeming with seafood.

That end of the Ice Age was accompanied by the first of the two most decisive changes in Japanese history: the invention of pottery. In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago. For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million.

The prejudice that islanders are supposed to learn from superior continentals wasn’t the sole reason that record-breaking Japanese pottery caused such a shock. In addition, those first Japanese potters were clearly hunter-gatherers, which also violated established views. Usually only sedentary societies own pottery: what nomad wants to carry heavy, fragile pots, as well as weapons and the baby, whenever time comes to shift camp? Most sedentary societies elsewhere in the world arose only with the adoption of agriculture. But the Japanese environment is so productive that people could settle down and make pottery while still living by hunting and gathering. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers exploit their environment’s rich food resources more than 10,000 years before intensive agriculture reached Japan.

Much ancient Japanese pottery was decorated by rolling or pressing a cord on soft clay. Because the Japanese word for cord marking is jomon, the term Jomon is applied to the pottery itself, to the ancient Japanese people who made it, and to that whole period in Japanese prehistory beginning with the invention of pottery and ending only 10,000 years later. The earliest Jomon pottery, of 12,700 years ago, comes from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island. Thereafter, pottery spread north, reaching the vicinity of modern Tokyo around 9,500 years ago and the northernmost island of Hokkaido by 7,000 years ago. Pottery’s northward spread followed that of deciduous forest rich in nuts, suggesting that the climate-related food explosion was what permitted sedentary living.

How did Jomon people make their living? We have abundant evidence from the garbage they left behind at hundreds of thousands of excavated archeological sites all over Japan. They apparently enjoyed a well-balanced diet, one that modern nutritionists would applaud.

One major food category was nuts, especially chestnuts and walnuts, plus horse chestnuts and acorns leached or boiled free of their bitter poisons. Nuts could be harvested in autumn in prodigious quantities, then stored for the winter in underground pits up to six feet deep and six feet wide. Other plant foods included berries, fruits, seeds, leaves, shoots, bulbs, and roots. In all, archeologists sifting through Jomon garbage have identified 64 species of edible plants.

Then as now, Japan’s inhabitants were among the world’s leading consumers of seafood. They harpooned tuna in the open ocean, killed seals on the beaches, and exploited seasonal runs of salmon in the rivers. They drove dolphins into shallow water and clubbed or speared them, just as Japanese hunters do today. They netted diverse fish, captured them in weirs, and caught them on fishhooks carved from deer antlers. They gathered shellfish, crabs, and seaweed in the intertidal zone or dove for them. (Jomon skeletons show a high incidence of abnormal bone growth in the ears, often observed in divers today.) Among land animals hunted, wild boar and deer were the most common prey. They were caught in pit traps, shot with bows and arrows, and run down with dogs.

 

Japanese origins Pt. 2

Here is the second part:

The most debated question about Jomon subsistence concerns the possible contribution of agriculture. Many Jomon sites contain remains of edible plants that are native to Japan as wild species but also grown as crops today, including the adzuki bean and green gram bean. The remains from Jomon times do not clearly show features distinguishing the crops from their wild ancestors, so we do not know whether these plants were gathered in the wild or grown intentionally. Sites also have debris of edible or useful plant species not native to Japan, such as hemp, which must have been introduced from the Asian mainland. Around 1000 b.c., toward the end of the Jomon period, a few grains of rice, barley, and millet, the staple cereals of East Asia, began to appear. All these tantalizing clues make it likely that Jomon people were starting to practice some slash-and-burn agriculture, but evidently in a casual way that made only a minor contribution to their diet.

Archeologists studying Jomon hunter-gatherers have found not only hard-to-carry pottery (including pieces up to three feet tall) but also heavy stone tools, remains of substantial houses that show signs of repair, big village sites of 50 or more dwellings, and cemeteries—all further evidence that the Jomon people were sedentary rather than nomadic. Their stay-at-home lifestyle was made possible by the diversity of resource-rich habitats available within a short distance of one central site: inland forests, rivers, seashores, bays, and open oceans. Jomon people lived at some of the highest population densities ever estimated for hunter-gatherers, especially in central and northern Japan, with their nut-rich forests, salmon runs, and productive seas. The estimate of the total population of Jomon Japan at its peak is 250,000—trivial, of course, compared with today, but impressive for hunter-gatherers.

With all this stress on what Jomon people did have, we need to be clear as well about what they didn’t have. Their lives were very different from those of contemporary societies only a few hundred miles away in mainland China and Korea. Jomon people had no intensive agriculture. Apart from dogs (and perhaps pigs), they had no domestic animals. They had no metal tools, no writing, no weaving, and little social stratification into chiefs and commoners. Regional variation in pottery styles suggests little progress toward political centralization and unification.

Despite its distinctiveness even in East Asia at that time, Jomon Japan was not completely isolated. Pottery, obsidian, and fishhooks testify to some Jomon trade with Korea, Russia, and Okinawa—as does the arrival of Asian mainland crops. Compared with later eras, though, that limited trade with the outside world had little influence on Jomon society. Jomon Japan was a miniature conservative universe that changed surprisingly little over 10,000 years.

To place Jomon Japan in a contemporary perspective, let us remind ourselves of what human societies were like on the Asian mainland in 400 b.c., just as the Jomon lifestyle was about to come to an end. China consisted of kingdoms with rich elites and poor commoners; the people lived in walled towns, and the country was on the verge of political unification and would soon become the world’s largest empire. Beginning around 6500 b.c., China had developed intensive agriculture based on millet in the north and rice in the south; it had domestic pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. The Chinese had had writing for at least 900 years, metal tools for at least 1,500 years, and had just invented the world’s first cast iron. Those developments were also spreading to Korea, which itself had had agriculture for several thousand years (including rice since at least 2100 b.c.) and metal since 1000 b.c.

With all these developments going on for thousands of years just across the Korea Strait from Japan, it might seem astonishing that in 400 b.c. Japan was still occupied by people who had some trade with Korea but remained preliterate stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers. Throughout human history, centralized states with metal weapons and armies supported by dense agricultural populations have consistently swept away sparser populations of hunter-gatherers. How did Jomon Japan survive so long?

To understand the answer to this paradox, we have to remember that until 400 b.c., the Korea Strait separated not rich farmers from poor hunter-gatherers, but poor farmers from rich hunter-gatherers. China itself and Jomon Japan were probably not in direct contact. Instead Japan’s trade contacts, such as they were, involved Korea. But rice had been domesticated in warm southern China and spread only slowly northward to much cooler Korea, because it took a long time to develop cold-resistant strains of rice. Early rice agriculture in Korea used dry-field methods rather than irrigated paddies and was not particularly productive. Hence early Korean agriculture could not compete with Jomon hunting and gathering. Jomon people themselves would have seen no advantage in adopting Korean agriculture, insofar as they were aware of its existence, and poor Korean farmers had no advantages that would let them force their way into Japan. As we shall see, the advantages finally reversed suddenly and dramatically.

More than 10,000 years after the invention of pottery and the subsequent Jomon population explosion, a second decisive event in Japanese history triggered a second population explosion. Around 400 b.c., a new lifestyle arrived from South Korea. This second transition poses in acute form our question about who the Japanese are. Does the transition mark the replacement of Jomon people with immigrants from Korea, ancestral to the modern Japanese? Or did Japan’s original Jomon inhabitants continue to occupy Japan while learning valuable new tricks?

The new mode of living appeared first on the north coast of Japan’s southwesternmost island, Kyushu, just across the Korea Strait from South Korea. There we find Japan’s first metal tools, of iron, and Japan’s first undisputed full-scale agriculture. That agriculture came in the form of irrigated rice fields, complete with canals, dams, banks, paddies, and rice residues revealed by archeological excavations. Archeologists term the new way of living Yayoi, after a district of Tokyo where in 1884 its characteristic pottery was first recognized. Unlike Jomon pottery, Yayoi pottery was very similar to contemporary South Korean pottery in shape. Many other elements of the new Yayoi culture were unmistakably Korean and previously foreign to Japan, including bronze objects, weaving, glass beads, and styles of tools and houses.

While rice was the most important crop, Yayoi farmers introduced 27 new to Japan, as well as unquestionably domesticated pigs. They may have practiced double cropping, with paddies irrigated for rice production in the summer, then drained for dry-land cultivation of millet, barley, and wheat in the winter. Inevitably, this highly productive system of intensive agriculture triggered an immediate population explosion in Kyushu, where archeologists have identified far more Yayoi sites than Jomon sites, even though the Jomon period lasted 14 times longer.

In virtually no time, Yayoi farming jumped from Kyushu to the adjacent main islands of Shikoku and Honshu, reaching the Tokyo area within 200 years, and the cold northern tip of Honshu (1,000 miles from the first Yayoi settlements on Kyushu) in another century. After briefly occupying northern Honshu, Yayoi farmers abandoned that area, presumably because rice farming could not compete with the Jomon hunter-gatherer life. For the next 2,000 years, northern Honshu remained a frontier zone, beyond which the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido and its Ainu hunter-gatherers were not even considered part of the Japanese state until their annexation in the nineteenth century.

It took several centuries for Yayoi Japan to show the first signs of social stratification, as reflected especially in cemeteries. After about 100 b.c., separate parts of cemeteries were set aside for the graves of what was evidently an emerging elite class, marked by luxury goods imported from China, such as beautiful jade objects and bronze mirrors. As the Yayoi population explosion continued, and as all the best swamps or irrigable plains suitable for wet rice agriculture began to fill up, the archeological evidence suggests that war became more and more frequent: that evidence includes mass production of arrowheads, defensive moats surrounding villages, and buried skeletons pierced by projectile points. These hallmarks of war in Yayoi Japan corroborate the earliest accounts of Japan in Chinese chronicles, which describe the land of Wa and its hundred little political units fighting one another.

In the period from a.d. 300 to 700, both archeological excavations and frustratingly ambiguous accounts in later chronicles let us glimpse dimly the emergence of a politically unified Japan. Before a.d. 300, elite tombs were small and exhibited a regional diversity of styles. Beginning around a.d. 300, increasingly enormous earth-mound tombs called kofun, in the shape of keyholes, were constructed throughout the former Yayoi area from Kyushu to North Honshu. Kofun are up to 1,500 feet long and more than 100 feet high, making them possibly the largest earth-mound tombs in the world. The prodigious amount of labor required to build them and the uniformity of their style across Japan imply powerful rulers who commanded a huge, politically unified labor force. Those kofun that have been excavated contain lavish burial goods, but excavation of the largest ones is still forbidden because they are believed to contain the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line. The visible evidence of political centralization that the kofun provide reinforces the accounts of kofun-era Japanese emperors written down much later in Japanese and Korean chronicles. Massive Korean influences on Japan during the kofun era—whether through the Korean conquest of Japan (the Korean view) or the Japanese conquest of Korea (the Japanese view)—were responsible for transmitting Buddhism, writing, horseback riding, and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques to Japan from the Asian mainland.

Finally, with the completion of Japan’s first chronicle in a.d. 712, Japan emerged into the full light of history. As of 712, the people inhabiting Japan were at last unquestionably Japanese, and their language (termed Old Japanese) was unquestionably ancestral to modern Japanese. Emperor Akihito, who reigns today, is the eighty-second direct descendant of the emperor under whom that first chronicle of a.d. 712 was written. He is traditionally considered the 125th direct descendant of the legendary first emperor, Jimmu, the great-great-great-grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Japanese culture underwent far more radical change in the 700 years of the Yayoi era than in the ten millennia of Jomon times. The contrast between Jomon stability (or conservatism) and radical Yayoi change is the most striking feature of Japanese history. Obviously, something momentous happened at 400 b.c. What was it? Were the ancestors of the modern Japanese the Jomon people, the Yayoi people, or a combination? Japan’s population increased by an astonishing factor of 70 during Yayoi times: What caused that change? A passionate debate has raged around three alternative hypotheses.

One theory is that Jomon hunter-gatherers themselves gradually evolved into the modern Japanese. Because they had already been living a settled existence in villages for thousands of years, they may have been preadapted to accepting agriculture. At the Yayoi transition, perhaps nothing more happened than that Jomon society received cold-resistant rice seeds and information about paddy irrigation from Korea, enabling it to produce more food and increase its numbers. This theory appeals to many modern Japanese because it minimizes the unwelcome contribution of Korean genes to the Japanese gene pool while portraying the Japanese people as uniquely Japanese for at least the past 12,000 years.

A second theory, unappealing to those Japanese who prefer the first theory, argues instead that the Yayoi transition represents a massive influx of immigrants from Korea, carrying Korean farming practices, culture, and genes. Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice. According to one estimate, Yayoi Japan received several million immigrants from Korea, utterly overwhelming the genetic contribution of Jomon people (thought to have numbered around 75,000 just before the Yayoi transition). If so, modern Japanese are descendants of Korean immigrants who developed a modified culture of their own over the last 2,000 years.

The last theory accepts the evidence for immigration from Korea but denies that it was massive. Instead, highly productive agriculture may have enabled a modest number of immigrant rice farmers to reproduce much faster than Jomon hunter-gatherers and eventually to outnumber them. Like the second theory, this theory considers modern Japanese to be slightly modified Koreans but dispenses with the need for large-scale immigration.

By comparison with similar transitions elsewhere in the world, the second or third theory seems to me more plausible than the first theory. Over the last 12,000 years, agriculture arose at not more than nine places on Earth, including China and the Fertile Crescent. Twelve thousand years ago, everybody alive was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or fed by farmers. Farming spread from those few sites of origin mainly because farmers outbred hunters, developed more potent technology, and then killed the hunters or drove them off lands suitable for agriculture. In modern times European farmers thereby replaced native Californian hunters, aboriginal Australians, and the San people of South Africa. Farmers who used stone tools similarly replaced hunters prehistorically throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia. Korean farmers of 400 b.c. would have enjoyed a much larger advantage over Jomon hunters because the Koreans already possessed iron tools and a highly developed form of intensive agriculture.

Which of the three theories is correct for Japan? The only direct way to answer this question is to compare Jomon and Yayoi skeletons and genes with those of modern Japanese and Ainu. Measurements have now been made of many skeletons. In addition, within the last three years molecular geneticists have begun to extract dna from ancient human skeletons and compare the genes of Japan’s ancient and modern populations. Jomon and Yayoi skeletons, researchers find, are on the average readily distinguishable. Jomon people tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography, with strikingly raised browridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat browridges and noses. Some skeletons of the Yayoi period were still Jomon-like in appearance, but that is to be expected by almost any theory of the Jomon-Yayoi transition. By the time of the kofun period, all Japanese skeletons except those of the Ainu form a homogeneous group, resembling modern Japanese and Koreans.

In all these respects, Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese. Similarly, geneticists attempting to calculate the relative contributions of Korean-like Yayoi genes and Ainu-like Jomon genes to the modern Japanese gene pool have concluded that the Yayoi contribution was generally dominant. Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. Genetic studies of the past three years have also at last resolved the controversy about the origins of the Ainu: they are the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.

Given the overwhelming advantage that rice agriculture gave Korean farmers, one has to wonder why the farmers achieved victory over Jomon hunters so suddenly, after making little headway in Japan for thousands of years. What finally tipped the balance and triggered the Yayoi transition was probably a combination of four developments: the farmers began raising rice in irrigated fields instead of in less productive dry fields; they developed rice strains that would grow well in a cool climate; their population expanded in Korea, putting pressure on Koreans to emigrate; and they invented iron tools that allowed them to mass-produce the wooden shovels, hoes, and other tools needed for rice-paddy agriculture. That iron and intensive farming reached Japan simultaneously is unlikely to have been a coincidence.

We have seen that the combined evidence of archeology, physical anthropology, and genetics supports the transparent interpretation for how the distinctive-looking Ainu and the undistinctive-looking Japanese came to share Japan: the Ainu are descended from Japan’s original inhabitants and the Japanese are descended from more recent arrivals. But that view leaves the problem of language unexplained. If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar. More generally, if the Japanese people arose recently from some mixture, on the island of Kyushu, of original Ainu-like Jomon inhabitants with Yayoi invaders from Korea, the Japanese language might show close affinities to both the Korean and Ainu languages. Instead, Japanese and Ainu have no demonstrable relationship, and the relationship between Japanese and Korean is distant. How could this be so if the mixing occurred a mere 2,400 years ago? I suggest the following resolution of this paradox: the languages of Kyushu’s Jomon residents and Yayoi invaders were quite different from the modern Ainu and Korean languages, respectively.

The Ainu language was spoken in recent times by the Ainu on the northern island of Hokkaido, so Hokkaido’s Jomon inhabitants probably also spoke an Ainu-like language. The Jomon inhabitants of Kyushu, however, surely did not. From the southern tip of Kyushu to the northern tip of Hokkaido, the Japanese archipelago is nearly 1,500 miles long. In Jomon times it supported great regional diversity of subsistence techniques and of pottery styles and was never unified politically. During the 10,000 years of Jomon occupation, Jomon people would have evolved correspondingly great linguistic diversity. In fact, many Japanese place-names on Hokkaido and northern Honshu include the Ainu words for river, nai or betsu, and for cape, shiri, but such Ainu-like names do not occur farther south in Japan. This suggests not only that Yayoi and Japanese pioneers adopted many Jomon place-names, just as white Americans did Native American names (think of Massachusetts and Mississippi), but also that Ainu was the Jomon language only of northernmost Japan.

That is, the modern Ainu language of Hokkaido is not a model for the ancient Jomon language of Kyushu. By the same token, modern Korean may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 b.c. In the centuries before Korea became unified politically in a.d. 676, it consisted of three kingdoms. Modern Korean is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla, the kingdom that emerged triumphant and unified Korea, but Silla was not the kingdom that had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries. Early Korean chronicles tell us that the different kingdoms had different languages. While the languages of the kingdoms defeated by Silla are poorly known, the few preserved words of one of those kingdoms, Koguryo, are much more similar to the corresponding Old Japanese words than are the corresponding modern Korean words. Korean languages may have been even more diverse in 400 b.c., before political unification had reached the stage of three kingdoms. The Korean language that reached Japan in 400 b.c., and that evolved into modern Japanese, I suspect, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modern Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.

History gives the Japanese and the Koreans ample grounds for mutual distrust and contempt, so any conclusion confirming their close relationship is likely to be unpopular among both peoples. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.


— June 1998

 

I wouldn't pay attention to anything on Yahoo. Most likely, they aren't soccer fans and they're just looking for an excuse to make anti-Korea statements.

Opinions posted there tend to lean towards the extreme and rarely tend to reflect reality. It's basically a small number of people trying to one-up each other with inflammatory statements. It's the same way at 2ch and any other unmoderated message board.

I am certainly excited to have someone who has proven himself at the World Cup and Serie A, but I also realize he will only be around for 4 months. My guess is that the majority of Japanese fans feel the same way.

 

We're actually in agreement

Matsu,

I did not mean to give you or anyone the impression that Japanese regard the term Kita Chosen as referring to an ancient kingdom. Obviously it is widely accepted as referring to North Korea. According to Kim Myung-Soo, people with allegiances to NK living in Japan were in somewhat of a legal limbo due to Japanese declaration that all people from former colonies returned to being citizens of countries prior to annexation by Japan.

Perhaps the situation has been handled by local governments due to practical necessity, as you pointed out. I recall that a Korean resident of Japan in Kawasaki became the first foreigner to be a civil servant in 1997(?).

I take the view that many of the terms used to refer to Koreans in Japan are misleading. For example, I seem to recall reading a statistic that 60% of international marriages in Japan are with Koreans. Now, are Koreans going over to Japan in such large numbers to marry Japanese or are Japanese traveling to Korea and falling in love? I doubt it. I'm guessing that it is probably due to the status of Korean living in Japan being regarded as foreigners, regadless of the fact that most longer speak Korean well nor have ever lived in Korea. Is a person who is identical to the average Japanese in every way except for his place of origins a couple of generations prior really a foreigner?

By the same token, referring to a Korean resident of Japan as a South Korean because he happens to belong to the Mindan group, or calling someone else a North Korean because he support the Chosensoren (Joseonchungnyun, or Jochungnyun for short) is misleading. The terms imply places of origin, but in reality it is just a matter of allegiance or what passport they possess. I realize that a passport is a legal document, but in reality, such a person would probably be regarded as more Japanese than Korean by many native-born Koreans.

My friend's cousin is a good example. She was born in Japan and has the Japanese name of Kazumi, and cannot speak a lick of Korean. Yet, she is considered a foreigner in Japan due to her South Korean passport. Yes, I realize that Koreans can get naturalized by a process in which changing their name to Japanese is one of the steps, but many Korean find it demeaning and choose not to.

As you know, fingerprinting and alien registration has been a requirement for Korean residents of Japan, regardless of how many generations they have been living in Japan. When compared with the laws in Germany, U.K. and the United States, Japanese law has been very harsh to foreigners, especially Koreans. Germany has made special accomodations to make it easy for a Jew to settle in Germany and get a German citizenship, to atone for past wrongs. The Japanese governments actions have been just the opposite.

I think many Koreans have trouble distinguishing the actions of the Japanese government and the sentiments of the ordinary citizen. By any measure, the actions of the Japanese government has been less than admirable in regards to dealing with the imperialist past, and many assume the average Japanese is the same way. The truth is that the average Japanese is ignorant, rather than evil, but that would come as little comfort to many Koreans.

Of course there is an explainable reason why the Japanese gov't has been so hostile. I could go into how MacArthur chose to keep many imperialists in power, including some Class A war criminals like Prime Minister Kishi, so that the Japanese economy can recover as quickly as possible and presumably block the spread of communism, but let that be a discussion for another day. My basic points are these:

1. I don't like the foreign status of Koreans in Japan. They deserve to be citizens without having to be stripped completely of their ethnicity.

2. I don't like the terms North Korean and South Korean used to describe them. They are misleading to the average layman who does not know the details of the situation.

Note that my two points are my opinions, not facts. One can simply either agree or diagree.

Best regards,
Hyok

 

Damn, this topic has just drifted waaaay out there. Anyway, to add to the crazy confusion, I'd just like to add some more links to those curious as to the origins of the modern-day Japanese:

http://www.uglychinese.org/japanese.htm

(contrary to popular belief, the domain name of that site is not meant to be racist but takes its name from the book by Taiwanese author Bai Yang).

For an extremely detailed version of one Korean scholar's view of the relationship between the Paekche Kingdom and the Yamato Kingdom, read Hong Wontack's PEAKCHE OF KOREA AND THE ORIGIN OF YAMATO JAPAN
http://gias.snu.ac.kr/wthong/publication/paekche/eng/paekch_e.html

English, and I think Korean versions of the book are out there. I remember picking it up one weekend at the library and I couldn't put it down! It's a really exciting story about how Paekche was forced off the peninsula to the Japanese isles after they were defeated by Silla and Koryo [please forgive me for slaughtering all these names! I don't know Korean!]

BTW, in 2001, Akihito himself admitted he is a descendant of Paekche:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,625427,00.html

 

Re: Re: We're actually in agreement

Matsu,

I like you. I really do. But at the moment, I'm really struggling to suppress a sneer from curling my lips.

The Japanese law regarding naturalization appears fairly liberal when taken at face value. The steps are simply:

a) Be aged twenty or older,
b) Have lived here continuously for five years,
c) Respect the Japanese Constitution (i.e. not join subversive groups),
d) Demonstrate the means to support your family,
e) Relinquish other nationalities (Japan will soon be the only OECD country requiring this), and
f) Have no major criminal record.

There is no requirement for knowledge of history, culture, or even language proficiency like in the U.S. So why is it that it is more difficult to become a Japanese citizen. Why is it that you find people from all over the world becoming American citizens while there are relatively fewer naturalized Japanese citizens?

There are many subtle obstacles, but the main one is the souko chousa ("good behavior survey") in which an inspector will come visit your house. He might look at your decor, open your refrigerator, even check your children's toys. They will talk to your neighbors to find out how "Japanese" you are.

Now, what are the chances that someone who has a pot of kimchi chigae on the stove, has arirang playing on the stereo, and goes by a Korean name will pass such an inspection. How about zero? Refusal rates are closely guarded secrets, so we cannot know for sure, but really, is there any doubt?

Sure, it is not written into the law that one needs to change the name to Japanese, but for a Korean wanting citizenship, would he risk it? It is just like the marriage law in Korea until recent changes. Administrative offices refused to accept marriage license applications from couples that had the same last name and were from the same clan (for example Kimhae Kim) regardless of how distant the relations were. Nothing written into law, but that's the way it was, until a new law said that as long as you were 8 relations removed, the marriage was legal.

This is similar to the granting of the right to vote to American black. Many southern states still found ways to deny that right by requiring a literacy test, since many black did not have formal education.

To say that Koreans have been refusing Japanese citizenship over the years by their own free choice is insensitive. If refusing to erase all trace of one's ethnicity and origins amount to free choice, then so be it.

It is true that through actions of Korean and Japanese activists that the Zainichi (Jaeil gyopo) are being treated better. That probably explains why more Koreans are naturalizing in larger numbers. Officials are not exerting the pressure to submit Japanese-sounding names like in the past. The situation today is much better than it was even ten years ago, but that is due to the Zainichi demanding their rights, not because Japan is such a nice, progressive country as you are making it sound.

It has been like pulling teeth with the Japanese government. They still refuse to remove Koreans who were conscripted into the Imperial Army from the list of war heroes in Yasukuni shrine, inspite of pleading from their families.

Yes, it is getting better. There still is ample room for improvement.

 

Hey Noobie,

I have that book by Hong, in English. Unfortunately, I have not had the time to read it in detail. Many Koreans, including myself, probably feel a bit of vindication when they read that book. "Hah! I told you so!" might be the first reaction.

However, I hope that the sense of vindication would give way to the fact that the Japanese and Koreans do share a common root, and that it would be tragic to continue a state of enmity. I know that the actions of the Japanese government are difficult to forgive, but friendships between individuals can be very rewarding.

By the way, don't mean to be too picky, but Paekche was defeated by the combined forces of Tang Chinese and Shilla. They also toppled Koguryo, and a latter day state of Parhae lurched on for a few more hundred years in its place. Shilla, after unifying Korean in the somewhat dubious manner, spent several years fighting off the treacherous Tang, who decided that they wanted entire Korea to themselves. The involvement of foreign powers was a foreshadowing of things to come.

Koryo was the dynasty founded by Yi Sung-gye, a military general who created a scholarly nation so that he would not have to fear a coup d'etat. This occurred shortly after the Shilla's defeat of the Tang.

Another picky point, Akihito acknowledged Korean origins, but did not specifically refer to Paekche. That would be too explicit for him ;-)

Take care, and let's talk football now.

Hyok

 

I see. It's been a while since I read that book, so the way in which Paekche was defeated is kind of muddy for me, but the Emperor did acknowledge Paekche. In that link above, here are Akihito's quoted words:

"I, on my part, feel a certain kinship with Korea, given the fact that it is recorded in the Chronicles of Japan [i.e. Nihon Shoki] that the mother of Emperor Kammu was of the line of King Muryong of Paekche,"

Of course people say it was backhanded to say his MOTHER was of the line of King Muryong when it is all but certain that his FATHER was also of the Paeckche Royal Household, but still, it's a start.

 

See I was right:

"...two incidents were constantly mentioned to link the origin of Japanese to the mainland Chinese: the story of Xu Fu (Jo Fuku)'s sailing to Japan to find panacea on behalf of first Qin Emperor Shihuangdi (Shi Huang Di or Shi Huangdi), and the story of hairy-faced knight's abandoning China's central plains to Tang Dynasty founders in search of an eastern land for creation of his own kingdom. There is no definite proof that Xu Fu, together with 3000 virgin boys and 3000 virgin girls, had actually landed in Japan 2200 years ago though a tombstone bearing his name was erected in Japan."

taken from the website provided by noobie, this was what I was referring to in my earlier post, I wasn't trying to start a flame war for those of you that think I was trying to.

 

Thanks for that quote, Noobie. I haven't seen that quote from Akihito before, but you are right that it is somewhat backhanded, considering that one of the first historical emperors (as opposed to legendary), Ojin, is believed to be a Paekche nobleman, Homuda, from the Puyo ruling family. If one buys the notion that there was a continuous unbroken line from the original Jimmu Tenno (which is highly doubtful), then it is not an exaggeration to say that the Japanese royalty ARE direct descendants of Paekche.

Later,
Hyok

 

Just curious, are there any known descendants of the Paekche Royal family left in Korea? I mean, of course they don't rule anything, but you know, just in-name. Also, are there any good books in English on the era of the 3 Korean Kingdoms?

 

I'm almost certain the answer is "no." I asked my father, who is somewhat of an expert on the matter, and he was sure that there was no one who can claim a link to Paekche royalty.

Shilla made special effort to destroy Paekche relics and eliminate its influence. In the Samguksagi, there is little detail on Paekche, and it probably is no coincidence that the people of Chollado, where Paekche was located, have been oppressed throughout Korean history.

I have been searching for books on the Three Kingdom era in English, but I cannot think of any I would recommend. If you are interested in modern history, any book by Bruce Cumings come very highly recommended. He covers ancient history, but it is short and derivative. Perhaps this can be your calling in life. As for me, working as an engineer is a bit more reliable source of income than becoming a doctorate of ancient NE Asian history. Maybe when I get independently wealthy, I'll do that.

Take care,
Hyok

 

I see. I have re-borrowed the Hong Wocktang book, "Paekche of Korea and the Origin of Yamato Wa" and am re-reading it, and something dawned upon me. If Paekche really is Yamato, then why did they make up their mythical pre-history and disclaim any relationship from the Korean mainland? A working theory I have is that 1) the defeat at the hands of Silla was too painful, shameful, embarassing, that it was just best to start anew or 2) A new history was created to weaken the people's sentiment to "take back the mainland." By teaching the people that there was no connection with the Korean peninsula, they could avoid constant war and concentrate on developing their new kingdom. Or maybe it was a bit of both.

It seems to be a sort of mideval version of the Nationalist's exile to Taiwan, with nascent Taiwanese Nationalists claiming they are their own country, Taiwan, that has nothing to do with China.

Thanks for the book recommendations. I will look into this.

 

regarding Taiwan

Taiwan is part of China, any idiot who thinks otherwise is a traitor to China and should be given a bullet to the back of the head.

 

Re: regarding Taiwan

Taiwan is not part of China. Taiwan is an independent nation. Taiwanese people do not desire to be Chinese. They want to be an independent state, so be it.