Who are the Japanese? (2008)

http://discovermagazine.com/1998/jun/japaneseroots1455/

by Futurebot • 11 years ago

89 30 11 years ago

USNetizen• 11 years ago

This is quite interesting. I lived in Okinawa for several years and remember how loathe they were to associate themselves with the Japanese Mainland "Honshu" - even calling themselves "Okinawan" and not Japanese with adamant fervor. A lot of that relates to World War II era atrocities committed on the island, but, regardless, I think Okinawans see themselves as largely very different from the mainland Japanese even though they are citizens of the same country. That would be yet another distinction that I think this article sort of missed as it only referenced differences between far north and the rest of Japan.

Having lived in both mainland and Okinawa, the cultures are rather starkly different as well - Okinawa with a pretty typical, more laid back island culture and mainland with a bustling, busy one. In this regard, Japan isn't as homogeneous - both culturally and genetically - as the article would have you believe if the covered area were to include Japan's southernmost islands.

moogleii• 11 years ago

Yeah, I noticed the article didn't really mention the Okinawans either. They were annexed relatively recently, and are pretty different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_Kingdom

On a related tangent, apparently modern karate originated in Okinawa, where it was locally called something like Tang-style (of the Chinese Tang dynasty). But it was re-branded Karate to make it more palpable to Japan (since they happened to be in the middle of invading China).

reallyRaoul• 11 years ago

or the Ainu.

S4M• 11 years ago

In Japanese, "te" means hand, and "kara" means both "Chinese" and "empty", so karate originally meant "Chinese hand", since it was derived from the Chinese kung fu, but its meaning later was changed into "empty hand".

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate#Etymology

slurry• 11 years ago

Before about 1932, karate was written with the characters 唐手 (Tang/China hand). Then it was written with 空手 (open hand) - same sound, different characters.

ABS• 11 years ago

On a related tangent, apparently modern karate originated in Okinawa

it's well documented actually, before 1900 or so no one in mainland Japan knew anything about what would later be called karate.

Gichin Funakoshi (father of shotokan karate, even though he never called it that himself) moved to mainland Japan in 1922 to popularize it. Before then only a few people in the Japanese navy and the prince/emperor-to-be had seen it while visiting Okinawa.

Yes, there are other styles other than Funakoshi but he is undisputably the one who broke into mainland Japan first

richsinn2• 11 years ago

This is also one of the reasons why Japan the Country has historically supported Judo more so than Karate (support via the Japanese government to promote it internationally, to the Olympics, etc).

mahranch2• 11 years ago

Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences.

I lived in Japan for some time and this sentence is a gross generalization. Some right-wingers in Japan are attempting to maintain their traditions, but the rest of the population either couldn't care less, or has fully embraced western culture. You don't have to look hard (or at all, really) to see the evidence. Speaking English is (and has been) considered "cool" and you can find popular music artists dropping the occasional English words in songs, in their mangas, anime or in their dramas. A walk around any city with over 20k people and you can see western influence quite literally everywhere. Nobody is rushing to tear it down or even denounce it.

There are a few extreme right-wing nationalists who might, but they're the fringe. They're smaller in size than America's Tea Party and should not be taken seriously.

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.

No, this is incorrect. At the very least, it's extremely misleading. China and Japan were fighting and both countries attempted to snatch up Korea as part of the first Sino war. It had nothing to do with their "restoration of legitimate arrangement of antiquity". That may have been their reasoning long after but it's not something any historians worth his salt would say was the reason for China and Japan's interest in Korea. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War#Conflic...

This paper is actually probably one of the best papers I've read on the reasons behind Japan's imperialism during that time: http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/papers/imperialism.htm

It goes over all of the possible reasons. The most likely of which, is that they were straight up emulating the West.

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

Western culture had a weird influence long before. Their children animation series were western looking characters. I don't know how much of it was a marketing strategy or a form of praise for westerners. I also noticed the trend for English lines (Ai Robu Iou) in anime theme songs.

zhemao• 11 years ago

Their children animation series were western looking characters.

It's because Osamu Tezuka, widely considered the father of modern anime and manga, was heavily inspired by Disney's animation style. He drew his characters with "Mickey Mouse"-style eyes, which evolved into the over-sized "anime eyes" we see today.

krapp2• 11 years ago

Osamu Tezuka (credited for inventing anime/manga as a genre) was indeed influenced by Disney character animation. And anime itself is a loanword from the French word for animation. There's nothing weird about one culture influencing another.

Japanese culture does seem to think that English 'sounds cool,' but how many US companies choose Japanese names for their products for the hip factor, and how many people get kanji tattoos despite barely knowing what they mean? The phenomenon definitely goes both ways, sometimes recursively: Nintendo of Japan reskinned Doki Doki Panic as Super Mario Bros. 2 for the US market, then resold it domestically as "Super Mario USA."

coldtea• 11 years ago

* A walk around any city with over 20k people and you can see western influence quite literally everywhere.*

Of course. It's 2014, and "western influence" includes things like technology and pop culture.

That doesn't mean that "attempting to maintain their traditions" is confined to some right wingers.

You probably conflate people trying to maintain their traditions actively (as most Japanese do) to vocal ideologists about maintaining traditions.

Maintaining traditions is not about that.

kazinator• 11 years ago

As a generalization, the Japanese are quite interested in other cultures all over. They assimilate artifacts from other cultures, making them Japanese in the process and therefore acceptable in a way to those who are conservative.

Foreign loanwords pass easily into Japanese. They get transliterated into the mora sounds (sometimes beyond easy recognition) and written in katakana. A foreign verb instantly becomes a verb in Japanese with the affixation of -suru/-shimasu (and variations like -itashimasu). So "take-it-easy-shimasu" ("I'm taking it easy") is possible, although the "take-it-easy" part becomes something like テイクイットイージー　(teikui tto iijii). Foreign nouns slip in just as easily, and with the -na affix, foreign adjectives can be used easily. "Wonderful" becomes ワンダフル (wandafuru). Now add -da/-desu and you can say that something is wonderful: "wandafuru desu". Switch to a -na (な)and you have an adjective. ワンダフルな公園 (wandafuru-na kouen: wonderful park) (Just made that up, but Google finds quite a few results for it in quotes). Because the phonetics is Japanese and is veneered over with a Japanese writing system, it is assimilated into Japanese and thereby somehow becomes non-invasive and acceptable. There is a lot of "Japanese English": words and phrases based on English which either don't have English cognates, or the obvious cognates have different meanings. For instance マイペース (maipe-su) is derived from "my pace", and one of its meanings is the obvious one: at one's own pace. But it also means "in one's own way": one's manner of doing things, of living, whatever. Your "pace" could be that you dye your hair purple or whatever, because nobody analyzes what "pace" actually means in real English.

e12e• 11 years ago

I agree with most of what you say, but regarding:

There are a few extreme right-wing nationalists who might, but they're the fringe. They're smaller in size than America's Tea Party and should not be taken seriously.

The one does not follow from the other. Japan has a terrible history when it comes to fascism, the collusion of government (the temporary US one, and before/after Japanese), gangsters and the far right in union busting, and general nastiness (not to mention oppression of foreigners, especially non-white foreigners).

So "should not be taken seriously" doesn't sit right with me. It's a little like saying neo-nazis shouldn't be taken seriously in Scandinavia, because they've been so successfully worked against over the last year -- but one should not ignore history. These kind of groups breed hatred and bigotry, influence mainstream politics (both in Sweden, Denmark and Norway) -- and in general, if ignored and left alone, will fester and become a problem for any healthy democracy. See also: France.

mahranch2• 11 years ago

So "should not be taken seriously" doesn't sit right with me.

If you're a Japanese citizen, of course you should take them seriously. However, none of us are Japanese citizens. We can afford to not take them seriously because there is quite literally nothing we can do about it.

My claim that they should not be taken seriously is more in the context of our own media. They tend to take what those fringe right-wingers say as representative of the entire country. They do it all the time in fact. You'll hear things like "Japan is racist", they haven't apologized for WW2, or that they're trying to rewrite their history.

No, they're not. None of those things are even remotely true. Their right-wing fringe would like some of those things to happen but they're not even close to being successful in their attempts.

See here for how Japan is actually one of the top 20 least racist countries in the world: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...

And as far as ignoring their war crimes go, their history text books actually the least nationalistic in Asia, and even less nationalistic than Americas. For proof, see this study done by Stanford University: http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a00703/

All that history revisionism nonsense is just that, nonsense. But the fact remains that you have major news organizations reporting the views of these right wingers and portraying them as something that's common in Japan. It's not remotely close to reality. In my experience (from living in Japan for a brief stint), it would be like the BBC interviewing and taking the KKK seriously, then trying to portray America as racist.

It's actually a pretty huge issue that I think needs to be addressed (the way western media portrays "wacky Japan") and I've been thinking about doing a piece on it myself.

smegel• 11 years ago

you might expect the Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language

Like the extensive use of Chinese characters in their writing system?

I started learning basic Japanese after learning Korean to an intermediate level, and was surprised that the grammar was almost identical for simple phrases.

trynumber9• 11 years ago

No genetic affinities is what is meant there. Viet, Korean, and Japanese all borrow up to 60% of their vocabulary from Chinese. But none of them have a strong relationship with Chinese or each other. As far as we can tell, so far, Japanese languages are isolates.

richsinn2• 11 years ago

Most linguists have historically categorized the Japonic languages and the Korean language as isolates. But, even though the technical elements between the two languages may bear no relationship with each other, the phonetic similarities between the two languages are pretty interesting. Also, at times, the grammatical features and structures between Japanese and Korean are more similar to each other than Japanese is to Chinese or Korean is to Chinese (e.g. Japanese and Korean are SOV word order [1] languages whereas Chinese is an SVO word order [2] language).

Of course, there's debate as to whether these similarities between the Japanese and Korean languages are a result of language convergence or divergence. But considering how close the two countries are (historically and geographically), it's probably a mix of both.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93ob...

4r10r5• 11 years ago

nihonjinron along the lines of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ... supporting a false ethnic nationalism

drpgq• 11 years ago

I thought this recent Razib Khan post on the origins of the Japanese was interesting

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/scions-of-the-hairy-ainu-not-amatera...

jckt• 11 years ago

Is there any reason why the submission title has "2008" in it? The article in question says it's from the June 1998 issue

cpncrunch• 11 years ago

Also, a lot of the information in the article is outdated. For example, it says that the oldest pottery in the world comes from Japan 12700 years ago. However in recent years 20,000 year old pottery has been found in China.

Prosciutto• 11 years ago

Put aside many other incorrect informations written on the article, I just want to say that a couple of years ago I visited National Science Museum in Tokyo and there are two entire floors dedicated to talk about Japanese's root. One of it said that the true native Japanese came from the mainland 50,000 years ago when they first invented large ships.

Secondly, there are artifacts and ancient pots remains that can be dated 70,000 years ago and trees and something which I cannot remember well.

After years of living here, I can only say don't believe anything on the article. Especially the fact that it didn't mention Ryukyuans.

kylebgorman2• 11 years ago

While I don't have a survey in hand, my impression is that few historical linguists believe there to be a demonstrated (genealogical) relationship between Korean and Japanese: they are generally considered to be isolates (i.e., languages which have no demonstrable relationship to any other extant language; Ainu, as it happens, is also thought to be an isolate).

Now, this doesn't mean they're not genealogically related. But, (at least prehistoric) languages change rapidly enough that it is probably impossible to convincingly reconstruct an ancestral language spoken more than a few thousand years ago, so the shared ancestor probably would have been spoken farther back than the comparative reconstruction method can look.

jqm• 11 years ago

I seem to remember years ago reading that the Japanese language was related to Finnish and considered to be in the same family.

Maybe things have changed or I'm mis-remembering.

SiVal• 11 years ago

Yes, things have changed. When I first learned both Japanese and Korean, they were considered part of a "Uralo-Altaic" language family that included Finnish and Hungarian as well as some Northeast Asian languages. I'm not aware of any linguist who believes in that East-West link anymore.

And, when I (as a non-Asian) learned both of these languages long ago, the difference from any other languages I had learned was obvious, and so was their resemblance to each other. I was quite surprised and puzzled to learn that linguists had declared them unrelated.

Over the years, more and more linguists have concluded that they are, in fact, related, something that has always been obvious to me (and that has nothing to do with shared Chinese loanwords in both.)

kylebgorman2• 11 years ago

My claim is that this idea that Japanese and/or Korean can be shown to be related to any other known language is very much a minority and/or fringe position, held by few mainstream historical linguists. (My only source is held by that I am a professional linguist and sometimes travel in circles that care about such matters.)

Who are the Japanese? (2008)

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