Please help me understand the ethnic/racial origin of the Japanese.

December 6, 2008 1:49 PM

Please help me understand the ethnic/racial origin of the Japanese.

I really would like to know the ethnic history of the Japanese. Considering that some mingling of different tribes had to have happened on Japanese soil, I would like to know who these tribes were. The purpose of all this information is basically to be able to relate the Japanese ethnicity to other ethnicities because obviously the connection has to be there, though it's hard to establish because the Japanese have a very unique look to them.

posted by gregb1007 to society & culture (10 comments total)

To the extent you are asking about the indigenous people of Japan, you might be interested in the Ainu.
posted by Dr. Zira at 2:11 PM on December 6, 2008

There are theories, but I don't think that much has been established. One of the original groups was the Emishi.

Research into this has been a bit hesitant. It's a bit like research into the origins of the Native Americans. Their own mythos says they've always been in the Americas, and anyone who says otherwise these days tends to draw protests.

Likewise, the Japanese national mythos is that the Japanese have been in Japan forever, and the mythos says that the Imperial Family is descended from Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess.

Shinto doesn't have the power over the national culture it once did, and the divinity of the Imperial Family is one of the things Japan had to give up after the war. But it's still politically incorrect to really disagree with those things, so I'm not sure just how much real work is going on trying to find out what really happened.

Another problem is that the best evidence is that the Japanese came to Japan from Korea, and that runs into some entrenched anti-Korean racism. That's on the wane, but it's been more formidable in the past and it made it perilous to talk about the out-of-Korea theory.

This is what I've heard about it all. I could be wrong, and my information could be out of date.
posted by Class Goat at 2:13 PM on December 6, 2008

This seems like the kind of thing that ten minutes with Google and Wikipedia could clear up.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:21 PM on December 6, 2008

Something you might find interesting is National Geographic's Atlas of the Human Journey. I think mtDNA will be our best key to figuring out questions like this in the future.
posted by pravit at 2:22 PM on December 6, 2008

Actually, the Japanese aren't quite as prickly about their ethnic origins as Class Goat might imagine. I recall watching a documentary on NHK quite a few years ago discussing the Korean component in very early Japanese history. One of the interesting points they made was comparing hina dolls from Kyoto and Tokyo, showing obviously different facial features. Their point was that the Kyoto hina dolls had more Koreanized features.

Also, comparing Yayoi pottery to Korean pottery of the same era, and contrasting it with the preceding Jomon pottery, makes it pretty clear that there's been an outside influence.

I don't know a whole lot more than this. It is true that there was a time when discussing Korean influence in very early Japanese history was Not Done, which has probably retarded scholarship.

It's probably an oversimplification to say that "the Japanese" came from Korea, in the same way it'd be an oversimplification to say "the English" came from Holland/Norway/France (whatever), although it's clear that those ethnic groups certainly mixed in with the English.
posted by adamrice at 2:26 PM on December 6, 2008

This study (411 KB pdf), which I found through Wikipedia, used genetic analysis to claim that the Japanese are a mix of two populations - hunter-gatherers ("Jomon culture") who came from Central Asia some time before 12,000 years ago, and rice farmers ("Yayoi culture") from southeast Asia who came to Japan via Korea starting some 2300 years ago.
posted by lukemeister at 2:33 PM on December 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

Lukemeister, an enormous thank you to you... You've really made my day with your answer!
posted by gregb1007 at 3:02 PM on December 6, 2008

gregb1007,

Sure - I almost tossed off a quick answer about Korea, but then decided I should find out whether I knew what was talking about.
posted by lukemeister at 4:30 PM on December 6, 2008

You should check out Charles Keally's pages; he has a lot of information about prehistoric Japan up there, and he knows what he is talking about. From the start of the Yayoi period to historical times is particularly messy and interesting.

Also, like adamrice says, Class Goat's information is about 70 years out of date. It's not in the slightest bit "dangerous" to discuss the out-of-Korea theory -- that is, fact -- and it hasn't been since at least the end of WWII.
posted by No-sword at 11:36 PM on December 6, 2008

There was an NHK TV programme, about 4-5 years ago that traced the origin of the Japanese through examination of DNA and finding the closest match. It showed that the major (around 80%) component was of Siberian origin. I seem to remember they went to a Siberian village where they had deemed the DNA was the closest match - and they looked very Japanese, or did the Japanese look very Siberian?
posted by AndyM825 at 7:35 AM on December 8, 2008