
Who are the Japanese? (2008) - Futurebot
http://discovermagazine.com/1998/jun/japaneseroots1455/
======
mahranch
> 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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-
Japanese_War#Conflict_in_Korea)

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](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.

~~~
agumonkey
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.

~~~
krapp
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."

~~~
agumonkey
I ... really can't think of any brand using japanese names. I'm curious,
enlighten me.

It's true DDP was rebranded as SMB2 but I don't think it reflects any kind of
japan culture love, IMO it was just a cheap strategy to release a Mario sequel
at low cost.

~~~
krapp
I might have thinking more about startup names and software names in the first
instance, where words like 'zen' and 'origami' do seem trendy.

------
USNetizen
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
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](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).

~~~
S4M
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate#Etymology)

------
jckt
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
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.

------
kylebgorman
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
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
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.)

------
Prosciutto
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.

------
drpgq
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...](http://www.unz.com/gnxp/scions-of-the-hairy-ainu-not-amaterasu/)

------
4r10r5
nihonjinron along the lines of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ... supporting
a false ethnic nationalism

------
smegel
> 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
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.

~~~
richsinn
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93verb)

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

