Yayoi is 500 yrs older?

[Taro Toporific]

Dang. Yayoi-chan doesn't look a day over 20 to me.

Yayoi finding stuns archaeologists
Asahi Shimbun, Japan - May 21
There's a lot riding on a new finding that suggests Yayoi ... began in Japan at least 500 years earlier than traditionally believed...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

400BC - 250AD The Yayoi culture is identified by its pottery. Mongoloid people from Korea entered Japan and mixed with the older Jomon populations.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.34,38)

300 - 400CE Historian Egami Namio in 1948 proposed the "horserider" thesis that cited equestrian goods and foreign culture elements as evidence that the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line had migrated from Korea about this time and conquered the northern part of Kyushu.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.36)

[Taro Toporific]

Yayoi finding stuns archaeologists
Asahi Shimbun, Japan - May 21

EDITORIAL: Recalibrating history
The Asahi Shimbun, May 21 (IHT/Asahi: May 22, 2003)
... Based on what we have been taught, rice paddy farming had been established for more than five centuries in the Korean Peninsula before being introduced to Japan...

... the Yayoi period actually began 500 years earlier than previously assumed, the time lag with the Korean Peninsula in terms of rice cultivation would be less conspicuous, and there could have been active interchange among the regions of East Asia around that time. ...

Perhaps the greatest significance of the the new findings is that they would put Japan in a new light, as a member of the larger Asian community from prehistoric time, rather than some unique, isolated entity in the region, as has always been assumed.

[Taro Toporific]

Yayoi finding stuns archaeologists
Asahi Shimbun, Japan - May 21

Deja vu? No thanks
Korea Herald /Tuesday, July 1

A few skulls of our remote ancestors can achieve a goal that has eluded generations of historians. The latest DNA tests on brain tissues from Yayoi-period human skulls found in southwestern Japan may stun many Japanese history buffs, dealing a fatal blow to a social taboo.

The Kyodo News Agency reported last week that Prof. Takao Inoue's team at the Tottori University School of Medicine has found that modern Japanese are genetically closer to Koreans and Chinese-Koreans than to any of their Asian neighbor. It indicates that Inoue and his colleagues have gone a step further toward proving the historical truth that the Japanese have struggled to forget over many centuries. This is significant progress over previous research, which suggested that modern Japanese are close genetic kin to Chinese and Koreans.

In spite of their cutting-edge technology and overwhelming economic strength, a great many Japanese today still believe - or want to believe - that their ethnicity is unique. Believe it or not, some Japanese still obviously subscribe to the prewar ideology which insists that they are racially superior to their neighbors.

Japanese archaeologists have provided "scientific evidence" to support this illusion. They have strived to prove, with artifacts unearthed at prehistoric sites, that the Japanese have lived on their islands since the world was created, and that their gene pool has remained isolated - and pure - since the last ice age ended more than 20,000 years ago.

.....
That was even before the scientists offered evidence showing a genetic affinity that links Japanese and Koreans, much less illustrating the latter's role in Japan's early development. The Associated Press reported that, when NHK aired a documentary in 1999 describing some of the recent DNA findings, hundreds of viewers deluged it with phone calls, "most expressing shock or surprise, with a few refusing to believe it."
...

The question haunting many observers is this: How could this man remain a professional star for three long decades?

Put simply, the amateur archaeologist responded - dishonestly - to his country's emotional needs. He connived to emplace objects that his fellow Japanese wanted to believe existed exactly where they hoped to discover them.

The Japanese needed to be convinced of their racial and cultural difference from, and superiority over, Asians to justify their imperialism. For the same purpose, they manipulated historical records during the colonial era. This was not a new practice, as they were politicizing history in centuries past.

...
2003.07.02 The Herald
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2003/07/02/200307020041.asp

[cstaylor]

I never understood the obsession with genetics and race... it's not what you're born with, it's what you do with it.