5 ms·

Who are the Japanese? (2008)

89 points by Futurebot 12y ago

jckt 12y 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 12y 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  Also, a lot of the information in the article is outdated.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.
USNetizen 12y 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 12y 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 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 12y ago
    or the Ainu.
  - S4M 12y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate#Etymology
  - slurry 12y 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 12y 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
  - richsinn 12y 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).
mahranch 12y 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#Conflict_in_Korea 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 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 12y 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 12y ago
smegel 12y 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 12y 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.
  - richsinn 12y 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%93verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93ob...
drpgq 12y 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-amaterasu/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/scions-of-the-hairy-ainu-not-amatera...
4r10r5 12y ago
nihonjinron along the lines of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ... supporting a false ethnic nationalism
Prosciutto 12y 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.
kylebgorman 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.)
  - kylebgorman 12y 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.)

89 points by Futurebot 12y ago

jckt 12y 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 12y 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.

USNetizen 12y 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 12y 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 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 12y ago
  or the Ainu.
- S4M 12y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate#Etymology
- slurry 12y 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 12y 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
- richsinn 12y 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).

mahranch 12y 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#Conflict_in_Korea 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 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 12y 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 12y ago

smegel 12y 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 12y 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.
- richsinn 12y 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%93verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93ob...

drpgq 12y 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-amaterasu/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/scions-of-the-hairy-ainu-not-amatera...

4r10r5 12y ago

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

Prosciutto 12y 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.

kylebgorman 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.)
- kylebgorman 12y 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.)