More on the Exploration of the Origins of the Japanese

From Past Horizons: Adventures in Archaeology
Origins of the Japanese
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 | Featured, News

Jomon pottery (left) and image of Ainu (Japan)

A team of researchers have been delving into the origins of the Japanese people, with some interesting findings. The research was centred on a study of Japanese dialects with the aim of finding the roots of the language.

The language family is known as Japonic and this includes Japanese and a similar language called Ryukyuan, which is spoken in the chain of islands to the south of Japan.

Comparing the cultures

Whilst genetically, the modern Japanese are descended from two main migrant streams, the Jōmon culture and the Yayoi culture, the linguistic roots have now been determined as originating from the Yayoi.

Archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jōmon culture and rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The hunter-gatherers arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age around 20,000 years ago, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They remained isolated until about 2,400 years ago when wet rice agriculture developed in southern China and was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, but that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, though still leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

The linguistic link was provided by a method known as the ‘Bayesian phylogeny’. This uses a computer to map several language trees employing a limited vocabulary of approximate 200 words which are known to evolve slowly.

By feeding all the data from the dialect studies into this computer model, a date of 2,182 years ago was predicted for the origin of Japonic, and this fits with the arrival of the Yayoi.

Whilst John B Whitman, of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo refers to the results as “solid and reasonable”,other linguists are far more sceptical.

A question of identity

“There has been a gap in thinking,” said Hisao Baba, curator of anthropology at the National Science Museum in Tokyo. “Archaeology has made a lot of progress, but politics has made it difficult for the general public to take a critical look at their own past.”

The question of origin cuts to the core of Japan’s identity as they have long celebrated themselves as ethnically unique.

As such, archaeology in Japan until the 1950s had to conform to accepted belief and all archaeological deposits in Japan, no matter how old, were left by ancestors of the modern Japanese. Japanese archaeologists said Japan’s gene pool had remained isolated since the end of the last ice age, over 20,000 years ago.

Confronted with evidence that a sudden change had swept Japan in about 400 BCE — replacing the millennia-old Jōmon hunter-gatherer culture with a society that could grow rice and forge both iron weapons and tools — archaeologists attributed it to nothing more than technological borrowing from the mainland rather than influx of a people. Even although recent analysis of skull shapes has shown the rice farmers who appeared 2,400 years ago were quite different from the hunters whom they replaced, it is still difficult for the Japanese to take this on board.

Direct comparisons between Jōmon and Yayoi skeletons show that the two peoples are noticeably distinguishable. The Jōmon tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography. They also have strikingly raised brow ridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people, on the other hand, averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat brow ridges and noses. By the Kofun period (250 to 538 AD) almost all skeletons excavated in Japan, except those of the Ainu and prehistoric Okinawans, resemble those of modern day Japanese.

Many Japanese people want to believe that their distinctive language and culture required uniquely complex developmental processes. To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.

This recent study of linguistic evidence may be further proof of a more complex history and genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jōmon people, with the Jōmon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. However it was the Yayoi language that prevailed, along with their agricultural technology.

Learn more.
■Neolithic – Yayoi period (c. 250 BC-c. AD 250)
■ Article by Richard Hooker on the Yayoi and the Jōmon.
■Jōmon Culture (ca. 10,500–ca. 300 B.C.)
■Hanihara K. 埴原和郎 日本人の誕生。人類はるかなる旅 (Nihonjin no tanjō. Jinrui haruka naru ryo – The birth of Japanese ethnicity. Long journey of the human race), Tokyo (1996;)
■Japanese roots are remarkably shallow, Martin Fackler, The Japan Times (August 31, 1999)
■Just who are the Japanese? Where did they come from, and when?, Jared Diamond Discover Magazine Vol. 19 No. 6 (June 1998).

The Peopling of Japan

I find the subject of trying to piece together the puzzle of who arrived where and when, and from where, endlessly fascinating. With the advent of technology capable of analyzing DNA, more answers are being provided - and more questions! Old paradigms are falling by the wayside (kicking and screaming all the way). As we refine our technology and techniques of analysis, more answers will be found. Wish I'd be around 100 years from now. Drat! DNA sheds light on mysterious Okhotsk people BY NOBUYUKI WATANABE, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN 2009/2/24 Scholars using DNA testing hope to unravel age-old mysteries surrounding the Okhotsk people, who suddenly disappeared around the 10th century in northern parts of Hokkaido. And their research could shatter theories on the evolution of the indigenous Ainu people. The Okhotsk culture is believed to have originated on Sakhalin and spread south to northern Hokkaido around the fifth century, when Japan was in the kofun period of tumulus mounds. The culture eventually spread to eastern Hokkaido and reached the Chishima archipelago, before disappearing in the 10th century. Researchers in such various fields as archaeology, history and ethnology have tried to figure out just who the Okhotsk people were. Some scholars believe the Okhotsk people were the northern race referred to as Ashihase in the ancient chronicle Nihon Shoki, compiled in the eighth century. Studies have also led researchers to small ethnic groups scattered around Sakhalin, Siberia and the islands in the northern parts beyond Hokkaido. Still, no definitive answer has been found. However, Ryuichi Masuda, an associate professor of molecular phylogenetics at Hokkaido University, and Takehiro Sato, a graduate student, have shed more light on the Okhotsk people. They extracted DNA samples from 37 human remains that were discovered from ruins of the Okhotsk culture and kept at Hokkaido University Museum. Analyses of the characteristics of the mitochondrial DNA led Masuda and Sato to conclude that the Okhotsk people are closest to the Nivkhis, who now live in northern Sakhalin and near the mouth of the Amur river in Siberia. The two also concluded that the Okhotsk people shared a common ancestor with the Ulchis, who live downstream of the Amur river. The Nivkhis and Ulchis are small ethnic groups with only a few thousand survivors remaining. Little is known about the Okhotsk people, who lived along the coast and caught fish and whales while raising dogs and pigs. But studies of the Okhotsk could also help scholars trace the evolution of the Ainu. Rice cultivation did not spread in Hokkaido even during the Yayoi Pottery Culture (300 B.C.-A.D. 300). But a unique culture developed, described as a procession beginning with a Jomon Pottery Culture, followed by a Later Jomon Pottery Culture and a Satsumon Pottery Culture. Although the Ainu are believed to have inherited aspects of Hokkaido culture, they also have cultural factors not found in the Jomon strain, for example their ceremonies involving bears. Moreover, scholars have said that similar habits with bears were found in the Okhotsk culture. Masuda and his associates have confirmed that some Okhotsk people had genetic types similar to those of the Ainu, but these types were not found among the Jomon strain. Tetsuya Amano, an archaeology professor at Hokkaido University, believes the analytic results opened new doors. "It has now become clear that the Ainu are not simply the direct descendants of the Jomon people, but emerged after going through a very complicated process," Amano said. So if the closest people to the Okhotsk were the Nivkhis, what kind of people are they? According to Hidetoshi Shiraishi, an associate professor of linguistics at Sapporo Gakuin University, the Nivkhi language is independent in that it is not structurally related to other languages in the vicinity. The origins of the Nivkhi people are also unclear. While the Nivkhis are believed to have navigated sail boats and led a life centered on fishing, their unique culture has been encroached upon in recent years with gradual integration into Russian culture. "There has been a number of waves of immigrants to Japan, such as the arrival of the Yayoi people, but the southern advance by the Okhotsk people is likely the most recent of those waves," said Naruya Saito, a professor of population genetics at the National Institute of Genetics. However, scholars still do not know what brought those Okhotsk people to Hokkaido. Hiroshi Ushiro, a curator specializing in archaeology at the Historical Museum of Hokkaido, said climate change, or more specifically global warming, may have enabled the Okhotsk people to enter Hokkaido. The latter part of the kofun period when the Okhotsk culture reached northern Hokkaido was relatively warm. Sea levels were about 1 meter higher than they are now. In the early part of the Heian Period (794-1185), when the culture spread across Hokkaido, the average annual temperatures were about 2 to 3 degrees higher than they are today. At that time, on the opposite side of the Eurasia continent, another northern people, the vikings, increased their population due to the warmer weather. The vikings ventured out to sea, conquered various lands in Europe and spread their reach to as far away as Greenland. A similar tale of cultural expansion may have taken place around the same time in the northern parts of the Japanese archipelago. (IHT/Asahi: February 24,2009)