[Akuma]

I find our ancient history fascinating. Because it is deeply connected with our religion Shinto we have many legends about that time.

It says at the beginning Japan was ruled from our highest goddess Amaterasu herself. She was on earth and ruled over all of Japan. Because of that it was called the Empire of the Sun. After many decades Amaterasu decided it was time for her to leave and to let one of her children members rule the earth. Her child denied that because he thought it would be too much for him so the honor was passed to her decendand Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan. The Ise Shrine for example contains the mirror of Amaterasu.

There is little to no information about that time known in Japan today. What we have are legends and gigantic tombs (which are banned from any research). But we have rare informations coming from outside of Japan.

The first emperor of China Qin Shin Huangdi was in great fear of death. He wanted to live forever and did evrything to achieve that goal. There were rumors about an mysterious island empire east from China which was ruled from a powerful Queen. She was called a powerful witch who knows the secret about eternal life. Qin Shin Huangdi is known to have send several expeditions there with gifts for the Queen. None of them returned.
Qin Shin Huangdi failed in his attempt for eternal life. Ironicly because he ate daily capsules containing mercury which was suppossed to make him eternal.

Many years later another chiense emperor did send another exedition to open relations with the mysterious empire in the east. From that expedition we have the first description about Japan from outside.
The diplomats say they found a land with happy and friendly people. They tell the country is ruled from a powerful queen. They call her Himiko. Himiko resides in a giant palace and almost never shows herself. A young men (a close relative, maybe her brother) speaks for her in public. The chinese diplomats claim she ruled with witchcraft. She brought peace to all the countless former tribal clans and united them under her leadership, bewitching the people. The delagtion moved on describing her as extraordinary beautiful and intelligent. Gifts were exchanged between the courts of China and Japan and some limited diplomatic relations established.

What i wonder is, who was that Himiko? And what influence did she have? Could it be, that Himiko forged alot into our image we have about Amaterasu herself? Was she problay a "priestess empress" who also impersonated the sun goddess on earth, similar to the Pharao of egypt?

The timescale of the chinese visist fits well with the reign of our empress Jingu. Jingu was a legendary and powerful japanese empress. So could it be, that Himiko is our empress Jingu? And that she created our image of Amaterasu we have today?

What bothers me is, that our legends say our first emperor Jimmu was one of her decesendend. Jimmu stepped on Throne roughly 660 before Christ as our first emperor. But Empress Jingu ruled roughly 400 years later.

I would like to hear our ideas about that

[Rainbow Crow]

Japan was founded when proto-Koreans, likely refugees from an early Chinese dynasty, moved to the Japanese islands where they engaged in intermittent warfare and intermarriage with the native Ainu populations.



^^ An Ainu male. One of their notable traits were their large beards.

The modern "Japanese" people had generally emerged as a result of this intermarriage by the time the early Japanese Emperors adapted the Chinese writing system to Japanese phonetics. The development of a system of written language can generally be viewed as the start of Japanese culture.

This is also why ancient Japanese are often depicted with beards in illustrations, because the Ainu blood was thicker back then. Over time the Han and Korean traits gained dominance, particularly after a new influx of proto-Korean refugees migrated to western Japan following an early Japanese-Korean war. These populations had been Japanese sympathizers and were allowed to settle in large numbers on the western Japanese islands after the other Korean kingdoms turned against them and eventually defeated them. As a result of this increase in Han/Korean blood, the Japanese are mostly without beards today because the larger Han/Korean populations drowned out many of the Ainu traits.

You can still see some of the Ainu traits in the modern Japanese though, such as the facial structure which differs from Koreans (and which is more notable in eastern Japan) and the clay-like skin tone that contrasts with the porcelain proto-Han skin tone.

There are still pure-blooded Ainu in Japan today though they are generally rare, living in rural parts of the country and those with thicker Ainu blood make up the traditional Japanese underclass along with more recent Korean migrants.

[Rainbow Crow]

Modern Ainu can be difficult to distinguish from "pure" Japanese, particularly as the populations continue to mix:



The Ainu liked symetrical, maze-like patterns which they incorporated regularly into their garments, blankets, etc. and which heavily influenced Japanese artwork:

[nucklepunche]

My understanding is that Ainu are closely related to Native Americans, or at least "closely" being that they came off the same branch thousands of years ago, which in turn was made up of a group that mixed European and Asian genes. Caucasians arose somewhere in west Central Asia or far Eastern Europe, and Asians divided up from them at some point.

[Decky]

If Japn was founded by a woman she would have been Chinese. Before China gave Japan the benefit of her civilisation it had no language culture or religion. They were esensially cave men.

[Noelnada]

If Japn was founded by a woman she would have been Chinese. Before China gave Japan the benefit of her civilisation it had no language culture or religion. They were esensially cave men.

China, Japan, these are modern constructions that will disappear as they appeared, in a blink of an eye

[Akuma]

If Japn was founded by a woman she would have been Chinese. Before China gave Japan the benefit of her civilisation it had no language culture or religion. They were esensially cave men.

This is bullshit. Japan has culture far before china even existed. Japan is the place with the oldest pottery in the world.

And our religion Shinto is also almost 40.000 years old and can be traced back at the earliest times of the jomon period.

The simple fact is, that chinese people are extinct today. What we see there today has nothing to do with the people who lived there at the time of Qin or Tang. Today tehy are mixed with evrything. But Japanese are pure as they were in the past. The people during the chinese tang dynasty are more related to us than that people who live in China today.

[Pants-of-dog]

This is bullshit. Japan has culture far before china even existed. Japan is the place with the oldest pottery in the world.

Actually, China has the oldest pottery in the world.

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/ju ... wn-pottery

A team of scientists led by Dr. Xiaohong Wu of Peking University has recently dated sediment layers containing pottery fragments in Xianrendong Cave in China and found them to be approximately 20,000 years old, predating the earliest known pottery dates by about 2,000 years, and predating the advent of agriculture by about 10,000 years. The finding refutes the long-held view that pottery production coincided with the beginning of agriculture.

And our religion Shinto is also almost 40.000 years old and can be traced back at the earliest times of the jomon period.

No. According to your own mythology, it started in about 660BC, or 2700 years ago. Even if we define Shinto as the collected mythology of the religions of the Jômon, and we assume that the Jômon were around as early as possible, that was still about 16,000 years ago.

The simple fact is, that chinese people are extinct today. What we see there today has nothing to do with the people who lived there at the time of Qin or Tang. Today tehy are mixed with evrything. But Japanese are pure as they were in the past. The people during the chinese tang dynasty are more related to us than that people who live in China today.

You have no idea how pure you are, because the Japanese refuse to take ethnicity into account in their census. You could be completely mongrelised by now and not know it. Mind you, I have no idea why you are supporting inbreeding.

[Akuma]

1. oldest pottery is from japan


http://www.examiner.com/article/oldest- ... discovered

2. parts of shinto mythology and practices can be dated back to oldest times if jomon period

3. I'm not a mongrel. Japan never had large scale immigrants like others. We are pure and this is not inbreeding, its genetic clean since we are a large group. Beside that i find non japanese not attractive. I would see a mixed children not as my real child. Thats my personal opinion you can beat on it as much as you want, that wont change how i think about it.

[Pants-of-dog]

1. oldest pottery is from japan


http://www.examiner.com/article/oldest- ... discovered

First of all, let us look carefully at the actual articles.

My article claims the pottery found is 20,000 years old. Yours claim that the oldest pottery is 15,000 years old.

And if you look at another article that discusses the same story as your article, we get this:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 040913.php

Pottery reveals Ice Age hunter-gatherers' taste for fish

Hunter-gatherers living in glacial conditions produced pots for cooking fish, according to the findings of a pioneering new study led by the University of York which reports the earliest direct evidence for the use of ceramic vessels.

Scientists from the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan carried out chemical analysis of food residues in pottery up to 15,000 years old from the late glacial period, the oldest pottery so far investigated. It is the first study to directly address the often posed question "why humans made pots?" The research is published in Nature.

The research team was able to determine the use of a range of hunter-gatherer "Jōmon" ceramic vessels through chemical analysis of organic compounds extracted from charred surface deposits. The samples analysed are some of the earliest found in Japan, a country recognised to be one of the first centres for ceramic innovation, and date to the end of the Late Pleistocene - a time when humans were adjusting to changing climates and new environments.

So, if we look at the bolded phrase, we notice that that the pottery investigated in this study is not the oldest in the world. Instead, the oldest pottery investigated in this study is from the Jômon period, which is about 15,000 years ago.

Apparently, the author of the article you posted did not read the study very carefully.

2. parts of shinto mythology and practices can be dated back to oldest times if jomon period

Like I said, if we accept that as true, then Shinto is (at its oldest) about 15,000 years old. It is not 40,000 years old as you claimed.

3. I'm not a mongrel. Japan never had large scale immigrants like others. We are pure and this is not inbreeding, its genetic clean since we are a large group.

Again, you have no idea how mongrelised the Japanese are because you guys refuse to keep track of ethnicity. I find it amusing that you guys pretend there is no immigration by simply ignoring it.

Beside that i find non japanese not attractive. I would see a mixed children not as my real child. Thats my personal opinion you can beat on it as much as you want, that wont change how i think about it.

I don't care about your personal opinion. Your opinion is irrelevant to debate.

[Rei Murasame]

It's interesting, Pants-of-Dog, that you are the same person who takes such offence when white people tell Native Americans that they are 'not pure enough' as a pretext for culturally attacking them, but then you turn around and do the exact same thing to East Asians under the banner of 'anti-racialism'.

What is the purpose of telling Akuma that he is 'not pure enough'?

[ThirdTerm]

The Jomon ceramic pots are about 15,000 years old and pottery discovered along the Amur river in Russia has a similar age, suggesting the Jomon's Siberian roots. The Ainu and other Siberian tribes such as Khanty people emerged around 30,000 years ago, when the Jomon or Ainu migration to Japan initially started. The Jomon or Ainu came from northeastern Asia or Siberia and settled in Japan and there are close genetic and cultural links between the original inhabitants of Japan and the native Siberian tribes. After the 3rd century BC, the Yayoi mass migration from the Korean Peninsula complicated the Japanese gene pool but the modern Japanese still maintain their Ainu heritage to some degree. The genetic contributions of Jomon or Ainu to the modern Japanese population are estimated to be 54.3∼62.3% in Ryukyuans and 23.1∼39.5% in mainland Japanese. Contrary to the old theory that the Ainu went extinct after being slaughtered by the Yayoi invaders in a massive scale tantamount to genocide, it's more likely that Ainu chieftains were gradually subjugated by the Yayoi migrants by the 10th century and the Ainu population was culturally and racially integrated with the newcomers who introduced rice farming and Shintoism to Japan.

Pottery was a hunter-gatherer innovation that first emerged in East Asia between 20,000 and 12,000 calibrated years before present1, 2 (cal BP), towards the end of the Late Pleistocene epoch, a period of time when humans were adjusting to changing climates and new environments. Ceramic container technologies were one of a range of late glacial adaptations that were pivotal to structuring subsequent cultural trajectories in different regions of the world, but the reasons for their emergence and widespread uptake are poorly understood. The first ceramic containers must have provided prehistoric hunter-gatherers with attractive new strategies for processing and consuming foodstuffs, but virtually nothing is known of how early pots were used. Here we report the chemical analysis of food residues associated with Late Pleistocene pottery, focusing on one of the best-studied prehistoric ceramic sequences in the world, the Japanese Jōmon. We demonstrate that lipids can be recovered reliably from charred surface deposits adhering to pottery dating from about 15,000 to 11,800 cal BP (the Incipient Jōmon period), the oldest pottery so far investigated, and that in most cases these organic compounds are unequivocally derived from processing freshwater and marine organisms. Stable isotope data support the lipid evidence and suggest that most of the 101 charred deposits analysed, from across the major islands of Japan, were derived from high-trophic-level aquatic food. Productive aquatic ecotones were heavily exploited by late glacial foragers3, perhaps providing an initial impetus for investment in ceramic container technology, and paving the way for further intensification of pottery use by hunter-gatherers in the early Holocene epoch. Now that we have shown that it is possible to analyse organic residues from some of the world’s earliest ceramic vessels, the subsequent development of this critical technology can be clarified through further widespread testing of hunter-gatherer pottery from later periods.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature12109.htmll

The genetic origins of Japanese populations have been controversial. Upper Paleolithic Japanese, i.e. Jomon, developed independently in Japanese islands for more than 10,000 years until the isolation was ended with the influxes of continental immigrants about 2,000 years ago. However, the knowledge of origin of Jomon and its contribution to the genetic pool of contemporary Japanese is still limited, albeit the extensive studies using mtDNA and Y chromosomes. In this report, we aimed to infer the origin of Jomon and to estimate its contribution to Japanese by fitting an admixture model with missing data from Jomon to a genome-wide data from 94 worldwide populations. Our results showed that the genetic contributions of Jomon, the Paleolithic contingent in Japanese, are 54.3∼62.3% in Ryukyuans and 23.1∼39.5% in mainland Japanese, respectively. Utilizing inferred allele frequencies of the Jomon population, we further showed the Paleolithic contingent in Japanese had a Northeast Asia origin.
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120405/srep00355/full/srep00355.html

[Rei Murasame]

Sounds about right to me. This means that Akuma was basically correct.

[Pants-of-dog]

It's interesting, Pants-of-Dog, that you are the same person who takes such offence when white people tell Native Americans that they are 'not pure enough' as a pretext for culturally attacking them, but then you turn around and do the exact same thing to East Asians under the banner of 'anti-racialism'.

What is the purpose of telling Akuma that he is 'not pure enough'?

I never said anyone was "not pure enough".

Akuma claimed that the Japanese were "pure" and I pointed out that since Japan does not track ethnicity, there is no way of knowing how pure the Japanese are.

Sounds about right to me. This means that Akuma was basically correct.

Was he correct about the oldest pottery in the world being Japanese? Not according to ThirdTerm's evidence.

Was he correct about Shinto being 40 000 years old? Not according to ThirdTerm's evidence.

Was he correct about the Japanese being a genetically pure nation? Not according to ThirdTerm's evidence.

[Rei Murasame]

I never said anyone was "not pure enough".

No, instead you strongly implied it.

Akuma claimed that the Japanese were "pure" and I pointed out that since Japan does not track ethnicity, there is no way of knowing how pure the Japanese are.

Which by your own logic is a completely unproductive conversation, which only serves to legitimise white supremacy. But you apply completely different sets of rules depending on the political outcome you want.

Was he correct about the oldest pottery in the world being Japanese? Not according to ThirdTerm's evidence.

Well, I didn't care about that.

Was he correct about Shinto being 40 000 years old? Not according to ThirdTerm's evidence.

ThirdTerm's evidence doesn't even address that.

Was he correct about the Japanese being a genetically pure nation? Not according to ThirdTerm's evidence.

Depends on how you define it. By the white definition, I suppose Japan is 'impure', because people had to fucking travel to get to an island. I suppose the only way to be 'pure' is to sprout out of the earth like shrubbery.

[Pants-of-dog]

No, instead you strongly implied it.

No, I did not imply that anyone want "not pure enough" because that would mean that I thought they were unable to attain something because of it, and I never said anything remotely like that.

Which by your own logic is a completely unproductive conversation, which only serves to legitimise white supremacy. But you apply completely different sets of rules depending on the political outcome you want.

Actually, I think this lack of tracking is a tool used by the Japanese to exercise Japanese supremacy. Please note how Akuma uses it to pretend that Japanese people are supposedly better because they are supposedly pure.

Well, I didn't care about that.

I suggest you focus on the claims I actually make instead of setting up strawmen about racism.

ThirdTerm's evidence doesn't even address that.

It does show that the pottery is (at the oldest) 15 000 years old, and if we assume that the pottery makers were Shinto. then Shinto must be (at the most) also 15 000 years old.

Depends on how you define it. By the white definition, I suppose Japan is 'impure', because people had to fucking travel to get to an island. I suppose the only way to be 'pure' is to sprout out of the earth like shrubbery.

Then let us get rid of this white definition that you have introduced into the conversation and look at things more realistically. ThirdTerm's evidence shows that the Japanese have differing levels of genetic ancestry from the Jômon depending on where they live. Some Japanese must have almost all their genetics from the Jômon people, while some must have almost none.

Which of these is the pure Japanese one?

[Rei Murasame]

No, I did not imply that anyone want "not pure enough" because that would mean that I thought they were unable to attain something because of it, and I never said anything remotely like that.

Alright.

Actually, I think this lack of tracking is a tool used by the Japanese to exercise Japanese supremacy. Please note how Akuma uses it to pretend that Japanese people are supposedly better because they are supposedly pure.

Koreans also have the same narrative for themselves, I assume you also think that is a dangerous Korean supremacy too?

Are only white people allowed to do this? You should go and inform the European nationalists on PoFo about this, because they seem to be under the misguided impression that white people are the persecuted ones who are 'not allowed to be ethnocentric', but actually if you look at the long arc of history, for most of the time on a global level, the only people who have been able to do whatever they want and call themselves whatever they want without controversy, have been white people.

It does show that the pottery is (at the oldest) 15 000 years old, and if we assume that the pottery makers were Shinto. then Shinto must be (at the most) also 15 000 years old.

Why does it have to be linked to pottery?

Then let us get rid of this white definition that you have introduced into the conversation and look at things more realistically. ThirdTerm's evidence shows that the Japanese have differing levels of genetic ancestry from the Jômon depending on where they live. Some Japanese must have almost all their genetics from the Jômon people, while some must have almost none.

Which of these is the pure Japanese one?

Okay, actually, we can maybe reach some agreement then.

I don't think that some would have none. Basically a Japanese person is a person who was created out of the intersection of Jomon and Yayoi. So when people say "Japan is pure", what they mean is that nothing else happened other than that, and that 'Japan' had its ethnogenesis at the mixture of these two ancient groups.

On a slightly funny note, I'll also acknowledge that Japan in fact aggravates itself on this issue too, it is not only a 'white' thing. Observe:

They're making a stereotype using phenotypes there, except actually the catch is that everyone presently looks more like the 'Jomon' model than the 'Yayoi' model anyway. Which I think is cool and predictable, but we shouldn't be looking at images of people anyway, because in reality it doesn't tell us anything much.

More sensible would be to look at this:

Click for full size.

A. NJ tree based on pairwise genetic distance. Each inferred Jomon population was named in population IDs of its admixed descendants and continental donors (JOMON ML-NH, JOMON ML-SH, JOMON ML-NHK, JOMON RK-NH, JOMON RK-SH and JOMON RK-NHK, respectively).

B. Populations presented on a 3D plot with axis of PC1, 2 and 3 from PCA analysis. Features of the genetic affinities were the same as those were discovered by NJ tree.

[Source]

So basically you can see the range within which 'Japanese' is, it's basically a group of people who are:

• Not 'other North East Asians', and
• Have Jomon ancestry.

Only Japanese people seem to satisfy that criteria.

[JRS1]

Why does it have to be linked to pottery?

It shouldnt be. But it is.

[Rei Murasame]

Well, I do understand why scientists won't accept the evidence taken from dialogues with ears of wheat which can talk, so I'm willing to let that one slide for now. They would indeed say, "you all need to come with a more independently-verifiable collection of evidence than that for 40K yrs". So I admit I'm being a bit unreasonable with Pants-of-Dog on that one. He's actually an ally in reality, but I'm just being obnoxious to him anyway, and I really shouldn't do that.

Also, on a completely separate note, looking at the two bullet points I placed at the end of the post, I also see that this can be another example of how ethnicity is constructed both genetically and politically. Think of this, if Japan was not able to manifest itself as a political entity, the framework for being able to say, "Japan is different from other North East Asians due to Jomon lineage", would not exist, because there would be no Japan about which such an observation could be made, and no borders to maintain that genetic structure over time.

Which is why maintaining political power is so important.

[Pants-of-dog]

Why does it have to be linked to pottery?

It doesn't. I was simply using the available evidence to figure out the absolute oldest that Shinto could be, to see if Akuma's 40 000 year claim made any sense. It does not.

Okay, actually, we can maybe reach some agreement then.

I don't think that some would have none. Basically a Japanese person is a person who was created out of the intersection of Jomon and Yayoi. So when people say "Japan is pure", what they mean is that nothing else happened other than that, and that 'Japan' had its ethnogenesis at the mixture of these two ancient groups.

Actually, if you look at Akuma's claim, the claim is that the Japanese gene pool is as "pure" as it was in the past. There is no evidence for this and is based partly on the (unsupported and probably incorrect) assumption that anyone with Japanese citizenry is also ethnically Japanese.