What's the origin of the Japanese people ?

[canadian_kor]

For people interested in the problem of the origins of the Japanese people, one of the best book is :
Hudson, Mark J. 1999 Ruins of Identity : Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands, University of Hawai'i Press
It is a critical synthesis of many studies : anthropology (genetics, virology, skeletons, dentology), archaeology and linguistics. It is not only about Japanese, but also Ryukyuans and Aynu.

ToMach, can you give us a brief synopsis of the book?

I also think this is the most likely theory of the origins of the Japanese.

Now the question is where did the Yayoi come from? The following article was posted a while ago on this forum has found evidence that supports the theory that the origin of the Yayoi people was an area south of the Yangtze.

"People who introduced irrigation techniques to the Japanese archipelago in the Yayoi Period (250 B.C.-300) were believed to have come to Japan either from the Korean Peninsula across the Tsushima Strait, or from northern China across the Yellow Sea.
The latest findings, however, bolster another theory suggesting the origin of the Yayoi people was an area south of the Yangtze, which is believed to be the birthplace of irrigated rice cultivation.
Yamaguchi, a researcher at Japan's National Science Museum, said the researchers compared Yayoi remains found in Yamaguchi and Fukuoka prefectures with those from early Han (202 B.C.-8) in Jiangsu in a three-year project begun in 1996.
The researchers found many similarities between the skulls and limbs of Yayoi people and the Jiangsu remains.
Two Jiangsu skulls showed spots where the front teeth had been pulled, a practice common in Japan in the Yayoi and preceding Jomon Period.
But the most persuasive findings resulted from tests revealing that genetic samples from three of 36 Jiangsu skeletons also matched part of the DNA base arrangements of samples from the Yayoi remains, the scientists said."

http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news111.htm

Sorry to burst your bubble Wang, but the Yayoi did not come from eastern China. Scholarship generally agrees that the Yayoi were generally of the Siberian-Tungusic stock (with some mixing with the "original" Koreans) that entered Japan via Korea. That article is flawed, I believe.

Btw, I also read somewhere that the Ainu were not a proto-Caucasoid race, but Austronesian Negroids (like the Australian aborigines). I found this interesting, since some Ainus do have Australian aboriginal facial traits (however, many modern Ainus look virtually mongoloid with some caucasoid traits).

[To anyone reading] Another thing, why are many Japanese so adverse to the idea that their ancestors came from nomadic tribes from Siberia? I found this curious. It's like many of them (even some scholars) like to move away from the idea that Japan had any sort of connections with Siberia.