The general public has been manufactured as a Nation of

Ventriloquists. The same "so-called mysteries" harbored by

Scientists should be no mystery at all if you got an "A" in World
History. When something teeter totters into a realm that can't be
linked back to mainstream history, scientists make the statement:
"We have our team of experts working on that." Therein lies the
carefully constructed hitch. Everything documented in history is measured to
and from Europe because of European mapmakers of the day.

Sheer evidence shows the EXODUS was FROM Africa--NOT TO AFRICA. If

you know anything about the color theory, you would know every color comes
from black--meaning that Africans produced all members of mankind. When
the historians FINALLY GOT BACK TO AFRICA, Africans had already
migrated to all parts of the world. Modern humans originated in Africa. Bands
of hominids migrated first to the Middle East, then throughout Europe and into
Asia. But exactly who moved away?

The Earth is filled with yellow, brown, and black people strategically stationed
as the 8% hangs on by a thread trying to dominate and change history in its
tracks. Can it be said that the global world has become one of Ventriloquists?

In biblical times "Africa" included much of what European maps call the
"Middle East." European mapmakers determined regions on the top of Africa
would be divided according to distances from Europe: "Near East," "Middle
East" and "Far East." Remember, the name Africa is actually of Latin origin
and was imposed on the great continent by European explorers. That brought
to the surface many more "Harbored Mysteries."

In November 2002 the replica of an ancient Chinese map that included a

recognizable outline of Africa was unveiled in South Africa's Parliament. The
Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire (Da Ming Hun Yi Tu) dating back
to 1389 was made decades before the first European voyages to Africa.
THEREIN LIES THE HITCH. The European scientists present at the unveiling
of the map had "egg in the face" because they couldn't explain how the
Chinese had a map dated decades before the Europeans sailed BACK to
Africa. Names on the map were written mostly in Manchu, a virtually extinct
language that needed to be translated. Remember the words, "FROM
AFRICA--NOT TO AFRICA."
 A picture dated 11
November 2002
shows a detail on the
Da Ming Hun Yi Tu
(The Amalgamated
Map of the Great Ming
Empire) dating back
to 1389 which is
arguably the oldest
world map in
existence that
accurately reflects the
African continent.

Clyde A. Winters and Blacks in China

The skeletal remains from Southern China are predominately

Negroid. The people of that era practiced single burials
which is an African ritual. In northern China Blacks founded
many civilizations. The three major empires of China were
the Xia Dynasty (c.2205-1766 BC), Shang Yin Dynasty
(c.1700-1050 BC) and the Zhou Dynasty. The Zhou dynasty
was the first dynasty founded by the Mongoloid people in
China called Hua (Who-aa). The founders of Xia and Shang
came from the Fertile African Crescent by way of Iran.
Chinese civilization began along the Yellow River. By 3500 BC. Blacks in
China were raising silkworms and making silk. The culture hero Huang Di is a
direct link of Africa. His name was pronounced in old Chinese Yuhai Huandi
or "Hu Nak Kunte." He arrived in China from the west in 2282 BC and settled
along the banks of the Loh River in Shanxi. This transliteration of Huandgi, to
Hu Nak Kunte is interesting because Kunte is a common clan name among
the Manding speakers. The Africans or Blacks that founded civilization in
China were often called Li Min "black headed people" by the Zhou dynasts.
This term has affinity to the Sumero-Akkadian term Sag- Gig-Ga "black
headed people.”
Taiwan's aboriginal clan

China was occupied predominately by Blacks from West Asia to China.

Blacks were forced from East and Southeast Asia by the expansion of the
Thai, Annamite, Bak and Hua Mongoloids. Blacks ruled China until around
1000-700 BC. Blacks of China were known in historical literature by many
names, including Negro, Austroloid, Oceanean, etc. by the Europeans. The
East Indians and Mongoloid groups had other names like Dara, Yneh-chih,
Yaksha, Suka, K'un-lun, Lushana and Seythians.

Hawaii's last Queen and her Black brother

(The Ancient Sea People)
 1874
1891 Lili'uokalani's
1838 - 1913 Queen brother
Queen Lili'uokalani
Lili'uokalani Hawaii's last Kalakaua
Queen becomes
king

The original Black population lived in China and were the Negritos and
Austroloid groups. After 5000 BC, Africoid people from Kush in Africa began
to enter China and Central Asia from Iran, while another groups reached
China by sea. This two-route migration of Blacks to China led to the
development of southern and northern Chinese branches of Africoids. The
Northern Chino-Africans were called Kui-shuang (Kushana) or Yueh-chih,
while the southern tribes were called Yi and li-man Yueh and Man. In addition
to the Yueh Tribes along the north east coastal region, Blacks also lived in
Turkestand, Mongolia, Transoxiana, the Ili region and Xinjiang Province.

Fifty thousand (50,000) years ago, the earliest forms of man were believed to
have migrated from the Asian Subcontinent to the Philippine Islands via land
bridges formed during the Ice Age. People of the Negrito Race came to the
Philippines. Negritos can be described as a generally under five feet tall, flat
nosed, dark-skinned with curly brown hair.

A number of factors lend support to the out-of-Africa hypothesis. The Negrito

*look* African. Their skin color is light by African standards (though pygmy
skin color is also lighter than their Bantu neighbors), but the rest of their
physiology appears African. An interesting detail is the fact that the Negrito
*sit* like pygmies, with their legs stretched out straight in front of them; I know
of no other people who sit that way. The socio-economic relationship between
the Negrito and their neighbors is strikingly analogous to that found in Africa.
The relic populations of Vedda peoples found in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and
Arabia. The logical explanation for the presence of Blacks worldwide is part of
a great migration.

In Southeast Asia and southern China, ancient skeletal remains represented

the earliest inhabitants to be Austroloids and Negrillo/Negrito. By the
beginning of the Present (Holocene) Period the population in China could be
differentiate, and placed into categories designating Mongoloid in the north,
and Oceanic on Black Races in the south. Below is an excerpt from Nsaka
Sesepkekiu -Student of African and Asian Studies - University of the West
Indies -Trinidad and Tobago who validates what is being said:
The original, first, native, primitive inhabitants of China were black Africans
who arrived there about 100,000 years ago and dominated the region until a
few thousand years ago when the Mongol advance into that region began.
These Africans who fled the Mongol onslaught can still be found in South East
Asia and the Pacific Islands misnomer Nigritos or "small black men." The Agta
of the Philippines is one such example. Indeed archeology, forensic and
otherwise confirm that China's first two dynasties, the Xia and the
Ch'ang/Sh'ang, were largely Black African with an Australoid, called "Madras
Indian" or "Chamar" in Trinidad, present in small percentages. These Africans
would carry an art of fighting developed in the Horn of Africa into China which
today we call martial arts: Tai Chi, Kung fu and Tae Kwon Do. Even the oracle
of the I-Ching came with a later African group, the Akkadians of Babylon.

Around 500 BCE an African living in India called Gautama would establish a
religion called Buddhism which would come to dominate Chinese thought. Any
one who is in doubt should consult Geoffrey Higgins's Anacalypsis, Albert
Churchward's Origin and Development of Religions, Gerald Massey's, Egypt
the Light of the World, Runoko Rashidi's African Presence in Early Asia and J
A Roger's Sex and Race Vol. 1. Many Africans survived the Mongol invasion
into the twentieth century only to be exterminated by Chairman Mao's program
of Cultural cleansing. Under this program millions of Africans and Afro-Asians
were killed from 1951-1956. Contribute we still did, giving the People's
Republic of China its first Chief Minister in the name of Eugene Chen, a
Trinidadian of George Street, Port-of-Spain, who was of an African mother and
a Chinese father.

The facts are well recorded in African, East Indian and African-American
history books. China also has a series of pyramids and groups of people
"minorities" in the South such as the Moi of Vietnam and the Nakhis of
Southern China. Cheikh Diop's points are well made when he stressed that
the Yellow Race has racial characteristics of both Negroid and Caucasian
Races. The mixture of the two races created the Yellow Race. Below are
pictures of Black Chinese from:

http://community-
2.webtv.net/BARNUBIANEMPIRE/BLACKPEOPLEBLACK/index.html

This picture below of Buddha portrays him as a Negroid

individual with kinky, coiled hair, flat nose, full lips. According
to sources from India (M. Gopinath, "Nagaloka: The Fractured
History and Forgotten Glory of the Bahujan Indians,"
published by Dalit Sahitya Sanghatane, No. 8, North Street, Neelasandra,
Bangalore, India - 560 047 India ) Buddha was, "an Enlightened Master from
the Sakya clan of Naga Race, he was the first man on earth to preach the
great principles off equality, liberty and fraternity. He made the Nagas to
realize their own "mind power" as against the "mantra power" (P 13).

Indo-Europeans

Several years ago a major television network covering then President Clinton's
trip to sub-Saharan Africa captured him being greeted by dignitaries. A young
girl dressed in a traditional skirt made from reeds was doing a dance with
movements reminiscent of the Hawaiian Hula Dance.

The dance focused on shaking of the belly. This dance was once common in
southern Africa countries and once widespread on the continent before the
influences of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. The dancing was once
common among Nilotic people. In Egypt the category of traditional dances is
called balladi, meaning simply "dances from the land". The dance has been
preserved in Africa from the days of the Pharaohs. Could this same belly
dance be reminiscent of Northern Africa and Hawaii--since the traveling of
Africans "FROM AFRICA--NOT TO AFRICA!"

Now with that said let's tackle the once scarce history of the Indo-Europeans
and their ploy to capture and claim what is Black African. Indo-European
means the following:

1. A family of languages consisting of most European languages as well

as those of Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and other parts of Asia. Proto-
Indo-European also called Indo-Germanic.
2. Aryan--applied to the languages of India and Europe which are derived
from the prehistoric Aryan language; also, pertaining to the people or
nations who speak these languages; as, the Indo-European or Aryan
family.
3. A member of any of the peoples speaking an Indo-European language.
A member of one of the Caucasian Races of Europe or India speaking
an Indo-European language.

And I quote from the Encyclopedia: "There is little known of the Indo-
European homeland, but what is known comes from the words that can be
reconstructed from their variants in the Indo-European Languages." As with
the continental Old European civilizations, the Indo-European tribes started
arriving in the Middle East--remember, once called "Africa" only very shortly
after the first Old European society had been established in that region, in the
so-called fertile river valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in
present day Iraq.
The Hebrew language belongs to the AfroAsian language family. The Afrasian
language family includes six groups, or branches: Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic,
Chadic (Hausa), Semitic, and Amazight (Berber). Even though a correction
over earlier names, Afro-Asiatic is a misnomer because these languages are
spoken nowhere in Asia unless carried there by religious conquest. These are
actually NorthEast Afrikan languages native to Afrika from their southern origin
in the Horn spreading westward to Nigeria and on to Morocco, eastward to
Oman, and northward to Syria (Jewish University in Moscow, 2007).
It's funny that some linguists would speak of a proto-Semitic language as if it
were ancestral to all Afro-Asian languages. Semitic was actually near the last
to seperate from the phylum roughly 6000 years ago whereas Kushitic
became distinct 10,000 years ago. This indicates that proto-Afro-Asiatic
developed in the region of Ethiopia and Somalia and began splitting by at least
8000 BC (Jewish University in Moscow, 2007).
The dialects or branches of Indo-European still represented today by one or
more languages are Indic and Iranian, Greek, Armenian, Slavic, Baltic,
Albanian, Celtic, Italic, and Germanic. The present century has seen the
addition of two branches to the family, both of which are extinct: Hittite
and other Anatolian languages, the earliest attested in the Indo-
European family, spoken in what is now Turkey in the second and first
millennia B.C.; and the two Tocharian languages, the easternmost of
Indo-European dialects, spoken in Chinese Turkistan (modern Xinjiang
Uygur) in the first millennium A.D.

THE HAMITO-SEMITIC, ETHIOPIAN-ARAMAIC IS AFRICAN--NOT INDO-

EUROPEAN! IT SHOULD BE questioned WHEN the word EUROPEAN is
grouped and hyphenated with an ancient Canaanite or Hittite Nation.

Insular British Celtic tongues, especially colloquial Welsh, show certain

peculiarities which are reminiscent of Hamitic and Semitic tongues. Irish has
as many features in common with non-Indo-European languages, especially
with Hamito-Semitic languages, as with other Indo-European languages.
Certain features of Old Irish verb forms can be understood only in the light of
Hittite, Vedic, Sanskrit, and Mycenean Greek. (Hittites were a Canaanite
nation.) The pre-Aryan idioms which still live in Welsh and Irish were derived
from a language allied to Egyptian tongues.

The natives of Ireland and Wales used a Hamitic and/or Semitic tongue before
they came into contact with Continental Indo-European ones. This is a proof,
then, to the objective reader, that the Celtic peoples of Europe originally spoke
Hebrew. Hittites were a Canaanite nation.

Both Egyptian and Berber are Hamitic tongues. They have a close affinity
with Semitic languages, and local dialects in various parts of the Middle East.
Aspects of Hamitic speech are found also in Biblical Hebrew but not
emphasized. Most of the ancient Canaanite peoples adopted a language
similar to Hebrew. There is Phoenician use of Hebrew. There are Arabic
dialects that are Hamitic or reveal a Hamitic substratum. The difference
between Hamitic and Semitic is more one of emphasis than of substance.
Dialects of Hebrew within the land of Israel could well have absorbed Hamitic
elements.

1. Biblical References:
The words "Semites," "Semitic," do not occur in the Bible, but are derived from
the name of Noah's oldest son, Shem (Genesis 5:32; Genesis 6:10; Genesis
9:18, Genesis 9:23 ff.; Genesis 10:1, Genesis 10:21 f.; Genesis 11:10 f.; 1Ch.
1). Formerly the designation was limited to those who are mentioned in Gen.
10; 11 as Shem's descendants, most of whom can be traced historically and
geographically; but more recently the title has been expanded to apply to
others who are not specified in the Bible as Semites, and indeed are plainly
called Hamitic, e.g. the Babylonians (Genesis 10:10) and the Phoenicians and
Canaanites (Genesis 10:15-19). The grounds for the inclusion of these Biblical
Hamites among the Semites are chiefly linguistic, although political,
commercial and religious affinities are also considered.

The nation of Iraq has only existed since 1932. Prior to that, the “land of the
two rivers” was a British colony. Before that, it belonged to the Ottoman
Empire. Heading backwards through time beyond that, it belonged to the
White Sheep Turks, Black Sheep Turks, Timurids, Mongols, Abassids,
Seljuks, Buwayhids, the Abbasids again, the Umayyads, the Sassanids
(Persian), the Arsacids (Parthian), the Seleucids (Macedonian-Greek), the
Persians again, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Aramaeans, the Elamites,
the Kassites, the Amorites, the Akkadians, and the Sumerians.

Aramaic

The language which Jesus spoke was the ancient Semitic language of
Aramaic. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in Aramaic. Aramaic was
also the official language of the Assyrians. Aramaic is one of the Semitic
languages, an important group of languages known almost from the beginning
of human history and including also Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, and Akkadian
(ancient Babylonian and Assyrian). It is particularly closely related to Hebrew,
and was written in a variety of alphabetic scripts. (What is usually called
"Hebrew" script is actually an Aramaic script.)

Aramaic as an Imperial Language

Aramaic was used by the conquering Assyrians as a language of

administration communication, and following them by the Babylonian and
Persian empires, which ruled from India to Ethiopia, and employed Aramaic as
the official language. For this period, then (about 700–320 B.C.E.), Aramaic
held a position similar to that occupied by English today. The most important
documents of this period are numerous papyri from Egypt and Palestine.

Biblical Aramaic

Aramaic displaced Hebrew for many purposes among the Jews, a fact
reflected in the Bible, where portions of Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic. Some
of the best known stories in biblical literature, including that of Belshazzar’s
feast with the famous "handwriting on the wall" are in Aramaic.

Aramaic survives as a spoken language in small communities in Syria, Iraq,

Turkey, and Iran. The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon will not attempt to be
a full dictionary for this Modern Aramaic, which is best undertaken as a
separate task, but where an ancient word has a modern continuation, the
Modern Aramaic use will be recorded.

All Semitic languages—and all of the languages of the world were

descendants of Hebrew or of Aramaic. It has always been maintained that
Arabic supported a close resemblance to the primitive Semitic language. The
domain of Semitic tongues we can assign to Arabic only a relative antiquity. It
is true that in Arabic very many features are preserved more faithfully than in
the cognate languages, for instance, nearly all the original abundance of
consonants, the short vowels in open syllables, particularly in the interior of
words, and many grammatical distinctions, which in the other languages are
more or less obscured. On the other hand, Arabic has coined, simply from
analogy, a great number of forms which, owing to their extreme simplicity,
seem at the first glance to be primitive, but which nevertheless are only
modifications of the primitive forms; while perhaps the other Semitic
languages exhibit modifications of a different kind.

The original people of Arabia were the descendants of Ad or the Adites. These
were Black descendants of Ham and they created the very first civilization in
South Arabia (Arabia Felix) about 1800 B.C. They are also known as Cushite-
Arabians to distinguish them from the Bedouin Semitic Arabians who lived in
the part of Arabia called Arabia Deserta, or the desert regions.

Blacks are the first people to inhabit Arabia (the Adites and Cushites), Iraq
(Cushites, Elamites), Iran (Elamites, Susians, Cushites). The first whites to
enter the Black regions of Mesopotamia were the Gutis who swept from the
Zagros Mountains and attempted to Destroy Black Mesopotamia. After many
centuries, these invaders and some of the Blacks mixed to create the
Assyrians, Babylonians and the present population of the region. Yet, Black
features and faces are still indigenous in parts of Iran and Iraq and South
Arabia.
 Samoa Solomon Islands

North Africa - 1890 North Africa - 1894

Samoa Samoa

The pictures above were taken in the 1890s. Once the world was "Colored."
 All of the people pictured below are currently classified as Caucasian except
the Oceanic Negroes (Samoa, Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, Cook Islands,
Fiji, Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New
Caledonia, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Marianas, Palau, Pitcairn, Samoa,
Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu).

stewartsynopsis@yahoo.com

Jared Diamond on “The Japanese Race”

Filed under:

• Academia

• Archaeology

• English

• General

— tak @ 3:38 am Print

At Savage Minds, an anthropology group blog that I contribute to, a heated debate has
erupted over Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, a book
that explains European imperialism by geography and ecology. This work has been made into
a recently aired three-part documentary on PBS. The posts, now three in number (here and
here and here) with endless comments, has spilled over to Crooked Timber and picked up by
individual bloggers elsewhere. While some of the debates have moved to discussions on the
minute details of Diamond’s argument, the impetus that triggered so much blogger enthusiam
was the question of whether the assumptions behind his argument are racist despite his public
denunciation of racism.
I tend to agree with my fellow anthropologists at Savage Minds. But for the most part I have
stayed out of the discussion because I have neither read his book nor seen the television
program.
Today, though, I found this article by Jared Diamond titled “The Japanese Roots” originally
published in the June 1998 (vol.19) issue of Discover (via cbuddha’s del.icio.us tag for
japanese anthropology). Curious, I read it right away. Now I am compelled to comment on
this article, not because I study “Japan,” and not because I carry a Japanese passport, but
because I now understand why my fellow bloggers felt so impassioned to critique Diamond.
In this article, Diamond explores the origin of the Japanese race. By slowly moving through
archaeological, historical, linguistic, and genetic evidence, and punctuating his sub-
arguments with discussions dealing with body hair, pottery shards, and the domestication of
animals (among others), he arrives at the conclusion that “Koreans and Japanese are joined
by blood.” That is to say, the Japanese race, and the knowledge of rice cultivation, came from
the Korean peninsula. As a good scientist he admits that he cannot conclusively and exactly
reconstruct what happened — that would require more evidence. But he focuses on one
particular concept: that rice cultuvation was of a higher stage of development and thus gave
whomever was growing this staple crop an advantage over others during military encounters.
(Here I don’t follow him: I don’t understand why rice agriculture necessarily gives people
more military might.)
I won’t go into detail here all of his arguments — it would be much faster for the reader to
plunge into the article herself.
In reading this article I realized why there is such a fierce debate over Jared Diamond. If
Guns, Germs, and Steel is anything similar in tone to this short Discover article, I can see
why many people would find him appealing. His heart is in the right place and he believes
that scientific investigation, such as the ones he conducts, can bring to light historical truths
and mend geopolitical conflicts. Here is his concluding paragraph:
History gives the Japanese and the Koreans ample grounds for mutual distrust and contempt,
so any conclusion confirming their close relationship is likely to be unpopular among both
peoples. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in
traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As
reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their
formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in
rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.
No wonder he is liked. Just like the way Diamond at the end of the PBS special reportedly
shed tears in an African hospital filled with dying children (as noted by Ozma here), the
ending of this short article also appeals to a sentimental justification of his science. This
mention of the “enmity” between Koreans and Japanese (which by the way should not and
cannot be compare to the conflict in the Middle East) is an appeal to one of the moral
dilemmas facing humanity today: how can we stop people from fighting each other?
Maybe I’m too cynical, but he seems quite naive to think that whatever “truth” he will
uncover in his field will solve geopolitical problems. If that is truly what he is seeking to
accomplish, I believe he needs to re-examine the political history of his own discipline.
This post is getting way long, so I’ll stick to the article at hand. Take this excerpt, from the
secong paragraph of this essay:
UNEARTHING THE ORIGINS OF THE JAPANESE IS A MUCH HARDER TASK THAN
YOU MIGHT GUESS. AMONG WORLD POWERS TODAY, THE JAPANESE ARE THE
MOST DISTINCTIVE IN THEIR CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT. THE ORIGINS OF
THEIR LANGUAGE ARE one of the most disputed questions of linguistics. These questions
are central to the self-image of the Japanese and to how they are viewed by other peoples.
Japan’s rising dominance and touchy relations with its neighbors make it more important than
ever to strip away myths and find answers.
Once again he explicitly frames the stakes of his research in geopolitical terms. But his
hopes, I think, are already thwarted by his first two sentence in which he assumes without
providing evidence that “the Japanese are the most distinctive in their culture and
environment.” Stop right there, mister, because to those who know Japan’s modern history,
he has just reproduced the rhetoric of Japanese imperialism!
I mean, why is Japanese culture perceived as the most unique? Where is the evidence? And
how do you even measure cultural uniqueness, let alone compare it ?
The myth of racial homogeneity has been dismantled by Japan historians, most recently by
Eiji Oguma in his A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Image, a translation of the 1995 discipline-
defining work 『単一民族神話の起源―「日本人」の自画像の系譜』. This racism,
which snugly fit with the emperor cult of seeing all Japanese subjects as having a common
ancestor, is generally understood to have peaked during Japanese imperialism.
There are also frightening parallels in the history of Japanese fascism to the kind of
environmental determinism used by Diamond. Take the example of Watsuji Tetsuro, who
despite his engagement with Heidegger’s critique of ontology (or perhaps because of it),
produced his 1936 work 『風土　人間学的考察』 (translated as Climate and Culture: A
Philosophical Study). Some Japanese critics have interpreted this book as using the argument
of environmental determinism to claim Japanese racial superiority: he writes that certain
climatic factors lend themselves better to philosophical and ethical inquiry. And of course,
the monsoon climate, with which the Japanese race nourished itself, allowed for the highest
form of cultural development. Sounds pretty racist.
Now Diamond does not argue this. But he shares with Watsuji a basic methodology of
relying on environmental factors as a way to typologize groups of people according to “race.”
The danger here lies not so much in the conclusions given by Diamond, but in the biologism
of his methodological assumption. Why does he rely so much on the concept of race? Why,
for example, does he assume that Japanese all speak Japanese and only Japanese? Or if he
finds evidence of rice cultivation in Japan it is immediate understood to be that it was left by
those who came from Korea? That’s like finding, hundreds of years from now, chopsticks
and wasabi tubes in New York City and saying, since so many people ate sushi, there must
have been a mass migration of Japanese!
But that’s not even the point here, for what it boils down to is that 1. he perpetuates racism by
associating a group of people with specific traits, and 2. he has some theory of civilizational
stages in mind whereby rice cultivation gives a military advantage over hunter & gatherer
people. This is just too simplistic, however statistically sound it may be. I mean didn’t people
actually mix agriculture and hunting, as was often the case in medieval Japan (noted by
Japanese historian Amino Yoshihiko) and is often noted in anthropological literature?
Instead of reading these simplistic assumptions about race, technology, and stages of
civilization, I’d rather wait for the release of Civilization 4, in which the game designers rely
on the same assumptions.
And finally, what does Diamond say about Japan in Guns, Germs and Steel? Japan was never
ostensibly “conquered” by the West and proved to be quite superior militarily and
economically. If anything this should prove his eurocentrism and blast his racial categories
altogether. But I will probably never read the book to find out.
Comments (20)

20 Responses to “Jared Diamond on “The Japanese Race””

1. Andrew says:

7/28/2005 at 4:21 am
“I don’t understand why rice agriculture necessarily gives people more military
might.”
I think he might have left that part of the argument out due to space constraints or
something. The point is that agriculture feeds far more people per acre than hunting
and gathering. In a battle, 10 against 1 usually wins. Plus, farming also gives the
farmers motive to expand (i.e., conquer): the population grows too rapidly for the
farms to feed everyone, so they start looking for more land – and more land, and more
land. This is not to deny, of course, as you rightly say, that people will often use a mix
of farming and hunter-gathering (is that a word?). Indeed, it’s hard to see how people
could have started farming in the first place without passing through a “transition”
stage. Diamond explicitly notes this in GG&S, but perhaps was covering too much
ground in this Discover article to give it proper treatment. But it seems plausible that
as you move slightly more toward farming, you necessarily move slightly more
toward a sedentary lifestyle and a more crowded population. The relationship may not
be linear, but it exists. (Anyway, Diamond in this article points out that for a long
time hunter-gathering was the more “effective” lifestyle in Japan, until the farmers
finally developed more efficient farming techniques.)
What I find questionable about the way Diamond frames his article is (as you point
out) the idea that “the truth” about their prehistoric histories will allow peace between
Korea and Japan, when it seems to me that all that conflict about who really
conquered whom is just an epiphenomenon on rival nationalisms. The comparison to
the Arab-Israeli conflict at the end highlights this absurdity: does anyone really think
that the Arab-Israeli conflict will be settled by informing the participants that they
have similar genes?
PS, I love that the title of the blog is “Frog in a Well”! that is one of the few Chinese
4-character phrases that I know…(my mom used to call my dad “frog in a well”)

2. Alan Baumler says:

7/28/2005 at 6:06 am
But I will probably never read the book to find out.
That’s too bad, because its not really ecological determinism in the simplistic sense
you suggest. He does not, in the book, typologize people according to “race.” (I have
not read the Discovery article.) Mostly he is looking at how envioromental factors
prior to 1600 led to the development of very different types of societies on the
Eurasian mainland than in the New World, Africa, and other places. I don’t think he
says much at all about Japan. I thought the book was too popularized for my taste, and
largely derivative of Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism. I was not that impressed with
the Savage Minds crew, as they seemed to be misreading the book (Actually, I think
 that most or all of them admited to not having read it), pointing out that Diamond is
looking at enviromental factors and that racists look at enviomental factors. That is
true, but not really to the point.
It would be very interesting to see what someone like Elvin or Totman, who know
something about the enviromental history of East Asia would say about Diamond and
Crosby.

3. Karlo says:

7/28/2005 at 8:30 am
I haven’t read the article you mention but I have read the book and I’d recommend
that you read it.
I’m currently reading his other book on the collapse of societies, and find it very good
so far to, although
not as entertaining a read. I think we could make too much of the offhand statement
that Japanese culture is
very unique. Of course, on the face of it, it’s quite a simplistic statement to make.
Before the modern period, so
many cultures throughout the world seem very different. But Japan is an island after
all and so the cultural borrowings from
Eurasia were more sporadic.

4. K. M. Lawson says:

7/28/2005 at 10:59 am
Tak, I have been following all the exchanges on the book at Savage Minds, Brad’s
blog, and Crooked Timber closely and saw also that you tentatively popped your head
in here and there. I’m glad you found some time to post here. I think both of us were
thinking many of the same things as we read about Diamonds book. Interestingly
enough, I thought of the exact same two books you mentioned when I was reading
about DIamond’s arguments: Watsuji Tetsurô’s Fûdo and Oguma Eiji’s brilliant book
『単一民族神話の起源―「日本人」の自画像の系譜』
As you have already hinted at, the former points out what happens when things go
way to far (and I know everyone is emphasizing how careful Diamond is on
qualifying his claims to prevent him from embracing any raw env. determ.) in, as one
Crooked Timber commenter noticed – attributing the causes of current circumstances
to hugely distant environmental factors. Any of us familiar with Nihonjinron
arguments of cultural nationalism and its predecessors in the imperial period have
strong suspicions about anything which embraces the sort of teleological approaches
based on environmental factors to get strong claims of causation that often float
passed the intervening centuries and perhaps especially the transition to modernity.
I’m reminded of the only slightly related but much more objectionable example of
Edward O. Wilson’s “Consilience” which is probably the most shockingly brazen and
frighteningly ignorant sample of how bad this can get in contemporary scholarship.
Alan may well be right about Diamond and I think many of the readers of Diamond
who have chimed in on the recent online discussion emphasize his careful
qualifications and retreats from any determinist argument – but it hasn’t prevented the
warning bells from ringing, and I think you simply can’t be careful enough in this
territory.
I would add 2 comments to your post Tak.
1) You note the likability of a book like this, as the “heart” is in the right place. Books
like this serve us well if for no other reason that they promote debate on these issues,
or as the case may be, generate productive complaints that the very 問題式 or
problematic of the approach betrays fallacious assumptions. Another reason why I
suspect this kind of approach is very popular is that it bypasses the muddy waters of
culture and the detailed contingencies of recent history that anthropologists and
historians wade through in order to jump to the (ironically) more serene waters of
qualitative data and the literally hard evidence of archeological findings – even when
such information is still scarce in many cases. This kind of approach is certainly
welcome but the framing of the questions and the consequences of proceeding certain
ways in argumentation share similar dangers to our own discpline that may not be
immediately obvious to those who believe they have found the path to greater
simplicity and clarity.
2) I think I interpreted Ogama’s argument a bit differently than you did. I took
Ogama’s main point in this respect to be arguing that while one Japanese discourse of
its origins in the prewar held everyone to be descendents of the emperor in fact the
dominant discourse of identity in Imperial Japan (especially after its acquisition of
colonies) emphasized the multi-ethnic (as opposed to the homogenous) nature of the
Japanese nation (He shows this up front with two interesting quotes juxtaposed at the
beginning of the book). Ogama notes in his conclusion (if I remember correctly, don’t
have the book with me in Seoul) this multi-ethnic and more inclusive and flexible
definition of Japanese identity is not necessarily better than the ridiculous notion (and
myth, as his title suggests) that Japan is homogenous. I took him to argue that only in
the postwar, stripped of its colonies did the myth of the homogenous nation truly
topple its competing rivals.
The result, however, is exactly the same: Scholars like Ogama Eiji (and Amino
Yoshihiko, is perhaps another good example) have brought us a long way to
considering the dangers of being less than very careful in carrying present day
concepts of Japan and Japaneseness in the past. Diamond was usually careful in the
article to discuss the diversity of both the Korean peninsula and the islands of Japan
but I would, like you, challenge the very efficacy of the approach here. Many Koreans
and Japanese are happy to admit some kind of racial connection between the two
(although granted there were once many Japanese who riled at the idea) but in the
historiography of the past century this kind of talk has only contributed to the mess…
Japanese nationalists can easily claim “My ethnic group grew out of the stagnant and
eventually despotic group that stayed on the peninsula and we grew to be strong and
modern. Now we will save you our old brothers from yourselves.” (See Tanaka’s
“Japan’s Orient”) and Koreans can say, “Haha, your ethnic group is just a derivative
of us superior and more highly developed mainland peninsula types. We gave you
everything you have! (I refer you to most old men I have spoken to in Korea about the
topic of Japan)
Rather than, as Diamond suggests, trying to convince both sides they are ethnic “twin
brothers” I think that wasting ink on these kinds of debates is only feeding the flames
and contributing to the ethnic essentialism and anachronistic silliness that the kind of
“my ethnic group taught fire and farming to your ethnic group” or “my ethnic group
conquered your island and developed into your ethnic group” which I believe should
be excised from the entire discussion.
5. tak says:

7/28/2005 at 12:15 pm
Andrew: Thanks for explaining Diamond’s agricultural superiority argument. I guess
it makes sense that more men are fed per acre with farms than hunting. But like in the
game Civilization 4, as in real life, doesn’t tending to a farm require more labor power
and resources than hunter-gathering (btw I like this phrase!)? Well, as you point out,
he explains himself more clearly in GGS. Which leads me to…
Alan & Karlo: I guess I should read GGS. I’m sure it is an engaging book, and from
all the commentary I have read in the last few days it sounds like he is empiricist and
detail oriented, which is something I always find admirable. Perhaps if I find it in a
used bookstore I’ll pick it up for that rainy day or that long flight. Oh, and yes, it
would be fascinating to hear from scholars well-versed in environmental history.
Alan, one more thing. Learning about how differnt types of societies emerged from
different environments is rewarding in and of itself, and when in the mood I love to
watch documentaries on such topics. I have no problems with this aspect of
Diamond’s scholarship. But I would be bit worried if the methods and conclusions of
his research are taken up in the political sphere, as is what he seems to be suggesting
in the essay I read. If understood without a critical eye, it can essentialize cultural
difference and possibly provide justification for ethnic conflict. As Konrad put it so
well in his comments, “this kind of talk has only contributed to the mess” rather than
uproot the source of the problem.
Konrad: Thanks for clarifying my very muddled and misinformed explanation of
Oguma’s book!
Your comments, though, made me think of another possible way to critique Diamond:
the discursive history of social darwinism and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth
century. I’m sure tons of books have been written about this topic (Julia Thomas’s
book, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology),
comes to mind in terms of Japanese history).

6. beowulf888 says:

7/28/2005 at 3:32 pm
Question (for anyone who wishes to comment): Would you describe a person as being
racist for promulgating spurious beliefs about a culture; or would you only label a
person racist if that person *maliciously* promulgated spurious beliefs about a
culture? I tend to label people racist for the latter reason instead of the former. And I
tend to label the former as just “misguided”. To my mind, if everyone who had a
misinformed view of another culture (any culture) was racist, then I would have guess
the entire population of this planet would fall within this category.
Anyway, I’ve always categorized Jared Diamond’s arguments as little better than
Marvin Harris’ cultural just-so stories. There seems to be a yearning by some within
the field of Anthropology to explain away cultural differences using historical,
technological, and economic arguments. I won’t deny that these factors may and do
contribute to the evolution of culture, but I doubt if these factors are the entire story. I
suspect those who argue the case of materialistic determinism are just looking for a
 simple answer (but I will entertain the notion that, depending on the proponent, they
may have a racist, imperialist, religious or Marxist ax to grind).
But if someone wants to argue that the modern American taboo against nose-picking
is based on a cultural selection against the behaviors that facilitate the transmission of
disease, I won’t label them racist. I’ll just label them silly ;-)
best regards,
–Beo

7. joe o says:

7/28/2005 at 3:49 pm
Diamond’s argument is that agriculture leads to higher densities of population.
Agriculture can also be exploited by a hierachy much more than hunter-gathering.
You can steal a weeks worth of food from a hunter-gather but you can steal a years
worth of food from an agriculturist if you come at the right time. Agicultural based-
hierachies can include a full time military to conquer other areas.
The other point that Diamond makes is that because agriculturists are so exploited,
people are better off (healthier taller) being hunter gatherers. But they are given no
choice.

8. Jonathan Dresner says:

7/28/2005 at 4:04 pm
The anthropological faith that our common origins can overwhelm our subsequent
divergences is touching, but as yet unproven. The idea that recovering an accurate
history of Japanese-Korean origins will have an effect on contemporary politics is a
real leap of faith, ignoring 1500 years of independent
competition/contact/conflict/colonialism/commerce, etc. If he’s serious about this,
then he is engaging in the kind of essentialism that he’s accused of: only if race is a
determinative category can the revelation of racial unity be determinative.
The most interesting element of this article is the linguistic argument — the existence
of dialects in pre-unification societies complicates our dating of language evolutions
— but it’s conjectural. Also, I haven’t read any of the scholarship in this area recently,
but I was under the impression that Korean and Japanese were much closer than his
sources suggest. I’ve always been struck by the lack of translators or linguistic
comments in the early chronicles, which suggests to me that the languages were pretty
much mutually intelligible roughly 1500 years ago.

9. Andrew says:

7/28/2005 at 5:12 pm
doesn’t tending to a farm require more labor power and resources than hunter-
gathering”
Perhaps, but the relevant quantity is the amount of labor power and resources required
*per calorie of food derived.* In that regard, farming is more “efficient” – put in X
amount of energy plowing, sowing, irrigating, harvesting, etc. and get much more
food out of that than if you had put X amount of energy into hunter-gathering. This is
 why farming can support a non-productive elite (artists, priests, etc.), because the non-
producers live off (often, take by coercive force) the surplus generated by the farmers.
In contrast, hunter-gatherers can only generate enough food to feed themselves, so
everyone has to pull their weight. Of course, this is a generality – as Diamond says,
until the Yayoi rice farmers developed good techniques of farming, the Jomon hunter-
gatherer lifestyle was more “efficient” in the Japanese environment, because the
Japanese archipelago was unusually fruitful in providing food for hunter-gatherers.
Note that farming produces a lot of calories, but not necessarily healthy calories,
depending on the crop. Hunter-gatherers were/are often a lot healthier than early
farmers because they have/had a more diverse diet. But you can still live with vitamin
deficiencies, so early agriculture tended to produce large but malnourished
populations. [Diamond has called the adoption of agriculture "the worst mistake in the
history of the human race" because it gave us malnourishment, famine, epidemic
diseases, social inequality, etc etc etc.]
Interesting factoid: the “energy efficiency” of food production is much higher for
“traditional agriculture” than for hunter-gathering, but ironically, it is much lower for
industrialized agriculture than for hunter-gathering, once you factor in all the energy
put into food production that comes from fossil fuels (fertilizer production, farming
machinery, transportation). Of course, since all the energy comes from fossil fuels and
not human muscle, the efficiency of industrial agriculture is much, much higher in
terms of amount of food produced per unit of human labor. Which is why modern
societies can get away with having only a few percent of the population working in
agriculture.

10. Andrew says:

7/28/2005 at 5:16 pm
Re: the idea that revealing the truth about the prehistoric past will end Japan-Korea
tensions – upon further reflection, this idea is so outlandish that I can’t really even
believe that Diamond himself takes it seriously. I would take it just as the “hook” that
he uses to catch the reader’s attention and make the article seem more relevant to a
popular science magazine.

11. Pearsall Helms says:

7/28/2005 at 5:50 pm
[Andrew: Thanks for explaining Diamond’s agricultural superiority argument. I guess
it makes sense that more men are fed per acre with farms than hunting. But like in the
game Civilization 4, as in real life, doesn’t tending to a farm require more labor power
and resources than hunter-gathering (btw I like this phrase!)?]
Only for part of the year. Traditional peasant life usually meant lots of sitting around
in between periods of frantic action…perfect for going off to hack people up! I don’t
know much about Japanese or Korean history, but in European terms year-round
warfare is essentially a recent innovation, born out of the industrial era. For example,
one of the big problems for the leaders of the American Revolution was keeping
significant numbers of troops in the field at all times, as huge numbers would melt
away at harvest time.
12. Justin Yoshida (cbuddha) says:

7/29/2005 at 1:48 am
I’m happy someone else found a use for that link because it was too annoying and I
couldn’t be bothered to blog about it. My all-time favorite theory of Japanese origin
must be the Lost Tribe argument, and for the same reasons I found your “chopsticks
and wasabi tubes” analogy particularly apt.
Please keep up with the good work here.

13. Stentor says:

7/29/2005 at 7:40 am
if he finds evidence of rice cultivation in Japan it is immediate understood to be that it
was left by those who came from Korea?
He doesn’t say that. In fact, he explicitly says that both migration and diffusion are
plausible hypotheses for the spread of rice. Then he cites evidence from the
physiology of the actual people involved (skeletal measurements and DNA) to resolve
the issue in favor of the migration hypothesis.

14. John Landon says:

7/29/2005 at 7:49 am
Discussion tends to focus on the secondary implications of Diamond’s
historiographical(evolutionary) method, which is where the problem lies. The
confusions of biological and cultural evolution have persisted since the time of
Darwin, and yes, of course, Herbert Spencer, who first made all the basic mistakes,
Darwin catching fleas from this and other sources. Darwin is exempted from scrutiny,
while everyone else is subject (justifiably) to close quarters. The subtitle to Darwin’s
text Origin should remind us that racial extermination lurks behind the cover of a
scientific thesis on evolution.
In this context Diamond is goodhearted, plays ball with the regime, but what is his
claim to a theory of history? Close to zero. The confusing influence of reductionist
biology and the debatable assumptions concerning Darwinian givens leaves nothing
but ‘flat history’ approaches, and the resulting theories of competition and conflict.
Diamond successfully coexists with this regime in a clever PR strategy, conscious or
unconscious, by displacing historical dynamics to the silliest form of explanation,
environmental determinism. The latter thesis simply makes no coherent sense of the
development of global civilization which shows the heretical factor of directionality,
although this is hard to detect/analyze in current methodologies. The great
prize/stumbling block of historical theories is the rise of the modern, and it is
interesting to consider Jim Blaut’s _Eight Eurocentric Historians_ for his acute
(whatever one thinks of Blaut’s vies) dismantling of the theories current in this field.
There Diamond’s thesis is really a non-thesis.

15. Charles Park says:

7/30/2005 at 3:45 am
I was almost done writing a lengthy comment when the screen disappeared. It can be
frustrating sometimes :-) Anyway here was I meant to say in abbreviated form:
1) I think it is unfair for you historians to be attacking a biologist’s popular work. Try
to understand his discipline and criticze his work in a biology journal. And sorry, I
don’t understand some of your historicisms.
2) The crux of Jared Diamond’s argument is that the practice of agriculture when well
managed creates societal surplus which the society can invest in cultural development,
technological development, more agricultural development, etc. Further, efficient
agriculture necessitats hierarchic governance which by definition requires a high level
of organization.
3) This premis is useful in the study of the clash of civilizations. In Guns, Germs and
Steel, he looks at the clash of an agricultural society (Europe) and the hunter-gatherer
society (American Indians or in the case of Mayans, highly less efficient agricultural
societies). In Japan Origins which is the focus of this blog entry, Jared Diamond
proposes the clash between possibly the Koguryo agricultural society of the 400 BC
vs. the hunter gather Japanese Jomon. When societies are worlds apart as agricultural
vs. hunter gatherer societies are apt to be, assimilation is less likely and atriction more
likely (Jared Diamond’s second and third hypotheses see more plausible).
4) I agree that Diamond’s premis is reductionist and deterministic. But theories are
reductionist and deterministic by definition for with our theories we seek to surmise
the world and predict it. Further, I think that his premis is also compelling. See
SAHA, N. and J. S. TAY, 1992 Origin of the Koreans: a population genetic study.
Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 88:27-36 which concludes that “…the Koreans are more
closely related to the Japanese and quite distant from the Chinese.”
5) I agree that Diamond is delving into territory that he may not be expert (e.g.,
anthropology, history, genetics, technology diffusion theory, linguistics, etc.). But
again remember that his intended audience is the lay public. Discover is not the
American Journal of Phys(iogical?) Anthropology. And given the complexity of the
issue, I think he finds it necessary to be integrating findings and arguments in many
disciplines of which he is not expert. So it’s great if you find his side arguments
interesting. And I think the public is well served by such integrationists when much of
real science is inaccessible to them. Further, I don’t think it ill-serves the public
political discourse since more information in such discourse is always better
especially when the parties appear to be adhering to certain non-sensical mythos.
6) Many of you accuse him of being a racist but I find the opposite (and I find your
finding offensive). I don’t think, as Tak suggests, that he is saying that the Europeans
were so superior because of their environment. Certainly, having visited the country, I
know Japan to be very beautiful. But to suggest that the Japanese or any race are
superior because of their natural endownments is silly. I do think what Diamond is
saying is that the natural endowments allowed the Europeans who are otherwise no
different from the rest of the world to develop surplus producing agriculture to a
sufficient level to enable them to develop their guns, steel and social systems to
conquer the world (they also inadvertently created germs also, since agriculture
enabled crowding to occur). I think he is in accord with modern genetic anthropology
which proposes that modern humans have a common African ancestor (not ancestry).
7) Lastly, I think Jared Diamond does positively serve the current political debate
between Japan and Korea. What is wrong with saying, “Hey you two, you are closer
to eachother than you think.” when one brother throws out the garlic breath bear
 against the Sun Goddess? Maybe instead of thinking of themselves as descended of a
garlic breath bear (extreme Korean nationalist?) or a pure race descended from a “Sun
Goddess” (extreme Japanese nationalist?), thinking of eachother as brothers
progresses the debate in the peaceful direction. If there is any universal political
responsibility for the scientist or scholar, I think shedding lite on the current political
debate is one of them, if done right (and so perhaps its time to open up the Imperial
tombs). Of course, at the same time as I say this, I cringe to think about the origin of
anti-semitism, the American racial studies and Japanese internment camps, the Nazi
concentration camp doctors, live vivisections and germ research by Japanese
scientists, etc. But I don’t see Jared Diamond who has love for the indigenous farmers
of Indonesia as racist.
Thanks Tak, as always. Now I can go to sleep…

16. tak says:

7/30/2005 at 9:09 am
I wanted to quickly acknowledge everyone’s comments. I apologize for not taking the
time to reply to everyone. I’ve been busy and just haven’t had time to respond.
Thanks to those who have graciously filled me in about the link between rice
cultivation and military strength. I have been enjoying the exchange.
As the readers here probably know, this post has been taken up by Henry at Crooked
Timber. The entry there has generated some good discussion. Check out the rebuttals
by our own Jonathan and Konrad.
For a list of links on the discussion generated by the posts at Savage Minds, see here.
I am also mirroring here my response to Henry (comment #52), who I thought
distorted some of my claims but also made some valid points. Charles, he makes
similar points as you do.
————–
Hi Henry,
I don’t mean any disrespect and I welcome any thoughts on my reading of Jared
Diamond’s essay, but frankly speaking I’m a little disappointed at how mean-spirited
this exchange has become. Perhaps my reading was sloppy and my argument weak,
but does this warrant an attack of this magnitude?
That being said, I am both stunned and excited that my post is being discussed on
Crooked Timber. I honestly appreciate the chance to re-work my thoughts and to
discover a new audience outside my disciplinary shelters. So here’s my second go at
it, as crooked as this timber may be!
First: I didn’t say that Jared Diamond was racist.
I tried in my post over at Frog in a Well to be generous in my reading of his article,
but it seems that I didn’t give that impression to some of my readers. I actually
enjoyed it (I would not have read it otherwise). Well written and imaginative, his
prose conjured up for me a panoramic view of the historical past. I especially found
the details exhilarating, epecially the parts in the middle where he describes what they
ate, how they procured food and stored it, what sort of language they spoke. In
regards to parts I did not understand, such as his argument about the rice agriculture
revolution that ushered in the Yayoi period, I was hoping that a kind reader or two
would help me figure them out (as some did). In this regard, as you point out Henry, I
am guilty of laziness.
I also felt that he was sensitive, if only mildly, to the history of the politics
surrounding the scholarship on the origin of the Japanese. His opening and closing
sections led me to think that he intended his article to be a corrective to the
widespread historical misunderstanding of how East Asian “peoples” came to be. (By
the way, in this article he avoids the term “race” and instead uses “people,” e.g., “the
Japanese people,” “the East Asian peoples,” and so on.) Reading him I did not think
that he was racist. Rather he was trying to find a way to debunk the racist sentiment
between Japanese and Korean by presenting several mediating layers of evidence
(archaelogical, physical-anthropological, linguistic) and causal explanations
(technology and the environment seems to be his favorites).
Yet despite the things I liked about the article, I was disturbed by some of his
assumptions, which in my opinion are the kind that help fuel the very racism abound
in East Asia today. This is what I meant by him perpetuating racism. My beef with
him is that I don’t think the enmity between Korea and Japan, which he casts in a
simplistic narrative of the conqueror and the conquered, can be helped by “find[ing]
common ground” in the intertwined prehistories of these peoples. I don’t think
evidence is enough. As some others have already commented, I wanted Diamond to
go a little further in thinking about the conceptual genealogy of the term “people,”
which I read, quite naively at first but now confirmed by my second reading of the
article, as “race.”
I cringed when I read the following sentence (in the second paragraph of the Discover
article): “Among world powers today, the Japanese are the most distinctive in their
culture and environment.” This may seem innocuous to some, but it reminds me, and
that of my fellow Frog in a Well contributors, of the same language used by Japan’s
cultural nationalists. Although Diamond does provide evidence as to the
environmental uniqueness of the archipelago, his statement about “culture” is touted
as a given. Besides, what “culture” is not by definition unique, if the very terms for
comparison must be defined according to the dictates of each individual culture? So
without giving any evidence for Japan’s “unique culture,” he embarks on the twists
and turns of the history of these peoples, all interacting among themselves, to beget
the modern Japanese. Somehow this uniqueness is an essential part of the Japanese
people from antiquity.
Now, take this opening paragraph from the new middle-school textbook (in English,
pdf) that was approved by Japan’s Ministry of Education earlier this year. This
textbook was written by right-wing revisionist historians who are seeking to erase any
mention of the Nanjing Massacre and sexual slavery, among other wartime and
imperialist era details that cast Japan in a negative light, from the school curriculum.
These textbooks have hence been the target of protests from governments and citizens
in East Asia:
The history you are about to study is the history of Japan. In other words, you will be
familiarizing yourselves with the stories of your ancestors — your blood relatives.
Your closest ancestors your parents, who were preceded by your four grandparents.
As you go back further in time, number of ancestors increases with each generation.
Then you realize that the humans populated the Japanese Archipelago are ancestors
you share with the other students in classroom. In every era, Japanese history was
made by ancestors common to all of us.
This paragraph emphasizes the fact that these ancestors, from Jomon to the near-
present, are “blood relatives.” I can say, from my own partial education in Japan and
 from the textbooks I have seen since, that this rhetoric of “ancestors” and “blood
relatives” in classrooms did not exist prior to this textbook. And for students of
Japanese history, these phrases come right out of Japan’s wartime propaganda.
Diamond might respond by mentioning that Koreans, too, are “blood relatives.”
Reportedly, here (in Japanese), the revisionist textbook’s take on the Jomon people
falls into the first of the three theories of the Yayoi transformation considered by
Diamond. But does that really matter to the Koreans and Japanese? As he himself
notes in the second section, these facts are always interpreted to serve the respective
nationalisms of the two (or three?) countries. Also there has been no proof so far that
arguing on the basis of historical evidence has actually changed the minds of these
revisionist historians. Diamond is attuned to this dilemma, but not enough.
Henry, I can hear you saying that what I am claiming here—of a connection between
Diamond and these revisionist historians—is based solely on resemblence and
association. Sure, there is perhaps no direct connection between Diamond and these
efforts by Japan’s revisionist historians, and I bet that Japanese archaeologists, and the
textbook authors, do not read Diamond’s work (although Diamond relies heavily on
Japanese scholarship). But I was suggesting that they, and me too in varying guises,
drink from the same river of 19th century ethnology. Archaeology and ethnology in
Japan share a history together with their Western counterparts, of which Diamond
would probably consider himself to be a part.
Piles of evidence shown to Japanese revisionist historians, including the research
results of Japanese archaeologists and physical anthropologists which Diamond neatly
synthesized in his essay, have not helped change their minds. This means that at least
one item in the sometimes contentious relationship between Japan and her continental
neighbors will never be resolved. Perhaps re-thinking the history of the concept of
race, environment, and culture might be the next move.

17. Titus Tao says:

7/31/2005 at 1:29 pm
Stretching biological theory to the social sphere is never a good idea. Social
Darwinism is a good example. Survival of the fittest in nature is based on the concept
of the existence of genetic diversity and the resulting influence of these differences on
the ability of organisms to thrive or perish in a given environment. Fitness is a fluid
concept and is dependent on the environmental conditions of a given moment in time
and space. As environmental change is constant, genetic traits that contribute to
fitness under one set of conditions may lead to an evolutionary dead end under a
different set of conditions. Social Darwinism ignores this fact, as well as the genetic
disconnect in an industrialized society where humans can alter their environment and
‘fitness’ as measured in social success has more to do with social position than
genetic makeup.
Diamond is dangerously close to making the same mistake. His thesis of
environmental determinism is Eurocentric at worst and Eurasiancentric at best. The
constrast in the development of civilizations between agrarian societies and hunt-and-
gathering societies is well made. Diamond also makes a convincing argument that the
comparatively more nutritious and more easily stored cereals crops such as wheat and
rice has allowed the agrarian societies of Eurasia to develope while the farmers in the
highlands of New Guinea did not “develope’ beyond subsistence farming because
their tuber crops such as taro are nutrient poor and are cannot be stored. However,
 where Diamond’s argument breaks down is in the Americas. Many parts of the
Americas, especially in the temperate latitudes, are environmentally very similar to
many parts of Eurasia. Agriculturally, corn is more productive than wheat and rice
and the argument that MesoAmerican agriculture is less advanced is invalid.
The Korean/Japanese ancestry debate is even more tenuous. Even if Diamond’s
environmental theory is valid, it operates on a civilizational macro-scale that cannot
possibly be applied to account for differences between Korea and Japan, which
essentially are of the same civilization operating on similar technology. While
Diamond is careful in referring to the Japanese and Koreans as ‘peoples’ and not
‘races’, this is still insufficient. A more explicit differentiation should be made
regarding the cultural basis of ethnicity, which often times does not have a genetic
basis.

18. Nevin T says:

8/1/2005 at 2:11 am
Good post, and it made me rethink my own opinion of Jared Diamond’s book, “Guns,
Germs and Steel.” I also found the reference to “blood relatives” in the new textbook
particularly troubling.

19. Susunomics says:

12/20/2005 at 12:33 am
The Japanese origins particularly in the are of Language was determined by African
scientists during the 1960’s, language types were used to determine migration
patterns. The prime minister of Senegal, the Foreign Minister of Papua New Guinea,
the present Fijian Representative to Los Angeles, Runoko Rashidi
http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/runoko.html and http://community.webtv.net/nubianem
) Ivan Van Sertima, and many others have pointed out that there were constant
migrations from the African continent to India, then to Southern Asia all the way to
Melanesia and Australia. Another migration took place from Africa to India to Central
Asia then to Europe (after the ice finally melted about 20,000 years ago).
Japan (according to ‘The Book of Ani’ one of hte most ancient African religious
books dating to traditions that go to about 15,000 BC) state that in North Africa
particularly the region between Dafur and Egypt, a Black race similar to Aboriginals
and Africans called the Anu lived in the region. The Anu and other Africans in the
Egyptian region were at war about 10,000 BC, says the ancient texts. The Anu and
their heiracy including one Tera Neter lost out to the Black Egyptians who were of the
same Black Negro race as the Anu.
The Anu migrated from Africa to India, SE Asia, Southern China, the Pacific Islands
and to Japan. Now who in Japan looks like a ‘pale-skinned’ version of the prehistoric
Black Anu of Africa? It is the Ainu of Japan.
Another group of Africoids settled in the southern part of Japan and that group was
also found in Melanesia, Papua, Indonesia and parts of Polynesia. Eventually, after
many centuries of mixing the aboriginal Black Anu and Black Oceanic Negro
Africoids of Southern Japan became mixed and lightened till they became more
Mongol.
 Genetic testing may or may not determine that, but one thing is very clear, Africans
who head the Japanes language have concluded that it is basically an African
language and they have determined that its ancient origins is East Africa and the
Calabar region of Nigeria. In fact both Japanese and Korean ponit to that particular
African region, see
http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/links_to_japanese_and_african_la.htm
Both Korean and Japanese map to African languages and it is facinating why people
continue to say that Japanese is not related to any other language when the facts are
right there in Africa for them to research, a research that Africans have done since the
sixties ( see the references at “Susu Economics,” pub. by
http://www.AuthorHouse.com )
Furthermore, anyone who studies the very ancient Buddhist statues (including the
Black one ) or the very ancient statues or the culture (including the round huts built by
the prehistoric Blacks of Japan) one will find an African connection.
As for Chinese, it also has its ancient varient in Africa in the region called Cameroon
and in the Western Sudan, where many ethnic groups have names, phrases and other
features that are identical to that of the Chinese. In fact, a few African tribes also have
faces similar to many Chinese people. These include the !Kong, the Nama, the
Mangbetu, some Zulu, some Twana, many Sahara Africans, the Mersi and others.
These features we call ‘Mongoloid’ developed in very old Southern Africa’s high
veldt or in the very hot by day and icy cold by night Sahara desert region. In fact, it is
also in the Sahara that straight hair and kinky hair among Blacks developed during the
‘wet’ phase and the very dry and hot phase of the Sahara about 50,000 years ago.
nubianem@webtv.net
http://community.webtv.net/paulnubiaempire
see “African Presence in Early Asia,” by Ivan Van Sertima

20. Marty Gensler says:

5/31/2006 at 12:29 am
haven’t read enuf of diamond to judge whether he know’s what he’s talking about.
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