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

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.

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.