Japanese Roots

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.

The search for answers is difficult because the evidence is so conflicting. On the one hand, the Japanese people are biologically undistinctive, being very similar in appearance and genes to other East Asians, especially to Koreans. As the Japanese like to stress, they are culturally and biologically rather homogeneous, with the exception of a distinctive people called the Ainu on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Taken together, these facts seem to suggest that the Japanese reached Japan only recently from the Asian mainland, too recently to have evolved differences from their mainland cousins, and displaced the Ainu, who represent the original inhabitants. But if that were true, you might expect the Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language, just as English is obviously closely related to other Germanic languages (because Anglo-Saxons from the continent conquered England as recently as the sixth century a.d.). How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan’s presumably ancient language and the evidence for recent origins?

Archeologists have proposed four conflicting theories. Most popular in Japan is the view that the Japanese gradually evolved from ancient Ice Age people who occupied Japan long before 20,000 b.c. Also widespread in Japan is a theory that the Japanese descended from horse-riding Asian nomads who passed through Korea to conquer Japan in the fourth century, but who were themselves—emphatically—not Koreans. A theory favored by many Western archeologists and Koreans, and unpopular in some circles in Japan, is that the Japanese are descendants of immigrants from Korea who arrived with rice-paddy agriculture around 400 b.c. Finally, the fourth theory holds that the peoples named in the other three theories could have mixed to form the modern Japanese.

When similar questions of origins arise about other peoples, they can be discussed dispassionately. That is not so for the Japanese. Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of history based on the earliest recorded Japanese chronicles, which were written in the eighth century. They describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to Earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 b.c. To fill the gap between 660 b.c. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other equally fictitious emperors. Before the end of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito finally announced that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this chronicle account. Unlike American archeologists, who acknowledge that ancient sites in the United States were left by peoples (Native Americans) unrelated to most modern Americans, Japanese archeologists believe all archeological deposits in Japan, no matter how old, were left by ancestors of the modern Japanese. Hence archeology in Japan is supported by astronomical budgets, employs up to 50,000 field-workers each year, and draws public attention to a degree inconceivable anywhere else in the world.

Why do they care so much? Unlike most other non-European countries, Japan preserved its independence and culture while emerging from isolation to create an industrialized society in the late nineteenth century. It was a remarkable achievement. Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences. They want to believe that their distinctive language and culture required uniquely complex developmental processes. To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.

What makes it especially difficult to discuss Japanese archeology dispassionately is that Japanese interpretations of the past affect present behavior. Who among East Asian peoples brought culture to whom? Who has historical claims to whose land? These are not just academic questions. For instance, there is much archeological evidence that people and material objects passed between Japan and Korea in the period a.d. 300 to 700. Japanese interpret this to mean that Japan conquered Korea and brought Korean slaves and artisans to Japan; Koreans believe instead that Korea conquered Japan and that the founders of the Japanese imperial family were Korean.

Thus, when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity. For the next 35 years, Japanese occupation forces tried to eradicate Korean culture and to replace the Korean language with Japanese in schools. The effort was a consequence of a centuries-old attitude of disdain. Nose tombs in Japan still contain 20,000 noses severed from Koreans and brought home as trophies of a sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Not surprisingly, many Koreans loathe the Japanese, and their loathing is returned with contempt.

What really was the legitimate arrangement of antiquity? Today, Japan and Korea are both economic powerhouses, facing each other across the Korea Strait and viewing each other through colored lenses of false myths and past atrocities. It bodes ill for the future of East Asia if these two great peoples cannot find common ground. To do so, they will need a correct understanding of who the Japanese people really are.

Japan’s unique culture began with its unique geogra-phy and environment. It is, for comparison, far more isolated than Britain, which lies only 22 miles from the French coast. Japan lies 110 miles from the closest point of the Asian mainland (South Korea), 190 miles from mainland Russia, and 480 miles from mainland China. Climate, too, sets Japan apart. Its rainfall, up to 120 inches a year, makes it the wettest temperate country in the world. Unlike the winter rains prevailing over much of Europe, Japan’s rains are concentrated in the summer growing season, giving it the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zones. While 80 percent of Japan’s land consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture and only 14 percent is farmland, an average square mile of that farmland is so fertile that it supports eight times as many people as does an average square mile of British farmland. Japan’s high rainfall also ensures a quickly regenerated forest after logging. Despite thousands of years of dense human occupation, Japan still offers visitors a first impression of greenness because 70 percent of its land is still covered by forest.

Japanese forest composition varies with latitude and altitude: evergreen leafy forest in the south at low altitude, deciduous leafy forest in central Japan, and coniferous forest in the north and high up. For prehistoric humans, the deciduous leafy forest was the most productive, providing abundant edible nuts such as walnuts, chestnuts, horse chestnuts, acorns, and beechnuts. Japanese waters are also outstandingly productive. The lakes, rivers, and surrounding seas teem with salmon, trout, tuna, sardines, mackerel, herring, and cod. Today, Japan is the largest consumer of fish in the world. Japanese waters are also rich in clams, oysters, and other shellfish, crabs, shrimp, crayfish, and edible seaweeds. That high productivity was a key to Japan’s prehistory.

From southwest to northeast, the four main Japanese islands are Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, and Hokkaido. Until the late nineteenth century, Hokkaido and northern Honshu were inhabited mainly by the Ainu, who lived as hunter-gatherers with limited agriculture, while the people we know today as Japanese occupied the rest of the main islands.

In appearance, of course, the Japanese are very similar to other East Asians. As for the Ainu, however, their distinctive appearance has prompted more to be written about their origins and relationships than about any other single people on Earth. Partly because Ainu men have luxuriant beards and the most profuse body hair of any people, they are often classified as Caucasoids (so-called white people) who somehow migrated east through Eurasia to Japan. In their overall genetic makeup, though, the Ainu are related to other East Asians, including the Japanese and Koreans. The distinctive appearance and hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Ainu, and the undistinctive appearance and the intensive agricultural lifestyle of the Japanese, are frequently taken to suggest the straightforward interpretation that the Ainu are descended from Japan’s original hunter-gatherer inhabitants and the Japanese are more recent invaders from the Asian mainland.

But this view is difficult to reconcile with the distinctiveness of the Japanese language. Everyone agrees that Japanese does not bear a close relation to any other language in the world. Most scholars consider it to be an isolated member of Asia’s Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages. Korean is also often considered to be an isolated member of this family, and within the family Japanese and Korean may be more closely related to each other than to other Altaic languages. However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features and about 15 percent of their basic vocabularies, rather than the detailed shared features of grammar and vocabulary that link, say, French to Spanish; they are more different from each other than Russian is from English.

Since languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged. By counting common words and features, linguists can estimate how long ago languages diverged, and such estimates suggest that Japanese and Korean parted company at least 4,000 years ago. As for the Ainu language, its origins are thoroughly in doubt; it may not have any special relationship to Japanese.

After genes and language, a third type of evidence about Japanese origins comes from ancient portraits. The earliest preserved likenesses of Japan’s inhabitants are statues called haniwa, erected outside tombs around 1,500 years ago. Those statues unmistakably depict East Asians. They do not resemble the heavily bearded Ainu. If the Japanese did replace the Ainu in Japan south of Hokkaido, that replacement must have occurred before a.d. 500.

Our earliest written information about Japan comes from Chinese chronicles, because China developed literacy long before Korea or Japan. In early Chinese accounts of various peoples referred to as Eastern Barbarians, Japan is described under the name Wa, whose inhabitants were said to be divided into more than a hundred quarreling states. Only a few Korean or Japanese inscriptions before a.d. 700 have been preserved, but extensive chronicles were written in 712 and 720 in Japan and later in Korea. Those reveal massive transmission of culture to Japan from Korea itself, and from China via Korea. The chronicles are also full of accounts of Koreans in Japan and of Japanese in Korea—interpreted by Japanese or Korean historians, respectively, as evidence of Japanese conquest of Korea or the reverse.

The ancestors of the Japanese, then, seem to have reached Japan before they had writing. Their biology suggests a recent arrival, but their language suggests arrival long ago. To resolve this paradox, we must now turn to archeology.

The seas that surround much of Japan and coastal East Asia are shallow enough to have been dry land during the ice ages, when much of the ocean water was locked up in glaciers and sea level lay at about 500 feet below its present measurement. Land bridges connected Japan’s main islands to one another, to the Russian mainland, and to South Korea. The mammals walking out to Japan included not only the ancestors of modern Japan’s bears and monkeys but also ancient humans, long before boats had been invented. Stone tools indicate human arrival as early as half a million years ago.

Around 13,000 years ago, as glaciers melted rapidly all over the world, conditions in Japan changed spectacularly for the better, as far as humans were concerned. Temperature, rainfall, and humidity all increased, raising plant productivity to present high levels. Deciduous leafy forests full of nut trees, which had been confined to southern Japan during the ice ages, expanded northward at the expense of coniferous forest, thereby replacing a forest type that had been rather sterile for humans with a much more productive one. The rise in sea level severed the land bridges, converted Japan from a piece of the Asian continent to a big archipelago, turned what had been a plain into rich shallow seas, and created thousands of miles of productive new coastline with innumerable islands, bays, tidal flats, and estuaries, all teeming with seafood.

That end of the Ice Age was accompanied by the first of the two most decisive changes in Japanese history: the invention of pottery. In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago. For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million.

The prejudice that islanders are supposed to learn from superior continentals wasn’t the sole reason that record-breaking Japanese pottery caused such a shock. In addition, those first Japanese potters were clearly hunter-gatherers, which also violated established views. Usually only sedentary societies own pottery: what nomad wants to carry heavy, fragile pots, as well as weapons and the baby, whenever time comes to shift camp? Most sedentary societies elsewhere in the world arose only with the adoption of agriculture. But the Japanese environment is so productive that people could settle down and make pottery while still living by hunting and gathering. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers exploit their environment’s rich food resources more than 10,000 years before intensive agriculture reached Japan.

Much ancient Japanese pottery was decorated by rolling or pressing a cord on soft clay. Because the Japanese word for cord marking is jomon, the term Jomon is applied to the pottery itself, to the ancient Japanese people who made it, and to that whole period in Japanese prehistory beginning with the invention of pottery and ending only 10,000 years later. The earliest Jomon pottery, of 12,700 years ago, comes from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island. Thereafter, pottery spread north, reaching the vicinity of modern Tokyo around 9,500 years ago and the northernmost island of Hokkaido by 7,000 years ago. Pottery’s northward spread followed that of deciduous forest rich in nuts, suggesting that the climate-related food explosion was what permitted sedentary living.

How did Jomon people make their living? We have abundant evidence from the garbage they left behind at hundreds of thousands of excavated archeological sites all over Japan. They apparently enjoyed a well-balanced diet, one that modern nutritionists would applaud.

One major food category was nuts, especially chestnuts and walnuts, plus horse chestnuts and acorns leached or boiled free of their bitter poisons. Nuts could be harvested in autumn in prodigious quantities, then stored for the winter in underground pits up to six feet deep and six feet wide. Other plant foods included berries, fruits, seeds, leaves, shoots, bulbs, and roots. In all, archeologists sifting through Jomon garbage have identified 64 species of edible plants.

Then as now, Japan’s inhabitants were among the world’s leading consumers of seafood. They harpooned tuna in the open ocean, killed seals on the beaches, and exploited seasonal runs of salmon in the rivers. They drove dolphins into shallow water and clubbed or speared them, just as Japanese hunters do today. They netted diverse fish, captured them in weirs, and caught them on fishhooks carved from deer antlers. They gathered shellfish, crabs, and seaweed in the intertidal zone or dove for them. (Jomon skeletons show a high incidence of abnormal bone growth in the ears, often observed in divers today.) Among land animals hunted, wild boar and deer were the most common prey. They were caught in pit traps, shot with bows and arrows, and run down with dogs.

The most debated question about Jomon subsistence concerns the possible contribution of agriculture. Many Jomon sites contain remains of edible plants that are native to Japan as wild species but also grown as crops today, including the adzuki bean and green gram bean. The remains from Jomon times do not clearly show features distinguishing the crops from their wild ancestors, so we do not know whether these plants were gathered in the wild or grown intentionally. Sites also have debris of edible or useful plant species not native to Japan, such as hemp, which must have been introduced from the Asian mainland. Around 1000 b.c., toward the end of the Jomon period, a few grains of rice, barley, and millet, the staple cereals of East Asia, began to appear. All these tantalizing clues make it likely that Jomon people were starting to practice some slash-and-burn agriculture, but evidently in a casual way that made only a minor contribution to their diet.

Archeologists studying Jomon hunter-gatherers have found not only hard-to-carry pottery (including pieces up to three feet tall) but also heavy stone tools, remains of substantial houses that show signs of repair, big village sites of 50 or more dwellings, and cemeteries—all further evidence that the Jomon people were sedentary rather than nomadic. Their stay-at-home lifestyle was made possible by the diversity of resource-rich habitats available within a short distance of one central site: inland forests, rivers, seashores, bays, and open oceans. Jomon people lived at some of the highest population densities ever estimated for hunter-gatherers, especially in central and northern Japan, with their nut-rich forests, salmon runs, and productive seas. The estimate of the total population of Jomon Japan at its peak is 250,000—trivial, of course, compared with today, but impressive for hunter-gatherers.

With all this stress on what Jomon people did have, we need to be clear as well about what they didn’t have. Their lives were very different from those of contemporary societies only a few hundred miles away in mainland China and Korea. Jomon people had no intensive agriculture. Apart from dogs (and perhaps pigs), they had no domestic animals. They had no metal tools, no writing, no weaving, and little social stratification into chiefs and commoners. Regional variation in pottery styles suggests little progress toward political centralization and unification.

Despite its distinctiveness even in East Asia at that time, Jomon Japan was not completely isolated. Pottery, obsidian, and fishhooks testify to some Jomon trade with Korea, Russia, and Okinawa—as does the arrival of Asian mainland crops. Compared with later eras, though, that limited trade with the outside world had little influence on Jomon society. Jomon Japan was a miniature conservative universe that changed surprisingly little over 10,000 years.

To place Jomon Japan in a contemporary perspective, let us remind ourselves of what human societies were like on the Asian mainland in 400 b.c., just as the Jomon lifestyle was about to come to an end. China consisted of kingdoms with rich elites and poor commoners; the people lived in walled towns, and the country was on the verge of political unification and would soon become the world’s largest empire. Beginning around 6500 b.c., China had developed intensive agriculture based on millet in the north and rice in the south; it had domestic pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. The Chinese had had writing for at least 900 years, metal tools for at least 1,500 years, and had just invented the world’s first cast iron. Those developments were also spreading to Korea, which itself had had agriculture for several thousand years (including rice since at least 2100 b.c.) and metal since 1000 b.c.

With all these developments going on for thousands of years just across the Korea Strait from Japan, it might seem astonishing that in 400 b.c. Japan was still occupied by people who had some trade with Korea but remained preliterate stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers. Throughout human history, centralized states with metal weapons and armies supported by dense agricultural populations have consistently swept away sparser populations of hunter-gatherers. How did Jomon Japan survive so long?

To understand the answer to this paradox, we have to remember that until 400 b.c., the Korea Strait separated not rich farmers from poor hunter-gatherers, but poor farmers from rich hunter-gatherers. China itself and Jomon Japan were probably not in direct contact. Instead Japan’s trade contacts, such as they were, involved Korea. But rice had been domesticated in warm southern China and spread only slowly northward to much cooler Korea, because it took a long time to develop cold-resistant strains of rice. Early rice agriculture in Korea used dry-field methods rather than irrigated paddies and was not particularly productive. Hence early Korean agriculture could not compete with Jomon hunting and gathering. Jomon people themselves would have seen no advantage in adopting Korean agriculture, insofar as they were aware of its existence, and poor Korean farmers had no advantages that would let them force their way into Japan. As we shall see, the advantages finally reversed suddenly and dramatically.

More than 10,000 years after the invention of pottery and the subsequent Jomon population explosion, a second decisive event in Japanese history triggered a second population explosion. Around 400 b.c., a new lifestyle arrived from South Korea. This second transition poses in acute form our question about who the Japanese are. Does the transition mark the replacement of Jomon people with immigrants from Korea, ancestral to the modern Japanese? Or did Japan’s original Jomon inhabitants continue to occupy Japan while learning valuable new tricks?

The new mode of living appeared first on the north coast of Japan’s southwesternmost island, Kyushu, just across the Korea Strait from South Korea. There we find Japan’s first metal tools, of iron, and Japan’s first undisputed full-scale agriculture. That agriculture came in the form of irrigated rice fields, complete with canals, dams, banks, paddies, and rice residues revealed by archeological excavations. Archeologists term the new way of living Yayoi, after a district of Tokyo where in 1884 its characteristic pottery was first recognized. Unlike Jomon pottery, Yayoi pottery was very similar to contemporary South Korean pottery in shape. Many other elements of the new Yayoi culture were unmistakably Korean and previously foreign to Japan, including bronze objects, weaving, glass beads, and styles of tools and houses.

While rice was the most important crop, Yayoi farmers introduced 27 new to Japan, as well as unquestionably domesticated pigs. They may have practiced double cropping, with paddies irrigated for rice production in the summer, then drained for dry-land cultivation of millet, barley, and wheat in the winter. Inevitably, this highly productive system of intensive agriculture triggered an immediate population explosion in Kyushu, where archeologists have identified far more Yayoi sites than Jomon sites, even though the Jomon period lasted 14 times longer.

In virtually no time, Yayoi farming jumped from Kyushu to the adjacent main islands of Shikoku and Honshu, reaching the Tokyo area within 200 years, and the cold northern tip of Honshu (1,000 miles from the first Yayoi settlements on Kyushu) in another century. After briefly occupying northern Honshu, Yayoi farmers abandoned that area, presumably because rice farming could not compete with the Jomon hunter-gatherer life. For the next 2,000 years, northern Honshu remained a frontier zone, beyond which the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido and its Ainu hunter-gatherers were not even considered part of the Japanese state until their annexation in the nineteenth century.

It took several centuries for Yayoi Japan to show the first signs of social stratification, as reflected especially in cemeteries. After about 100 b.c., separate parts of cemeteries were set aside for the graves of what was evidently an emerging elite class, marked by luxury goods imported from China, such as beautiful jade objects and bronze mirrors. As the Yayoi population explosion continued, and as all the best swamps or irrigable plains suitable for wet rice agriculture began to fill up, the archeological evidence suggests that war became more and more frequent: that evidence includes mass production of arrowheads, defensive moats surrounding villages, and buried skeletons pierced by projectile points. These hallmarks of war in Yayoi Japan corroborate the earliest accounts of Japan in Chinese chronicles, which describe the land of Wa and its hundred little political units fighting one another.

In the period from a.d. 300 to 700, both archeological excavations and frustratingly ambiguous accounts in later chronicles let us glimpse dimly the emergence of a politically unified Japan. Before a.d. 300, elite tombs were small and exhibited a regional diversity of styles. Beginning around a.d. 300, increasingly enormous earth-mound tombs called kofun, in the shape of keyholes, were constructed throughout the former Yayoi area from Kyushu to North Honshu. Kofun are up to 1,500 feet long and more than 100 feet high, making them possibly the largest earth-mound tombs in the world. The prodigious amount of labor required to build them and the uniformity of their style across Japan imply powerful rulers who commanded a huge, politically unified labor force. Those kofun that have been excavated contain lavish burial goods, but excavation of the largest ones is still forbidden because they are believed to contain the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line. The visible evidence of political centralization that the kofun provide reinforces the accounts of kofun-era Japanese emperors written down much later in Japanese and Korean chronicles. Massive Korean influences on Japan during the kofun era—whether through the Korean conquest of Japan (the Korean view) or the Japanese conquest of Korea (the Japanese view)—were responsible for transmitting Buddhism, writing, horseback riding, and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques to Japan from the Asian mainland.

Finally, with the completion of Japan’s first chronicle in a.d. 712, Japan emerged into the full light of history. As of 712, the people inhabiting Japan were at last unquestionably Japanese, and their language (termed Old Japanese) was unquestionably ancestral to modern Japanese. Emperor Akihito, who reigns today, is the eighty-second direct descendant of the emperor under whom that first chronicle of a.d. 712 was written. He is traditionally considered the 125th direct descendant of the legendary first emperor, Jimmu, the great-great-great-grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Japanese culture underwent far more radical change in the 700 years of the Yayoi era than in the ten millennia of Jomon times. The contrast between Jomon stability (or conservatism) and radical Yayoi change is the most striking feature of Japanese history. Obviously, something momentous happened at 400 b.c. What was it? Were the ancestors of the modern Japanese the Jomon people, the Yayoi people, or a combination? Japan’s population increased by an astonishing factor of 70 during Yayoi times: What caused that change? A passionate debate has raged around three alternative hypotheses.

One theory is that Jomon hunter-gatherers themselves gradually evolved into the modern Japanese. Because they had already been living a settled existence in villages for thousands of years, they may have been preadapted to accepting agriculture. At the Yayoi transition, perhaps nothing more happened than that Jomon society received cold-resistant rice seeds and information about paddy irrigation from Korea, enabling it to produce more food and increase its numbers. This theory appeals to many modern Japanese because it minimizes the unwelcome contribution of Korean genes to the Japanese gene pool while portraying the Japanese people as uniquely Japanese for at least the past 12,000 years.

A second theory, unappealing to those Japanese who prefer the first theory, argues instead that the Yayoi transition represents a massive influx of immigrants from Korea, carrying Korean farming practices, culture, and genes. Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice. According to one estimate, Yayoi Japan received several million immigrants from Korea, utterly overwhelming the genetic contribution of Jomon people (thought to have numbered around 75,000 just before the Yayoi transition). If so, modern Japanese are descendants of Korean immigrants who developed a modified culture of their own over the last 2,000 years.

The last theory accepts the evidence for immigration from Korea but denies that it was massive. Instead, highly productive agriculture may have enabled a modest number of immigrant rice farmers to reproduce much faster than Jomon hunter-gatherers and eventually to outnumber them. Like the second theory, this theory considers modern Japanese to be slightly modified Koreans but dispenses with the need for large-scale immigration.

By comparison with similar transitions elsewhere in the world, the second or third theory seems to me more plausible than the first theory. Over the last 12,000 years, agriculture arose at not more than nine places on Earth, including China and the Fertile Crescent. Twelve thousand years ago, everybody alive was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or fed by farmers. Farming spread from those few sites of origin mainly because farmers outbred hunters, developed more potent technology, and then killed the hunters or drove them off lands suitable for agriculture. In modern times European farmers thereby replaced native Californian hunters, aboriginal Australians, and the San people of South Africa. Farmers who used stone tools similarly replaced hunters prehistorically throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia. Korean farmers of 400 b.c. would have enjoyed a much larger advantage over Jomon hunters because the Koreans already possessed iron tools and a highly developed form of intensive agriculture.

Which of the three theories is correct for Japan? The only direct way to answer this question is to compare Jomon and Yayoi skeletons and genes with those of modern Japanese and Ainu. Measurements have now been made of many skeletons. In addition, within the last three years molecular geneticists have begun to extract dna from ancient human skeletons and compare the genes of Japan’s ancient and modern populations. Jomon and Yayoi skeletons, researchers find, are on the average readily distinguishable. Jomon people tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography, with strikingly raised browridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat browridges and noses. Some skeletons of the Yayoi period were still Jomon-like in appearance, but that is to be expected by almost any theory of the Jomon-Yayoi transition. By the time of the kofun period, all Japanese skeletons except those of the Ainu form a homogeneous group, resembling modern Japanese and Koreans.

In all these respects, Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese. Similarly, geneticists attempting to calculate the relative contributions of Korean-like Yayoi genes and Ainu-like Jomon genes to the modern Japanese gene pool have concluded that the Yayoi contribution was generally dominant. Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. Genetic studies of the past three years have also at last resolved the controversy about the origins of the Ainu: they are the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.

Given the overwhelming advantage that rice agriculture gave Korean farmers, one has to wonder why the farmers achieved victory over Jomon hunters so suddenly, after making little headway in Japan for thousands of years. What finally tipped the balance and triggered the Yayoi transition was probably a combination of four developments: the farmers began raising rice in irrigated fields instead of in less productive dry fields; they developed rice strains that would grow well in a cool climate; their population expanded in Korea, putting pressure on Koreans to emigrate; and they invented iron tools that allowed them to mass-produce the wooden shovels, hoes, and other tools needed for rice-paddy agriculture. That iron and intensive farming reached Japan simultaneously is unlikely to have been a coincidence.

We have seen that the combined evidence of archeology, physical anthropology, and genetics supports the transparent interpretation for how the distinctive-looking Ainu and the undistinctive-looking Japanese came to share Japan: the Ainu are descended from Japan’s original inhabitants and the Japanese are descended from more recent arrivals. But that view leaves the problem of language unexplained. If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar. More generally, if the Japanese people arose recently from some mixture, on the island of Kyushu, of original Ainu-like Jomon inhabitants with Yayoi invaders from Korea, the Japanese language might show close affinities to both the Korean and Ainu languages. Instead, Japanese and Ainu have no demonstrable relationship, and the relationship between Japanese and Korean is distant. How could this be so if the mixing occurred a mere 2,400 years ago? I suggest the following resolution of this paradox: the languages of Kyushu’s Jomon residents and Yayoi invaders were quite different from the modern Ainu and Korean languages, respectively.

The Ainu language was spoken in recent times by the Ainu on the northern island of Hokkaido, so Hokkaido’s Jomon inhabitants probably also spoke an Ainu-like language. The Jomon inhabitants of Kyushu, however, surely did not. From the southern tip of Kyushu to the northern tip of Hokkaido, the Japanese archipelago is nearly 1,500 miles long. In Jomon times it supported great regional diversity of subsistence techniques and of pottery styles and was never unified politically. During the 10,000 years of Jomon occupation, Jomon people would have evolved correspondingly great linguistic diversity. In fact, many Japanese place-names on Hokkaido and northern Honshu include the Ainu words for river, nai or betsu, and for cape, shiri, but such Ainu-like names do not occur farther south in Japan. This suggests not only that Yayoi and Japanese pioneers adopted many Jomon place-names, just as white Americans did Native American names (think of Massachusetts and Mississippi), but also that Ainu was the Jomon language only of northernmost Japan.

That is, the modern Ainu language of Hokkaido is not a model for the ancient Jomon language of Kyushu. By the same token, modern Korean may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 b.c. In the centuries before Korea became unified politically in a.d. 676, it consisted of three kingdoms. Modern Korean is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla, the kingdom that emerged triumphant and unified Korea, but Silla was not the kingdom that had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries. Early Korean chronicles tell us that the different kingdoms had different languages. While the languages of the kingdoms defeated by Silla are poorly known, the few preserved words of one of those kingdoms, Koguryo, are much more similar to the corresponding Old Japanese words than are the corresponding modern Korean words. Korean languages may have been even more diverse in 400 b.c., before political unification had reached the stage of three kingdoms. The Korean language that reached Japan in 400 b.c., and that evolved into modern Japanese, I suspect, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modern Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.

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.

揭密日本人的起源(翻译完成）

揭示日本人的起源，是一件比你想象的还要困难的任务。在当今世界的强国之中，日本人拥有最独特的文化和环境。他们的语言起源是最具争议的语言学问题之一。这些问题，是日本人如何看待自己，以及如何被别人看待的核心问题。日本强烈的控制欲，和与邻国敏感的关系，使揭掉神话的外衣寻找答案比以往更加重要。

寻找答案很困难，因为证据之间互相矛盾。一方面，从生物学角度来说，日本人在外貌和基因方面和其他东亚人特别是韩国人相似。和日本人喜欢激动一样，他们在文化上和生物学上相当接近，只有位于北海道北端的吓夷人例外。总的来说，这些事实似乎可以证明，日本人刚刚总亚洲大陆来到日本岛不久，因为时间太短了，他们还没有从他们的亚洲近亲那里发生太多改变，而吓夷人才是那里的原住民。但是如果这是真的，你会期望日本语会显示出一些与大陆语言相通的特性，就像英语与德语显示出明显的亲缘关系（因为盎格鲁－撒克逊人直到公元六世纪才从欧洲大陆征服英格兰）。日本古代的语言，和其近代起源之间的矛盾，我们如何解释？
考古学家已经提出四点相互矛盾的理论。最广为接受观点是，日本人是由古代冰河时期的一批人进化而来，他们在遥远的公元前20000年占领了日本。另一种流传很广的说法是，日本人是亚洲骑在马背上的游牧民族的后裔，他们在第四世纪穿过朝鲜半岛征服日本，但是他们断然不是韩国人。还有一种理论，西方的考古学家和韩国人喜欢，而日本人反感，认为日本人是朝鲜移民的后裔，他们在公元前400年携带农耕文明到达日本。最后，第四种理论坚持认为，以上三种理论的人群，混合形成了今天的日本人。

其他民族的种族起源问题，我们可以平静的讨论。但是日本人不行。直到1946年，日本学校还在传授一个源自日本的最早史书中的神话故事，这本史书写于公元8世纪。这个神话是这样描述的，诞生于造物主邪那歧（Izanagi）左眼中的太阳女神Amaterasu，派遣她的孙女Ninigi来到位于日本列岛之一的九州的大地上，和一个大地之神成亲。Ninigi的重孙Jimmu，再一头美丽的圣鸟的帮助下，击败了他的无助的敌人，成为了日本的第一任皇帝，那时是公元前660年。为了填补自公元前660年至日本最初纪年的帝王史，该史书又杜撰了13位其他的假想的皇帝。在第二次世界大战临近结束之前，日本的裕仁天皇最终宣布，他并非神之家族，日本的考古学家和历史学家不得不对此做出合理的解释。和美国的考古学家不一样，他们承认由古代原住民留下来的美国古代遗址和现代的美国人没有任何关系，日本的考古学家坚信，日本的所有考古遗迹，无论其多么古老，都是现代日本人的祖先遗留下来的。在日本，考古学由自然科学预算资助，每年雇佣近50000名相关领域的工作者，并且不可思议的吸引了世界各地的关注。

为什么他们这么在乎？和大多数的非欧洲国家不一样，十九世纪晚期，在形成工业化社会的巨变中，日本很好了保持了自己的独立和文化，这是一个了不起的成就。如今，面对强大的西方文化入侵的时候，日本人非常清楚的关注保持他们的传统文化。他们相信，他们特色的语言和文化经过了独特的、复杂的发展过程。承认日语和其他任何语言的关系，似乎意味着文化身份的屈服。

造成冷静得讨论日本的考古学如此困难的原因是，日本人对历史的解释，深深的影响了如今的思维习惯。在东亚的各民族中，是谁把文明传播给了谁？谁对土地拥有历史上的主权？这些已经不仅仅是学术问题。比如，大量的考古学证据表明，在公元300年至700年之间，在日本和朝鲜半岛之间有人和物品的往来。对此，日本人的解释是，日本政府了朝鲜半岛，并且把朝鲜半岛的奴隶和工匠带回了日本；而韩国人坚信高丽人征服了日本，并且日本帝国的创立者是高丽人。

因此，1910年，日本向朝鲜半岛派遣军队，并且把半岛变成了它的附庸国，日本的军方领导人称颂这次吞并为符合古老意志的合理的安排。在接下来的35年里，日本军方势力权利消除韩国文化，并且在学校中力图用日语取代韩语。这种做法，是一种源自于久远的歧视性态度的后果。日本的鼻子坟墓依然埋葬着20000个鼻子，它们是从韩国人身上割下来，被作为战利品带回来的，这场战争是16世纪日本的侵略。不必惊讶，许多韩国人厌恶日本人，并且这种延误又产生蔑视。

什么是真正的符合古老意志的合理的安排？现在，日本和韩国都是经济强大的国家，通过朝鲜海峡隔海相望，因为错误的神话故事和曾经的暴行而彼此审视。如果这两个伟大的民族不能找到共同的立场，这对东亚意味着病态。因此，日本人到底是什么人？对此他们需要一个正确的理解。

日本独特的文化开始于它独特的地理位置和环境。比较而言，它远比大不列颠更加孤立，大不列颠距离法国的海岸线只有22英里，而日本到亚洲大陆最近的一点（朝鲜半岛南部）距离为110英里，它到俄罗斯大陆的距离为190英里，到中国大陆的距离为480英里。同样的，独特的气候也将日本隔离。它每年近120英尺的降雨量，使其成为世界上最湿润的国家。和欧洲广泛的冬季降雨不同，日本的雨季集中在夏天作物成长的季节，使其成为温带地区最高农作物生产力的国家。同时，日本国土的80％，由不适于农业发展的山地组成，并且只有14％的土地作为农田，这些农田非常肥沃，以至于每平方英里的土地养活的人口，是大不列颠相同土地养活人口的8倍。日本的高降雨量也保证了被砍伐树木的快速再生。尽管经过了数千年的连绵不绝的人类战争，日本依然向游客展示了令人印象深刻的绿色，因为它的70％的国土都被森林覆盖。

随着纬度和海拔的变化，日本的森林树种多样：在南部的低海拔地区，为常绿阔叶林；在中部地区，为落叶阔叶林；在北部和高海拔地区，为针叶林。对于史前人类来说，落叶阔叶林是最富饶的，提供丰裕的可食用的各种坚果，比如胡桃、栗子、七叶树栗子、橡子和掬子。日本的水生态系统也很富饶，湖泊、河流和近海水域出产丰富的大马哈鱼、鳟鱼、金枪鱼、沙丁鱼、鲭、青鱼和鳕鱼。现在，日本是世界上最大的鱼类消费国。日本的水生态系统还盛产蛤蚌，以及其他贝类、蟹类、虾类和可食用的藻类。丰富的物产是日本史前文明的关键。

从西南到东北，日本的四个主要岛屿分别是：九州、四国、本州和北海道。直到十九世纪晚期，北海道和本州北部的主要居民还是虾夷人，他们的生活方式以狩猎、采集为主，还有少量的农业，日本人征服了主要岛屿的剩余部分，我们才开始了解他们。
诚然，从外表看来，日本人和其他东亚人非常相似。而虾夷人不同，他们的独特外表和世界上任何一个单一成分的民族都不一样。比如说，每个虾夷（男）人都有浓密的胡须和茂盛的体毛，他们经常被分类为高加索人（所谓的白色人种），不清楚他们如何横穿欧亚大陆向东迁徙来到日本。尽管如此，从遗传基因组成来讲，虾夷人还是和东亚人种有关联，包括日本人和朝鲜人。虾夷人独特的外表，采集和打猎的生活方式，日本人普通的外表，精耕细作的农耕文明生活方式，经常被用来作为直接的证据证明，虾夷人是日本列岛靠打猎采集为生的原始居民的后裔，而日本人则更可能是来自于亚洲大陆的近期的后来者。

但是这个观点很难和日本语言的独特性相一致。每个人都承认，日语和世界上其他任何语言都没有亲缘关系。大多数学者认为，日语是亚洲的阿尔泰语系中独立的一个成员，这个语系包括土耳其语，蒙古语和通古斯语，韩语也经常被认为是这个语系中独立的一员，并且日语和韩语在这个语系中相比其他成员更加亲近。但是，日语和韩语相似的地方，还仅仅限制在一般的语法功能和大约15％的基本词汇，而不是语法的细节功能和关联的词汇。相对于俄语和英语，它们的区别更加明显。

随着时间的流逝，语言也在不停演进，两种语言越相近，它们近代的分歧就越多。通过统计语言中的共通词汇和语法功能，语言学家何以推算这些语言是在多长时间以前开始纷华的，并且这种推算证实，日语和朝鲜语至少在4000年前就以经分离。而对于吓夷语来说，它的起源还处于怀疑之中，或许它和日语没有任何关系。

在基因和语言之外，第三种关于日本人起源的证据来自于古代图画。保存至今最古老的日本居民的画像，是被城为埴轮（haniwa，日本古坟时代陪葬品：译者注）的雕像，它们矗立于具有1500年左右历史的墓葬的外边。这些雕像无疑是刻画东亚人的。他们不同于有浓密胡须的虾夷人。如果日本人确实在北海道南部取代了吓夷人，那么取代的时间必然发生在公元500年之前。

我们关于日本的有文字记载的最早的信息，来自于中国古代的史书，因为中国远比韩国或者日本更早的发展了文字记录的能力。在古中国早期形形色色的东夷访客中，日本的名称为Wa，据说，它的居民被分割为100多个争夺激烈的部落。日本公元700年之前的历史，只有从一些韩语或者日语的碑文中保存下来，而日本更多的史书完成于公元712年至720年之间，在韩国要稍晚一些。以上表明，日本的文化大量的来自于韩国本身，而韩国来自于中国。在史书中，同样记载了大量在日本的韩国访客和在韩国的日本访客，然而在日本和韩国的历史学家那里，分别被解释为曾经征服对方的证据。

那么，日本人的祖先看起来比他们所写的更早之前到达日本。他们的生物学因素证明他们在近代到达日本，而他们的语言证明他们很早以前就以经到达。为了解决这个自相矛盾的难题，我们必须回归到考古学。

日本岛和东亚大陆之间狭窄的海洋，在冰河世纪曾经是一片干燥的陆地，那时很多海水冰冻在冰山之中，海平面比现在的高度要低500英尺。陆地桥连接着日本的主要岛屿，连接着俄罗斯大陆，连接着朝鲜半岛南部。哺乳动物穿过陆地桥，走向日本，这其中不仅包括现在日本熊和猴子的祖先，还包括古代的人类，当然这些早在船只发明以前。石器时代的人类早在50万年前到达日本。

大约在13000年以前，随着世界范围内的冰山迅速融化，日本的自然环境发生了显著的变化，更适合人类生存。温度上升，降雨充沛，湿度加大，植物的生产力达到现在的水平。落叶阔叶林里到处是坚果树，它们在冰河世纪只能生长在南方，现在也扩张到北方的针叶林中，给人类提供了更多的食物。海水的上涨淹没了陆地桥，把日本从一个与亚洲连接的陆地，变成了一个大范围的群岛，把曾经的平原变成了物产丰富的浅海，并且创造了数千公里高生产力的海岸线，以及大量的岛屿、海湾、冲击平原、河口，这些地方都富产海洋生物。

冰河时代的结束，伴随着第一个在日本历史上最具有决定性意义的改变：陶器的发明。根据考古学家的一般经验，发明的流程是从大陆到岛屿，并且认为小的边缘的群体不会对其他世界贡献革命性的成果。因此，令考古学家惊讶的是，世界上已知的最古老的陶器，制造于12700年前的日本。作为人类经验史上第一次使用陶器，人们把它们做成各种形状的密封的盛水容器。随着他们拥有了蒸煮食物的能力的时候，他们可以比以前更容易获得丰富的资源：蔬菜的叶子，可以在户外的篝火上烤干或者烘干；贝类，可以被轻易的打开；并且一些类似于橡子的有毒食物，现在可以把毒性煮掉。柔软的熟食可以用来喂养婴儿，可以使婴儿更早断奶，提高婴儿的成活率。牙齿稀少的老人，他们拥有丰富的社会经验，现在也可以被供养并活的更长久。所有这些使用陶器产生的重大影响，造成了人口的爆发式增长，使日本人口从大约数千人爬升到25万。


岛国居民要向大陆居民学习，这种一直以来的偏见，被发明陶器的日本人打破，但这并不是给考古学家带来震惊的唯一原因。另外，最初的日本陶器工匠，显然都是狩猎和采集者，这一点也违反了传统的观点。通常情况下，只有定居民族才使用陶器：因为游牧民族使用帐篷运输笨重的、易碎的器皿，以及武器和孩童。世界上其他地区的定居民族往往是农耕民族。但是日本的物产如此富饶，人们可以定居下来，制造陶器，同时依然过着狩猎和采集的生活方式。直到精耕细作的农业文明到达日本之前的10000多年中，陶器帮助日本居民充分的利用环境所赐的丰富的食物资源。

许多古代的日本陶器都在柔软的泥土上装饰着旋转或者压制的绳状花纹。因为在日本语中，绳纹用jimon表示，在那个时代，绳纹被应用于陶器本省，用于制造陶器的古代日本人，并且应用于从陶器发明开始至10000年后结束的整个历史时期。最早的绳纹陶器，可以追溯到12700年前，源自日本最南端的九州岛。从那时开始，陶器开始向北扩张，在9500年前左右到达现在东京所在地的附近，并在7000年前到达最北端的北海道。陶器的向北扩张，跟随着富产坚果美食的森林北迁，证明了因为气候导致的食物大增长，允许了定居生活的实现。

绳纹时代的人民如何生活？遍布日本的成百上千个考古遗迹中发掘出来的生活物品，为我们提供了丰富的证据。很明显，他们的膳食营养非常合理，即使现在的营养学家也要拍手称赞。

一个主要的食物范畴是坚果，尤其是栗子和胡桃，以及除去或者煮掉了毒性的七叶树果和橡子。在秋天，坚果的收获量巨大，并且可以贮存在6英尺宽、6英尺深的地下储藏室中度过冬天。源自植物的其他食物包括浆果、水果、种籽、叶子、嫩枝、花卉和根。总之，考古学家在绳纹时代的遗迹中，认定了64中可供食用的植物。

和现在一样，日本古代居民在海洋食品方面也引导着世界的潮流。他们在公海捕猎金枪鱼，在沙滩上杀死海豹，在河流里捕捉随洋流迁徙的大马哈鱼。他们把海豚驱赶到狭窄的水中，用棍棒击打，或者用尖矛刺穿，和现在的日本猎人做的一样。他们用在河坝中网捕捉各种各样的鱼，用鹿角做成的鱼钩钓鱼。他们在退潮的时候采集贝类、螃蟹和海藻。在陆地上的动物中，野猪和驯鹿是最常见的猎物。它们被陷阱诱骗，被弓箭射杀，被猎狗追逐。

关于绳纹时代生活最具争议的问题是，农业的的贡献有多大。许多绳纹时代的遗迹中留有可供食用的植物，它们是源自日本的野生种类，而且今天还作为农作物在种植，包括红豆和绿豆。这些绳纹时代遗留下来的植物，不能明显的显示出农作物和其野生祖先之间的区别，因此我们不知道它们是从野外采集的还是人工种植的。遗迹中还有一些可供食用或者其他用途的植物种类不是源自于日本的，比如大麻，那些一定是从亚洲大陆引入的。大约在公元前1000年左右，也就是绳纹时代的末尾，一些主产地为东亚的谷物如稻谷、大麦、小米开始在日本出现。所有这些引人注目的线索表明，绳纹时代的人们很可能已经开始实践刀耕火种的农业文明，但是很明显，作为一种非主要的方式，其对他们的饮食贡献很小。

研究绳纹时代采集和狩猎者的考古学家，不仅发现了难于运输的陶器（其中一些有6英尺高），还发现了笨重的石器工具，残余的带有修葺痕迹的坚固房子，多达50户甚至更多居民的村庄，还有坟墓，所有这些深入的证据表明，绳纹时代的居民是定居民族，而不是游牧民族。多种多样的丰富的动植物资源，与居住中心较短的距离——森林、河流、海滩、海湾和公海，使这种居住在家的生活方式成为可能。绳纹时代，居住的的人口密度很高，尤其是在日本中部和北部，那里有丰富的坚果森林、不停迁徙的大马哈鱼和富饶的海洋。绳纹时代，日本的总人口估计在25万，当然相对于现在不屑一顾，但在当时令人惊讶。

和我们强调绳纹时代居民确实拥有什么一样，我们需要清楚的知道他们没有什么。他们和同时期的几百英里之外的中国人和韩国人生活的很不一样。绳纹时代居民没有精耕细作的农业文明。除了狗（可能还有猪），他们没有其他驯养的动物。他们没有金属工具，没有文字，不会编织，几乎没有官吏和平民之别的社会等级。陶器风格的地域性区别表明，几乎没有任何推动中央集权和统一的力量。

尽管在东亚范围内也特立独行，但绳纹时代的日本并不是完全孤立的。陶器、黑曜石和鱼钩证明，绳纹居民和韩国、俄罗斯和冲绳有贸易往来——正如亚洲大陆农作物的引入。但是，和后来相比，那点和外界有限的贸易，对绳纹社会几乎没有影响。绳纹时代的日本是一个狭小的封闭的空间，在多达一万年的时间里几乎没有改变。

暂且放下日本人，让我们回忆一下，在日本绳纹时代行将结束的公元前400年，亚洲大陆的人类社会是怎么的吧。中国已经形成了由富裕的贵族和贫穷的平民组成的帝王之国；人们居住在高墙保护的城镇中，国家正处于向中央集权过渡的阶段，此后不久，中国变成了世界上最大的帝国。从约公元前6500年开始，中国已经发展了精耕细作的农业文明，北方以粟类为主，南方以水稻为主；已经开始豢养猪、鸡和水牛。到了这时候，中国人至少已经有了900年的文字书写史，1500年的金属工具史，并且刚刚发明世界上第一个铁器。这些发展同样传播到韩国，韩国也拥有数千年的农业文明（至少在2100年前种植水稻），公元前1000年开始冶炼金属。

数千年来，亚洲国家蓬勃发展，可是与亚洲大陆只隔着一道朝鲜海峡的日本，公元前400年的时候，仍然被使用石器工具的采集和狩猎者盘踞，他们只和朝鲜半岛发生一点贸易。纵观人类历史，拥有金属武器，以稠密农业人口为基础的庞大军队的中央集权国家，一直在驱逐和消灭稀少的狩猎和采集者。但是绳纹时代的日本怎么样在如此长的时间中幸免？

为了理解问题的答案，我们需要认识到知道公元前400年，朝鲜半岛分隔开的，不是富裕的农民和贫穷的狩猎－采集者，而是贫穷的农民和富裕的狩猎－采集者。中国本身和绳纹时期的日本很可能没有直接接触，而是由韩国充当联系人。水稻在温暖的中国南方被驯化，却迟迟才传播到较为寒冷的韩国，这是因为培育抗旱的品种花去了很长的时间。早期，韩国的水稻农业采用旱田而不是水田灌溉，所以产量不高。因此，韩国早期的农业文明，竞争不过日本的狩猎和采集。在引入韩国的农业方面，日本人看不到任何优势，而且贫穷的韩国农民没有把他们的生活方式强制推进到日本的优势。当然，我们将要看到的，是这种优势突然而戏剧性的逆转。

陶器发明带来了日本的人口爆发，在之后的一万多年后，日本历史上第二个重大的事件触发了第二次人口大爆发。在公元前400年左右，来自韩国南部的新的生活方式到达日本。这第二次改变导致了激烈争辩的问题——日本人到底是谁？这次改变是标志着绳纹时代的居民被来自韩国的移民取代，成为现代日本人的祖先，还是日本的原始绳纹时代的居民依然占据日本并开始学习新知识？

这种新的生活模式，最早出现在日本最西南部的岛屿——九州的北部海滨，与韩国南部隔着朝鲜海峡。在那里，我们发现最早的铁制金属工具，和无可置疑的全面的农业。此时的农业以灌溉稻田的形式出现，经考古发掘，包括完整的沟渠、河坝、堤岸和水田，以及大米残迹。1884年，在东京的一个行政区，具有这个时期特征的陶器被第一次认证之后，考古学家将这这种新生活方式的时期成为弥生时代。和绳纹时代的陶器不同，弥生时代的陶器在形状上非常接近同时期韩国南部的陶器。新的弥生文明的许多其他元素也明显是从韩国和其他国家引入到日本的，包括青铜器皿、编制物品、玻璃器具以及工具和房屋的样式。

在水稻作为最重要的农作物的同时，弥生时代的农民引入了27种新的动植物种类，当然包括被驯养的猪。他们可能已经开始实践一年两收，夏季种植灌溉水稻，然后排干水，在冬季种植小米、大麦和小麦。必然的，这种高效的、精耕细作的农业生产立即在九州触发了人口的增长，考古学家已经指出，这次增长比绳纹时代更加剧烈，尽管绳纹时代持续的时间要14倍于弥生时代。

几乎就要同时，弥生时代的农业文明从九州跳跃式的发展到毗邻的本州和四国，在200年之内到达东京地区，并且在下个世纪到达寒冷的四国北端（距离第一个弥生时代的定居点1000英里）。对本州北部短暂的占领之后，弥生时代农民放弃了那里，据推测是因为水稻农业正不过绳纹时代的狩猎和采集生活。在接下来的2000年里，本州北部一直处于边缘地带，更远处最北部的日本岛屿北海道，以及那里的居民虾夷猎人，甚至根本就不被当作日本过的一部分，知道他们在19世纪被征服。

经过几个世纪的发展，弥生日本开始第一次出现社会等级的划分，尤其显示在墓地分配。在大约公园前100年后，崛起的精英阶层的墓地开始单独分离出来，并饰以来自中国的奢侈品，比如漂亮的玉器和铜镜。随着弥生时代人口的持续剧增，最适合水稻种植的湿地和灌溉平原的不断开发，考古学证明战争越来越频繁：这些证据包括弓箭大规模的生产，村庄周围的护城河，以及被锐器贯穿身体的埋葬的骷髅。这些弥生时代战争的证据证实了中国史书中那些最早到达日本的来访者的说法，他们描述日本的战国时代，上百个小的政治团体互相斗争。

在公元300年至公元700年这段时期，考古学发现和后来史书中模棱两可的描述，都让我们模糊的窥视到政治上统一的日本出现雏形。在公元300年之前，精英阶层的墓地规模狭小，并且显示出原始的多样的风格。从公元300年开始，巨大的、状如钥匙孔的、被称作古坟（kofun）的墓地渐渐增多，遍布当时的从九州到本周北部的弥生地区。古坟长达1500英尺，高于500英尺，标志着他们可能是世界上最巨大的土墩式坟墓。修建这些巨大的陵寝需要巨大的劳动力，而且其一致的风格意味着，强力的统治者指挥巨大的、政治意义上的、统一的劳动力。在这些陵寝中还发现了大量的随葬品，可是其中的绝大部分依然禁止开放，因为据信其中包含日本帝国祖先的轨迹。这些陵寝中发现的对外开放的关于中央集权的证据，进一步证实了在后来日本和韩国的史书中，关于来访者对古坟时代天皇的描述。古坟时代韩国对日本的影响巨大——不论是韩国征服了日本（韩国观点）还是日本征服了韩国（日本观点）——佛教、文字、骑术，以及新的制陶工艺和冶金技术都从亚洲大陆传播过来。

最后，随着日本第一部史书完成于公元712年，日本的历史开始完全显现。也就是从712年开始，生活在日本的居民才是最终的无可非议的日本人，他们的语言（学术上的古日本语）才是无可非议的现代日本语的祖先。当今的执政者明仁天皇，是公元712年写就的史书中的天皇的第82世直系子孙。按照惯例，他被认为是传说中的第一任天皇——神武天皇的第125世直系子孙，而神武天皇是天照大神的重玄孙。

日本文化在弥生时代700年中经历的变化，远比绳纹时代10000年的变化要剧烈。绳纹时代的稳定性（或者说保守性），和弥生时代变化的剧烈性，这种对比是日本历史上最明显的特征。很显然的，公元前400年发生了一些重大的事件。现代日本人的祖先是绳纹时代的人们，还是弥生时代的人民，或是两者的结合？弥生时代，日本的人口实现了令人惊讶的70倍的增长：是什么导致了这样的剧变？争论的焦点集中于以下三个推测之中。

一种理论是，绳纹时代的狩猎—采集者本身渐渐进化成现代日本人。因为数千年来，他们一直过着定居的生活方式，他们可能已经做好准备接受农业文明。绳纹时代，社会已经引入抗寒的水稻种籽，并且已经从韩国得到了灌溉种植的信息，可以生产更多的粮食以提高人口数量，而弥生时代所发生的，也许一点也不会更多。这种理论迎合了许多现在的日本人，因为这样可以把不受欢迎的韩国基因对日本基因的贡献减至最少，同时可以证明，在过去的至少12000年的时间里，日本人是独一无二的民族。

第二种理论——没有迎合那些喜爱第一种理论的日本人——认为弥生时代的转变受到了韩国移民的巨大影响，包括他们带来的农业生产、文化、以及基因。九州曾经看起来像是韩国水稻农民的天堂，因为那里比韩国更湿润，有更多湿地，是一个更好的水稻种植地。据估计，弥生时代，日本接收了几百万的韩国移民，他们的贡献完全超过了绳纹时代的日本人（弥生时代之前，约在75000人）。如果是这样，现代日本人就是韩国移民的后代，他们在过去的2000多年中发展了他们自己的文化。

最后一种理论，接受韩国移民的证据，但是认为没有这么重大。而是，高生产力的农业使一部分种植水稻的农民在人口增速上超过了狩猎和采集者，并最终从数量上超过了他们。和第二种理论相似，这种理论认为现代日本人有轻微的韩国成分，但是回避大规模移民的必要性。

和世界中具有类似改变的其他地方相比，第二种理论和第三种理论看起来比第一种理论更符合道理。在过去的12000年，农业在地球上到达的地方不超过9个，包括中国和肥沃的新月地带。12000年前，每一个生存的人都是狩猎和采集者；现在几乎我们全部都是农民或由农民养活。农业从那些起源地扩展到各界各地，主要是因为农民比狩猎者更加强大，他们发展更先进的技术，然后杀死狩猎者或者把他们驱逐出适合农业生产的土地。在现代，来自欧洲的农民取代了土生土长的加利福尼亚猎人，澳洲土著，以及南非的祖鲁人。同样的，使用石器工具的农民取代了曾经遍布欧洲、东南亚和印度尼西亚的狩猎者。公元前400年，韩国农民已经具有比绳纹狩猎者非常明显的优势，因为韩国人已经使用铁制工具，而且拥有高度发达的精耕细作的农业。

对于日本来说，以上三种理论那一种是正确的？回答这个问题的唯一直接的方法是，拿绳纹时代、弥生时代的骨骼和基因，和现代日本人和虾夷人的骨骼和基因做比较。现在，已经用很多骨骼做了测算。而且，在过去的三年里，分子遗传基因学家已经开始从古代日本人骨骼中提取DNA，并且用以比较古代日本人和现代日本人的基因。研究发现，绳纹时代和弥生时代的骨骼，在平均值上可以轻易的区分出来。绳纹时代，人们的身高较矮，拥有较长的前臂和较短的腿，两眼的距离较宽，他们的面部较宽较短，面部特征非常显著，如明显凸出的额头、鼻子和鼻梁。弥生时代，人们的平均身高要高1到2英尺，他们的两眼距离较窄，面部高而长，额头和鼻子平坦。一些弥生时期的骨骼在外表上依然和绳纹时代类似，但是这在任何关于绳纹——弥生时代转变的理论中，都是已经预料到的。到了古坟时代，除了虾夷人外的所有日本人的骨骼，形成了同质化的群落，类似现在的日本人和韩国人。

综合以上所有方面，绳纹时代的头骨和现在日本人不同，而非常像现代的虾夷人，同时，弥生时代的头骨非常像现代的日本人。是类韩国人的弥生时代基因对现代日本人的基因库贡献大，还是类虾夷人的绳纹时代基因对现代日本人的基因库贡献大，遗传学家经过计算比较已经判定，弥生时代占有显而易见的优势。既然这样，来自韩国的移民的确对现代日本人作出了很大的贡献。但原因是移民的数量巨大，还是适度的移民加高速的人口增长率，我们尚不能断定。过去三年的遗传学研究，还最终解决了关于虾夷人起源的争论，他们是日本绳纹时代居民的后代，混合了弥生时代韩国殖民者和现代日本人的基因。

继承了水稻农业赋予韩国农民的压倒性优势，我们惊讶于为什么农民如此突然的就取得了对绳纹时代狩猎和采集者的胜利。是什么最终打破了平衡，触发了弥生时代的转变？很可能是以下四个发展因素的共同作用：农民们开始使用灌溉稻田取代低产的旱地，以提高大米的产量；他们培育了可以在寒冷地区良好生长的水稻品种；韩国人口急剧增长，由此带来的土地压力迫使韩国人移民；他们发明了铁器工具，使他们可以大量生产木铲、锄头以及其他灌溉水稻农业需要的工具。铁器和精耕细作的农业生产同时到达日本，不太可能只是巧合。

我们已经看到，来自考古学、人体学和遗传的证据都证明，特征明显的虾夷人和特征不明显的日本人如何共同拥有日本：虾夷人遗传自日本的原住居民，日本人遗传自更近期的到达者。但是这个观点不能解释语言的难题。如果日本人真是来自韩国的近期的移民，你会期望日语和韩语非常近似。更通常的说，如果生活在九州岛上的日本人，是类虾夷人的绳纹时代居民和弥生时代来自韩国的入侵者的混血儿的话，那么日语应该和韩语和虾夷语都有密切的关系。然而，日语和虾夷语没有任何可论证的关系，日语和韩语的联系也相去甚远。为什么会这样，如果这种混合仅仅发生在2400年前？我建议如下解决这个难题：九州岛绳纹时代居民的语言和现代的虾夷语，弥生时代入侵者的语言和现代的韩语，都差异巨大。

在近代，虾夷语仍然被北海道的虾夷人使用，所以北海道的绳纹时代居民很可能同样说一种类虾夷语的语言。而九州岛的绳纹时代居民当然不是这样。从南端的九州岛到北端的北海道，日本列岛的跨度接近于1500英里。在绳纹时代，人们的生活方式和陶器的风格，呈现出明显的原始的多样性，而且从未有过政治上的统一。在绳纹时代的10000年中，人们应该形成了多种多样的语言。事实上，在北海道和本州北部，许多日语中的地名使用的虾夷语中的词汇，如用于河流的nai、betsu，用于海角的shiri，但是这种类虾夷语的词汇没有出现在更南部一些的日本。这不仅证明了弥生时代和日本的先驱者们采用了许多绳纹时代的地名，还证明了虾夷语仅仅是日本最北端的绳纹时代的语言。

就是说，现代北海道的虾夷语，并不是古绳纹时代九州的语言。同理，对于源自于公元前400年韩国移民的弥生时代语言，韩语也不是一个可参考的模型。在公元676年韩国统一前的数个世纪，朝鲜半岛由三个王国组成，现代韩语继承于新罗王国的语言。但是统一之前，新罗王国与日本的联系并不多。早期的韩国史书告诉我们，不同的王国有不同的语言。而被新罗击败的王国的语言，现在已经知之甚少，所剩无几的被保存下来的高句丽王国的词汇，比起对应的现代韩语，更接近于对应的古代日本语。在没有实现政治统一的公元前400年，韩语可能更加的多种多样。我猜想，在公元前400年到达日本并发展成现代日语的韩语，和发展成现代韩语的新罗语，肯定大不相同。那么，现代日本人和韩国人在外貌和基因上非常相似，在语言上却大相径庭，我们可不必讶异。

历史给了日本人和韩国人富饶的土地，用于互不信任和互相蔑视，所以任何拉近他们之间距离的结论很可能都是不受欢迎的。就像阿拉伯人和犹太人，韩国人和日本人血脉相连却互相敌视。但是敌视会互相破坏，在东亚就像在中东。尽管不愿意承认，但是日本人和韩国人就像孪生兄弟，曾经拥有共同成长的岁月。东亚的政治未来，很大程度上取决于他们能够成功的重新发现彼此在古代紧密的关系。