Japanese People - Theories of Origins

Theories of Origins

Arai Hakuseki, who knew in the 18th century that there were stone tools in Japan, suggested that there was Shukushin in ancient Japan, and then Philipp Franz von Siebold claimed that indigenous Japanese was Ainu people. Iha Fuyū suggested that Japanese and Ryukyuan people have the same ethnic origin, based on his 1906 research of the Ryukyuan languages. In the Taishō period, Torii Ryūzō claimed that Yamato people used Yayoi pottery and Ainu used Jōmon pottery.

A common origin of Japanese and Koreans has been proposed by a number of scholars since Arai Hakuseki first brought up the theory and Fujii Sadamoto, a pioneer of modern archeleogy in Japan, also treated the issue in 1781. But after the end of World War II, Kotondo Hasebe and Hisashi Suzuki claimed that the origin of Japanese people was not the newcomers in the Yayoi period (300 BCE – 300 CE) but the people in the Jōmon period.

However, Kazuro Hanihara announced a new racial admixture theory in 1984. Hanihara also announced the theory "dual structure model" in English in 1991. According to Hanihara, modern Japanese lineages began with Jōmon people, who moved into the Japanese archipelago during Paleolithic times from their homeland in southeast Asia. Hanihara believed that there was a second wave of immigrants, from northeast Asia to Japan from the Yayoi period. Following a population expansion in Neolithic times, these newcomers then found their way to the Japanese archipelago sometime during the Yayoi period. As a result, miscegenation was rife in the island regions of Kyūshū, Shikoku, and Honshū, but did not prevail in the outlying islands of Okinawa and Hokkaidō, and the Ryukyuan and Ainu people continued to dominate here. Mark J. Hudson claimed that the main ethnic image of Japanese people was biologically and linguistically formed from 400 BCE to 1,200 CE.

Masatoshi Nei opposed the "dual structure model" and alleged that the genetic distance data show that the Japanese people originated in northeast Asia, moving to Japan perhaps more than thirty thousand years ago.

On the other hand, research in October 2009 by the National Museum of Nature and Science et al. concluded that the Minatogawa Man, who was found in Okinawa and was regarded as evidence that Jōmon people came to Japan via the southern route, had a slender face unlike the Jōmon. Hiroto Takamiya of the Sapporo University suggested that the people of Kyushu immigrated to Okinawa between the 10th and 12th centuries CE.

A 2011 study by Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa reported that a common origin of Japonic languages had originated around 2,182 years before present.