Message from canaise

[Anonymous]

Ok. Now I get it. The islands we call Japan were once connected to the mainland. Duh! It seems quite obvious now. All these beautiful, dark haired people with black eyes would have to be related. Blood types of A an B. Related to Ural-Altaic (sp?), but not related to Sino-Tibetian? OK, not in the way it is related to them as in the Malay-Polynesian. But, still related? Has to be. Look at the faces and eyes. Vertical myths...just like ours (Christian): a three layer cake of heaven, earth and underworld (hell). Not like ours in that the hell is not as mean...more of a purgatory from which eventual release will be granted. The Puritan hell is for all eternity. Nice guys, the Puritans. And they (the vertical Asian myths) let animals fly. We have no flying animals in Christianity, except where penetrated by non-Christian myths. Horizontal myths: the gods are "out there," across the horizon, across the sea. Over the rainbow?

What about the Jamon? Is it true that in hunting-gathering cultures that women were more on an equal par with men? I understand that it was the plow that turned this upside down. A woman cannot stand behind a plow with oxen drawing it when she is pregnant. But, in a slash and burn agriculture, she can poke a hole in the ground with a stick and drop a seed. When the male is in charge of agriculture, he is now in a position to dominate and stratification of society is the inevitable outcome. Is this why in the Yayoi culture we get surplus and conflict. Men need to hunt. If we don't let them, the hyper-males will find a way to use that extra, waiting testosterone. They used to hunt the wooly mammoth; now, they drag the mouse. Or, at my school, they play football. The mammoth having been shrunk to the size of a pigskin football.

Ashikaga: power moves from the capital to the provinces. The daimyo emerge. Like Afganistan now? Each lord has his samurai. All hills have castles. Yes, you are lord over your mound of dirt! But, it's not over yet. There is a shift to the flatlands. A move back to the centralization of power. Easier to collect taxes. Next move is shoen, and eventually, two systems of govt.: shoen and centralization? Not quite sure I understand what the two systems were.