Session 6

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

Session 6 Origins of Japan Readings Discussing Japan’s beginnings, I found it very interesting that the pride that Japan takes in their “pure blood” is really not that pure at all. Professor Yamashita shared that there are 5 kinds of pre­historical evidence that can trace the Japanese and their decent. Geological, archaeological,and ethnographic which includes blood type and fingerprint patterns. There is also Linguistic which includes Language family, either Japanese,Korean,Manchurian, Mongolian,Hungarian,Turkish or Finnish. There is also a Malay­Polynesian language family. And finally a Sino­Tibetan family. The fifth form of evidence is mythological. This includes vertical cosmology, horizontal cosmology, and Shinto. When you take all of these into consideration there is really no pure blood. The Japanese are mostly thought to have come from the Korean people. The other interesting information I got from the professor was the discussion of tombs. The giant tombs were awesome. If I saw the pictures without an explanation I would never be able to figure out that is what they are. They look like giant mounds of dirt with moats surrounding them. Because of all the planting in the middle they simply look like a garden. When you do see the the scales of these tombs you realize how important the people are that are buried there. Very interesting discussion.

[Anonymous]

• One of the most interesting ideas from today’s session was the geographic and biological evidence of the origin of Japanese people. In this session, it was noted that in looking at people’s finger prints, we can tell a lot about the places from which people migrated. For example, in the north of Japan, people tend to have B type blood and finger prints that resemble loops an arches, whereas in the south of Japan, people tend to have A type blood, and finger prints that follow swirl patterns. I have a similar activity for a unit I teach on pre-Colombian empires. I typically have my students investigate how people populated the Americas by analyzing a set of evidence. In this set of evidence, students consider some of the physical features that are common among native Americans and Asians as they begin to make connections about the migration patterns of people. I would like to devise a similar activity with the evidence viewed in today’s session about the movement of people in Japan.

edited by nramon on 6/23/2016

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