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Yamato people

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Not to be confused with Wajin (ancient people).
Yamato
大和民族
Yamato-no-Takeru, prince of the Yamato dynasty.
Total population
Approximately 124.76 million[1]
Regions with significant populations
Indigenous
Japanese Archipelago（ Japan）
Large immigrants
Americas（ Brazil,  United States）
Languages
Japanese
Religion
Shintoism, Japanese Buddhism
Related ethnic groups

The Yamato people (大和民族, Yamato minzoku, literally "Yamato ethnicity") or Wajin (和人, Wajin, literally "Wa people")[2] are an East Asian ethnic group and nation native to the Japanese archipelago.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] The term came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the settlers of mainland Japan from minority ethnic groups who have settled the peripheral areas of the Japanese empire, such as the Ainu, Ryukyuans, Nivkh, Oroks, as well as Koreans, Han, Han Taiwanese, Taiwanese aborigines, and Micronesian peoples who were incorporated into the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century. Clan leaders also elevated their own belief system that featured ancestor worship into a national religion known as Shinto.[13]

The name was applied to the Imperial House of Japan or "Yamato Court" that existed in Japan in the 4th century; further, it was originally the name of the region where the Yamato people first settled in Yamato Province (modern-day Nara Prefecture). Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated whether the word is related to the earlier Yamatai (邪馬臺). The Yamato clan set up Japan's first and only dynasty.

In recent centuries, some Yamato have emigrated from Japan to Hawaii, Peru, Brazil, and other South American countries.

Etymology

Further information: Wa (Japan) and Yamatai

The Wajin ( also known as Wa or Wō ) or Yamato were the names early China used to refer to an ethnic group living in Japan around the time of the Three Kingdoms period. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato with one and the same Chinese character 倭 until the 8th century, when the Japanese found fault with it, replacing it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance". Retroactively, this character was adopted in Japan to refer to the country itself, often combined with the character 大, literally meaning "Great", similar to Great Qing or Great Britain, so as to write the preexisting name Yamato (大和) (e.g., such as 大淸帝國 "Great Qing Empire" or 大英帝國 "Great British Empire"). The pronunciation Yamato cannot be formed from the sounds of its constituent Chinese characters; it is speculated to originally refer to a place in Japan meaning "Mountain Gate" (山戸).[14]

The historical province of Yamato (now Nara Prefecture in central Honshu) borders Yamashiro Province (now the southern part of Kyoto Prefecture); however, the names of both provinces appear to contain the Japonic etymon yama, usually meaning "mountain(s)" (but sometimes having a meaning closer to "forest", especially in some Ryukyuan languages). Some other pairs of historical provinces of Japan exhibit similar sharing of one etymological element, such as Kazusa (<*Kami-tu-Fusa, "Upper Fusa") and Shimōsa (<*Simo-tu-Fusa, "Lower Fusa") or Kōzuke (<*Kami-tu-Ke, "Upper Ke") and Shimotsuke (<*Simo-tu-Ke, "Lower Ke"). In these latter cases, the pairs of provinces with similar names are thought to have been created through the subdivision of an earlier single province in prehistoric or protohistoric times.

Although the etymological origins of Wa remain uncertain, Chinese historical texts recorded an ancient people residing in the Japanese archipelago, named something like *ʼWâ or *ʼWər 倭. Carr[15] surveys prevalent proposals for the etymology of Wa ranging from feasible (transcribing Japanese first-person pronouns waga 我が "my; our" and ware 我 "I; we; oneself") to shameful (writing Japanese Wa as 倭 implying "dwarf"), and summarizes interpretations for *ʼWâ "Japanese" into variations on two etymologies: "behaviorally 'submissive' or physically 'short'". The first "submissive; obedient" explanation began with the (121 CE) Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. It defines 倭 as shùnmào 順皃 "obedient/submissive/docile appearance", graphically explains the "person; human' radical with a wěi 委 "bent" phonetic, and quotes the above Shi Jing poem. "Conceivably, when Chinese first met Japanese," Carr[16] suggests, "they transcribed Wa as *ʼWâ 'bent back' signifying 'compliant' bowing/obeisance. Bowing is noted in early historical references to Japan." Examples include "Respect is shown by squatting",[17] and "they either squat or kneel, with both hands on the ground. This is the way they show respect."[18]

Koji Nakayama interprets wēi 逶 "winding" as "very far away" and euphemistically translates Wō 倭 as "separated from the continent". The second etymology of wō 倭 meaning "dwarf (variety of an animal or plant species), midget, little people" has possible cognates in ǎi 矮 "low, short (of stature)", wō 踒 "strain; sprain; bent legs", and wò 臥 "lie down; crouch; sit (animals and birds)". Early Chinese dynastic histories refer to a Zhūrúguó 侏儒國 "pygmy/dwarf country" located south of Japan, associated with possibly Okinawa Island or the Ryukyu Islands. Carr cites the historical precedence of construing Wa as "submissive people" and the "Country of Dwarfs" legend as evidence that the "little people" etymology was a secondary development.

History of usage

See also: Yamato-damashii

In the 6th century, the Yamato dynasty—one of many tribes, of various origins, who had settled Japan in prehistory—founded a state modeled on the Chinese states of Sui and Tang, the center of East Asian political influence at the time. As the Yamato influence expanded, their Old Japanese language became the common spoken language.

The concept of "pure blood" as a criterion for the uniqueness of the Yamato minzoku began circulating around 1880 in Japan, around the time some Japanese scientists began investigations into eugenics.[19]

In present-day Japan, the term Yamato minzoku may be seen as antiquated for connoting racial notions that have been discarded in many circles since Japan's surrender in World War II.[20] "Japanese people" or even "Japanese-Japanese" are often used instead, although these terms also have complications owing to their ambiguous blending of notions of ethnicity and nationality.[21] If regarded as a single ethnic group, the Yamato people are among the world's largest. They have ruled Japan for almost its entire history.

In present-day Japan statistics only counts their population in terms of nationality, rather than ethnicity, thus the number of ethnic Yamato and their actual population numbers are ambiguous. [22]

Origin

Main articles: Genetic history of East Asians and Genetic and anthropometric studies on Japanese people
Genetic composition (Yamato people[注 1][23]）
East Asian lineage
 
 89%
Austronesian lineage
 
 7%
Finno-Ugric lineage
 
 2%
Turco-Mongol lineage
 
 2%
Proposed population migration routes into Japan, based on haplogroups.

The most well-regarded theory is that present-day Yamato Japanese are descedants from both, the Yayoi people and the various local Jōmon people. Japanese people belong to the East Asian lineages D-M55 and O-M175, with a minority belonging to C-M217 and N-M231.[24][5][6][7] The reference population for the Japanese (Yamato) used in Geno 2.0 Next Generation is 89% East Asia, 2% Finland and Northern Siberia, 2% Central Asia, and 7% Southeast Asia & Oceania, making Japanese approximately ~100% East-Eurasian.[25] Genealogical research has indicated extremely similar genetic profiles between these groups, making them nearly indistinguishable from each other and ancient samples. Japanese people were found to share high genetic affinity with the ancient (~8,000 BC) "Devils_Gate_N" sample in the Amur region of Northeast Asia.[5]

The earliest written records about people in Japan are from Chinese sources. These sources spoke about the Wa people, the direct ancestors of the Yamato and other Japonic agriculturalists. The Wa of Na received a golden seal from the Emperor Guangwu of the Later Han dynasty. This event was recorded in the Book of the Later Han compiled by Fan Ye in the 5th century. The seal itself was discovered in northern Kyūshū in the 18th century.[26] Early Chinese historians described Wa as a land of hundreds of scattered tribal communities.[27] Third-century Chinese sources reported that the Wa/early Yamato lived on raw fish, vegetables, and rice served on bamboo and wooden trays, clapped their hands in worship (something still done in Shinto shrines today), and built earthen-grave mounds. They also maintained vassal-master relations, collected taxes, had provincial granaries and markets, and observed mourning. The Wei Zhi (Chinese: 魏志), which is part of the Records of the three Kingdoms, first mentions Yamataikoku and Queen Himiko in the 3rd century. According to the record, Himiko assumed the throne of Wa, as a spiritual leader, after a major civil war. Her younger brother was in charge of the affairs of state, including diplomatic relations with the Chinese court of the Kingdom of Wei.[28] When asked about their origins by the Wei embassy, the people of Wa claimed to be descendants of the people of Wu, a historic figure of the Wu Kingdom around the Yangtze Delta of China, however this is disputed.[29][30]

Japonic speakers were also present on the southern and central "Korean Peninsula". These "Peninsular Japonic agriculturalists" were later replaced/assimilated by Koreanic-speakers (from southern Manchuria) likely causing the Yayoi migration and expansion within the Japanese archipelago.[31][32] Whitman (2012) suggests that the Yayoi agriculturalists are not related to the proto-Koreans but that they were present on the Korean peninsula during the Mumun pottery period. According to him, Japonic arrived in the Korean peninsula around 1500 BC and was brought to the Japanese archipelago by the Yayoi agriculturalists at around 950 BC, during the late Jōmon period. The language family associated with both Mumun and Yayoi culture is Japonic. Koreanic arrived later from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula at around 300 BC and coexist with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had influence on each other and a later founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families.[33]

A study by Kanazawa-Kiriyama et al. 2019 suggests that modern Japanese have between 9–13% ancestry from the heterogeneous Jōmon groups (with the remainder being from rice farming agriculturalists).[34]

Watanabe et al. 2021 found that Japanese from different regions had different amounts of Jōmon-derived SNP alleles, ranging from 17,3% to 24% samplified by southern Jōmon, and 3,8% to 14,9% samplified by northern Jōmon. Southern Jōmon were genetically similar to contemporary East Asians (especially Tujia people, Tibetan people and Miao people), while northern Jōmon had a partial distinct ancestry component, possibly deriving from Paleolithic Siberians, next to an East Asian ancestry component.[35]

Controversies regarding the Ryukyuan people

There were disagreements about considering the Ryukyuans the same as the Yamato, or identify them as an independent but related ethnic group, or as a sub-group that constitutes Japanese ethnicity together with the Yamato. From the Meiji period onward, Japanese scholars[who?] supported the later discredited[dubious – discuss] ideological viewpoint that they were a sub-group of the Yamato people. The Ryukyuans were assimilated into Japanese (Yamato) people with their ethnic identity suppressed by the Meiji government.[36] Many modern day Japanese people in the Ryukyu Islands are a mixture of Yamato and Ryukyuan.

Shinobu Orikuchi argued that the Ryukyuans were the "proto-Japanese" (原日本人, gen nippon jin), whereas Kunio Yanagita suggested they were a sub-group who settled in the Ryukyu Islands while the main migratory wave moved north to settle the Japanese archipelago and became the Yamato people.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Världens 100 största språk 2010" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2010), in Nationalencyklopedin（from the number of speakers in mainland Japanese）
  2. ^ David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu: Transcultural Japan: At the Borderlands of Race, Gender and Identity,, p. 272: "“Wajin,” which is written with Chinese characters that can also be read “Yamato no hito” (Yamato person)".
  3. ^ Ang, Khai C.; Ngu Mee S.; Reid P. Katherine; Teh S. Meh; Aida, Zamzuraida; Koh X.R. Danny; Berg, Arthur; Oppenheimer, Stephen; Salleh, Hood; Clyde M. Mahani; ZainMd M. Badrul; Canfield A. Victor; Cheng C. Keith (2012). "Skin Color Variation in Orang Asli Tribes of Peninsular Malaysia". PLoS ONE. 7 (8): 2. Bibcode:2012PLoSO...742752A. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042752. PMC 3418284. PMID 22912732.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  4. ^ Satoshi, Horai; Murayama, Kumiko; Hayasaka, Kenji; Matsubayashi, Satoe; Goonnapa Fucharoen, Yuko; Harihara, Shinji; Park, Kyung Sook (September 11, 1996). "mtDNA Polymorphism in East Asian Populations, with Special Reference to the Peopling of Japan". American Journal of Human Genetics: 579–590.
  5. ^ a b c Siska, Veronika; Jones, Eppie Ruth; Jeon, Sungwon; Bhak, Youngjune; Kim, Hak-Min; Cho, Yun Sung; Kim, Hyunho; Lee, Kyusang; Veselovskaya, Elizaveta; Balueva, Tatiana; Gallego-Llorente, Marcos; Hofreiter, Michael; Bradley, Daniel G.; Eriksson, Anders; Pinhasi, Ron; Bhak, Jong; Manica, Andrea (2017). "Genome-wide data from two early Neolithic East Asian individuals dating to 7700 years ago". Science Advances. 3 (2) (published February 1, 2017): e1601877. Bibcode:2017SciA....3E1877S. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1601877. PMC 5287702. PMID 28164156. The close genetic affinity between Devil's Gate and modern Japanese and Koreans, who live further south, is also of interest. It has been argued, based on both archaeological (21) and genetic analyses (22–25), that modern Japanese have a dual origin, descending from an admixture event between hunter-gatherers of the Jomon culture (16 to 3 ka) and migrants of the Yayoi culture (3 to 1.7 ka), who brought wet rice agriculture from the Yangtze estuary in southern China through Korea. We investigated whether it was possible to recover the Northern and Southern genetic components by modeling modern Japanese as a mixture of all possible pairs of sources, including both modern Asian populations and Devil's Gate, using admixture f3 statistics. The clearest signal was given by a combination of Devil's Gate and modern-day populations from Taiwan, southern China, and Vietnam (Fig. 4)
  6. ^ a b Wang, Yuchen; Lu Dongsheng; Chung Yeun-Jun; Xu Shuhua (2018). "Genetic structure, divergence and admixture of Han Chinese, Japanese and Korean populations". Hereditas. 155: 19. doi:10.1186/s41065-018-0057-5. PMC 5889524. PMID 29636655.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  7. ^ a b Wang, Yuchen; Lu, Dongsheng; Chung, Yeun-Jun; Xu, Shuhua (2018). "Genetic structure, divergence and admixture of Han Chinese, Japanese and Korean populations". Hereditas. 155 (published April 6, 2018): 19. doi:10.1186/s41065-018-0057-5. PMC 5889524. PMID 29636655.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  8. ^ Levin, Mark (February 1, 2008). "The Wajin's Whiteness: Law and Race Privilege in Japan". Hōritsu Jihō (法律時報). 80 (2): 80–91. SSRN 1551462.
  9. ^ Robertson, J. (2002). "Blood talks: Eugenic modernity and the creation of new Japanese". History and Anthropology. 13 (3): 191–216. doi:10.1080/0275720022000025547. PMID 19499628. S2CID 41340161.
  10. ^ Weiner, Michael, ed. (2009). Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity (2nd ed.). Routledge.
  11. ^ Tian, Chao; Kosoy, Roman; Lee, Annette; Ransom, Michael; Belmont, John W.; Gregersen, Peter K.; Seldin, Michael F. (December 5, 2008). "Analysis of East Asia Genetic Substructure Using Genome-Wide SNP Arrays". PLoS ONE. 3 (12): e3862. Bibcode:2008PLoSO...3.3862T. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003862. PMC 2587696. PMID 19057645.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  12. ^ Jeong, Choongwon; Nakagome, Shigeki; Di Rienzo, Anna (2016). "Deep History of East Asian Populations Revealed Through Genetic Analysis of the Ainu" (PDF). Genetics. 202 (1): 261–272. doi:10.1534/genetics.115.178673. PMC 4701090. PMID 26500257.
  13. ^ Tignor, Robert (2013). Worlds Together, Worlds Apart Volume 1: Beginnings through the Fifteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 346. ISBN 978-0-393-12376-0.
  14. ^ "Ž×"n'ä?'‹ã?B?à". Inoues.net. Retrieved 2011-09-26.
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  18. ^ Wei Zhi, tr. Tsunoda 1951, 13.
  19. ^ Robertson 2002.
  20. ^ Weiner 2009, xiv–xv.
  21. ^ Levin 2008, 6.
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  23. ^ Genographic Project#Geno 2.0 Next Generation|Reference Populations – Geno 2.0 Next Generation . (2017). Genographic Project|The Genographic Project. Retrieved 15 8May 2017, from link.
  24. ^ YOUICHI SATO, TOSHIKATSU SHINKA, ASHRAF A. EWIS, AIKO YAMAUCHI, TERUAKI IWAMOTO, YUTAKA NAKAHORI Overview of genetic variation in the Y chromosome of modern Japanese males.
  25. ^ Reference Populations – Geno 2.0 Next Generation . (2017). The Genographic Project. Retrieved 15 May 2017, from link.
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  29. ^ Karako-kagi Archaeological Museum (2007). "ヤマト王権はいかにして始まったか". Comprehensive Database of Archaeological Site Reports in Japan. Retrieved 2016-09-01.
  30. ^ 最古級の奈良・桜井“３兄弟古墳”、形状ほぼ判明　卑弥呼の時代に相次いで築造 Archived 2008-03-08 at the Wayback Machine, Sankei Shimbun, March 6, 2008
  31. ^ Janhunen, Juha (2010). "Reconstructing the Language Map of Prehistorical Northeast Asia". Studia Orientalia (108). ... there are strong indications that the neighbouring Baekje state (in the southwest) was predominantly Japonic-speaking until it was linguistically Koreanized.
  32. ^ Vovin, Alexander (2013). "From Koguryo to Tamna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean". Korean Linguistics. 15 (2): 222–240.
  33. ^ Whitman, John (2011-12-01). "Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan". Rice. 4 (3): 149–158. doi:10.1007/s12284-011-9080-0. ISSN 1939-8433.
  34. ^ Late Jomon male and female genome sequences from the Funadomari site in Hokkaido, Japan – Hideaki Kanzawa-Kiriyama, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Nature and Science 2018/2019en
  35. ^ Watanabe, Yusuke; Ohashi, Jun (2021-03-08). "Comprehensive analysis of Japanese archipelago population history by detecting ancestry-marker polymorphisms without using ancient DNA data". bioRxiv: 2020.12.07.414037. doi:10.1101/2020.12.07.414037. S2CID 229293389.
  36. ^ Masami Ito (12 May 2009). "Between a rock and a hard place". The Japan Times. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  1. ^ Naruya Saito, "The Source of the Japanese", Kawade Shobo Shinsha, Year: 2017. Quote "Ryukyu people and Ainu people are genetically most closely related to Yamato people."
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