Japan's Sense of Racial Uniqueness Challenged

TOKYO — The invaders came from across the sea.

With their advanced technology and overwhelming numbers, they quickly seized a foothold in the new world. The original inhabitants--tribes of hunter-gatherers--perished or were driven back.

The story may sound familiar, but this is not the European conquest of the Americas. It is what archeologists suggest may have happened in prehistoric Japan.

It is a controversial view of Japan's past that should raise eyebrows in this country of history buffs. But it doesn't. Most Japanese have never even heard of it.

That's because although Japanese archeologists have come to accept the view that their ancestors migrated from mainland Asia, most popular discussion still adheres to the pre-World War II ideology that the Japanese are racially distinct from the rest of Asia.

"There has been a gap in thinking," said Hisao Baba, curator of anthropology at the National Science Museum in Tokyo. "Archeology has made a lot of progress, but politics has made it difficult for the general public to take a critical look at their own past."

Issues at the Core of Japanese Identity

Of course, Japan isn't alone in mixing history with politics. British archeologists argue over the extent of Celtic vs. Anglo-Saxon heritage, and Americans have only recently begun to view their past from the perspective of American Indians.

But in few countries are the issues as charged as here.

The question of origin cuts to the core of Japan's identity. Japanese have long celebrated themselves as ethnically unique, partly to offset the humiliation of having to borrow from the modern West. A sense of difference also made it easier to justify their country's military occupation of neighbors like Korea and China earlier in the century.

Archeology in Japan long followed that line.

For much of this century, Japanese archeologists said Japan's gene pool had remained isolated since the Ice Age, more than 20,000 years ago.

Confronted with evidence that a sudden change had swept Japan about 400 BC--replacing a millenniums-old hunter-gatherer culture with a society that could grow rice and forge iron weapons and tools--archeologists attributed it to nothing more than technological borrowing from the mainland.

But more recent analysis of skull shapes has shown the rice farmers who appeared 2,400 years ago were racially quite different from the hunters whom they replaced.