From: guohsu@mercury.cs.uregina.ca (Allen G.C. Hsu)
Subject: Re: Where did Japanese come from? (are they 1/2 white?)
Summary:  Citation from a bilingual book
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 02:03:33 GMT
Organization: University of Regina, SK, Canada
Keywords:  The Origins of Japanese


        JAPAN AS IT IS (Second edition), Part-1, Section 6, pp.20
	        published by Gakken Co., Ltd., 1990. 

                Origins of the Japanese People

     Since Meiji times, archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists
     have attempted to trace the origin of Japanese people. Housing
     types and myths suggest a Polynesian origin; varied culture
     characteristics point to southern China; tomb artifacts suggest a
     relationship to the monted nomads of Korea and northern China;
     and other clues hint that the first Japanese made their way from
     Siberia across ancient land bridges. Human skeletons, stone ware,
     and other finds since the Second World War have supplied a wealth
     of data and facilitated scientific comparison with other peoples
     and races.

 o  The Japanese Prototype

    Human skeletons over 100,000 years old have been discovered, but the
    prototype of the modern Japanese id believed to have come to Japan 
    about 18,000 years ago. This was the time of the last glacial period,
    when the world's oceans were 140 meters lower than they are now. Great
    migrations were being made all over the globe in pursuit of the mammoth
    and the other sources of food. This was also when Mongoloid peoples
    migrated to north and south America.

    Linked to the Asian continent by expanses of land bridging the Tatar,
    Soya, Tsugaru, and Tsushima straits and the Yellow Sea, and connected
    to the southern Ryukyu Islands, Japan was easily accessible to the
    migratory peoples. From the north came a new Mongoloid race, short and
    with relatively flat features adapted to hard northern climes, and from 
    the south came the older Mongoloid race of round-faced people who
    populated much of the southern Asian continent. The intermixing of these
    two races resulted in the prototype Japanese distinguished primarily by 
    new Mongoloid features but having old Mongoloid characteristics as
    well--hairy, short of stature, and with a round face.

 o  Modern Japanese

    The commonly accepted hypothesis today is that prototype Japanese were
    fairly evenly distributed throughout Japan. From the Yayoi through the 
    Kofun periods, tall, narrow-faced peoples representing more advanced
    Chinese and Korean civilizations immigrated to west Japan bringing their
    culture and technology with them. These immigrants were gradually 
    assimilated into the indigenous stock, and the result was the modern
    Japanese. The intermingling of the tall immigrant peoples with the short
    indigenous Japanese took so long to spread, however, that examples of
    early prototype Japanese are still to be found in the northernmost and
    southwestern areas of Japan.

    Interestingly, studies of modern Japanese racial characteristics have
    shown that people in the north tend to be short and round-faced while
    people in the south tend to be tall and  narrow-faced.

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