Sea People (Japan)

The were an ancient ethnicity that migrated to the Japanese archipelago from Korea and China during the Yayoi period (300 BCE–300 CE). Although highly controversial, a single study that utilized radiometric dating techniques inconclusively suggested a period that began between 1000 and 800 BCE. They interacted, intermarried, and warred with the established Jōmon people to form the modern Japanese people. Modern Japanese people have primarily Yayoi ancestry (about 90% on average, with their remaining ancestry deriving from the Jōmon).

Origin

The terms Yayoi and Wajin can be used interchangeably, though "Wajin" (倭人) refers to the people of Wa and "Wajin" (和人) is another name for the modern Yamato people.David Blake Willis & 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)’.

There are several hypotheses about the origin of the Yayoi people:
* There is a view that a large number of Yayoi immigrants came mainly from the Korean Peninsula to mainland Japan.
* And there is a theory that the people migrated from the Korean Peninsula and Jiangnan near the Yangtze River Delta in ancient China.崎谷満『DNA・考古・言語の学際研究が示す新・日本列島史』(勉誠出版　2009年)(in Japanese)
* Another view is that they are from the northern part of the Korean peninsula. This is because the human bones of the Doigahama ruins resemble the ancient human bones of the northern part of the Korean peninsula, and pottery is similar to the " Engraved band sentence pottery", that is widely used during the Yayoi period and was also discovered in the Sini-Gai culture in the southwestern coastal province of Primorskaya Oblast.
* The theory that Yayoi people have multiple origins has also been suggested and is influential.
* Historian Ann Kumar presented genetic and linguistic evidence that some of the Yayoi people were of Austronesian origin.
*According to several Japanese historians, the Yayoi and their ancestors, the Wajin, originated in the today Yunnan province in southern China. Suwa Haruo considered Wa-zoku (Wajin) to be part of the Baiyue (百越).

*According to Vovin Alexander, The Yayoi were present on large parts of the Korean Peninsula before they were displaced and assimilated by arriving proto-Koreans.Vovin, Alexander (2013). "From Koguryo to Tamna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean". ''Korean Linguistics''. 15 (2): 222–240. Similarly Whitman (2012) suggests that the Yayoi are not closely 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 BCE and was brought to the Japanese archipelago by the Yayoi at around 950 BCE. The language family associated with both Mumun and Yayoi culture is Japonic. Koreanic arrived later from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula at around 300 BCE 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.

Genetics

It is estimated that Yayoi people mainly belonged to Haplogroup O-M176 (O1b2) (today accounting for about 32% of Japanese males), Haplogroup O-M122 (O2, formerly O3) (today ~20%) and Haplogroup O-M119 (O1) (today ~1%). Haplogroups O2-M122 and O1a-M119 are typical for East and Southeast Asians, whereas the present-day distribution of haplogroup O1b2-M176 is rather limited to Japan and Korea. Mitsuru Sakitani suggests that haplogroup O1b2, which is common in today Koreans, Japanese and some Manchu, and O1 are one of the carriers of Yangtze civilization. As the Yangtze civilization declined several tribes crossed westward and northerly, to the Shandong peninsula, the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. One study calls haplogroup O1b1 a major Austroasiatic paternal lineage and the haplogroup O1b2 (of Koreans and Japanese) a "para-Austroasiatic" paternal lineage.

The modern Yamato people are predominantly descendants of the Yayoi people and closely related to other modern East Asians, particularly Koreans and Han Chinese. It is estimated that the majority of Japanese people around Tokyo have about 12% Jōmon ancestry or less. A genome research (Takashi et al. 2019) confirmed that modern Japanese (Yamato) descend mostly from the Yayoi people. Mitochondrial DNA analysis of Jōmon and modern Japanese samples show that there is a discontinuity between the mtDNAs of people from the Jōmon period and people from the Kofun and Heian periods. This finding implies that the genetic conversion of the Japanese people may have occurred during or before the Kofun era, at least at the Shomyoji site.

Another genetic study (2019) estimated that modern Japanese (Yamato) share more than 90% of their genome with the Yayoi people and less than 10% with the Jomon. A more recent study by Gakuhari et al. 2019 estimates that modern Japanese people have between 90.2–92% Yayoi ancestry (with the 8–9.8% from the Jōmon) and cluster closely with other East Asians but are clearly distinct from the Ainu people. A geneflow estimation by the same study however suggests only 3.3% Jōmon ancestry in modern Japanese. A study by Kanazawa-Kiriyama et al. (2019) suggests 9–13% Jomon ancestry in the modern Japanese, and 27% in Ryukyuans, with the remainder in both being from the Yayoi.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 2018/2019.

Language

See also

* Japanese people
* Yayoi culture

Notes

References

{{Portal bar, Ancient Japan

Archaeology of Japan
Tribes of ancient Japan
Yayoi period