"Despite thousands of years of dense human occupation, Japan still offers visitors a first impression of greenness because 70 percent of its land is still covered by forest."
Heh. Only to people who look out the window of their plane. For most visitors, the first (and last) impression is of concrete. Much of the forest land is concentrated in remote areas, especially mountainous areas. He knows this, as he mentions that "80 percent of Japan's land consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture." Thus, axiomatically, 50% of its land is both forest and mountain; at least five-sevenths of the forest land is mountains.
"For most visitors, the first (and last) impression is of concrete." Maybe. If you take the Narita express, though, you pass by some lovely verdant farmland on the way to the airport from Tokyo. Or at least, you used to, five or six years ago (the last time I was there). Maybe it's all built up now.
First impressions can be deceiving. There is much to love about Japan, but its excessive addiction to concrete is not one of them. Alex Kerr, in Dogs and Demons, points out that Japan in the 1990s used 30 times as much concrete per unit of area as the US does and spent three to four times as much on public works (mainly bridges to nowhere, as anybody familiar with the nations (non-rail) infrastructure can attest). You'll struggle to find a river or coastline in Japan that is not encased in concrete. And some of the worst abuses are in the most remote areas. I've spent a great deal of time in and around the Inland Sea, and it's stunning - and heartbreaking - how many even uninhabited islands - have had their shorelines buried under concrete, like some Christo stunt gone horribly wrong...
"Most scholars consider it to be an isolated member of Asia's Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages."
I'm not sure that you can still say "most" about this. Most scholars aren't happy with the Altaic classification either, but they don't have a better idea. I'm not sure that they consider it a member at all.
I think that's correct, but I also think that part of what frustrates traditional linguistic analogies here is that for both Korean and Japanese, vast swaths of "native" vocabulary have been replaced by Chinese loanwords in historical time. Who knows what kinds of wholesale borrowings occurred before people were writing things down?
Additionally, when Diamond writes: "However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features," I think he's understating the similarities between Japanese and Korean quite a bit. Not only is word order largely the same between the two (slightly more consistent in Japanese, as I think Korean breaks the "head-last" orientation in forming negatives), but verb constructions are frequently precise analogues of one another. E.g. hago issoyo and shite imasu ("is doing") match up gramatically as close as anything in English or French -- the way they're constructed is the same, but the underlying words have just been substituted out.
Also this: "Since languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged." -- I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Languages don't necessarily evolve at the same pace, do they? If I recall correctly (based, on what one of my professors at university said, from her work on Icelandic), Icelandic barely changed between the 10th and the 19th centuries, such that 19th and even 20th century Icelanders could read the old sagas without difficulty. With English, meanwhile, we struggle to read Chaucer, let alone Beowulf. I have also heard that Turkish remained largely consistent from the Fall of Constantinople until Ataturk's language reforms.
Also this: "If the Japanese did replace the Ainu in Japan south of Hokkaido, that replacement must have occurred before A.D. 500." Really? I'm pretty sure we see the replacement continuing in historical time, in the 8th and 9th centuries, certainly with respect to the Emishi, probably the Ainu as well. Don't the various Heian era records bear out that conflict over the northern half of Honshu was continuing throughout that period?
I think that the argument based upon linguistics is mostly sound. Even if one of two compared languages is very conservative, the other will not necessarily be and even if it is, knowledge of similar conservatism should make them comparable in a useful way.
Languages change at varying rates, but no spoken language will keep frozen for very long. Icelandic, and the less famous Faroese, is a conservative language, but has still diverged substantially from Old Norse. In such matters one should be careful to distinguish the written and spoken forms of language, as the latter is conservative and slightly more responsive to institutional dictates. I think that the statements about modern Icelanders being able to read the old sagas is myth, but even if they were able to read them, that might just be an artifact of conservative orthography and conventions.
I very much doubt that modern Icelanders would be able to understand the sagas if they were read aloud in Old Norse. In the case of Turkish, if it was frozen, it was almost surely a matter of a rigid written standard. Atatürk's reforms were largely a matter of reviving old Turkish words that has been replaced by Arabic and Persian borrowings. Commands by authorities that a language change or not change seldom have much effect, L'Académie française is something of a joke and even the nationalistic fervor of the time wasn't enough to make the Turks adopt all of Atatürk's changes or to eliminate foreign borrowings in the speech of older Turks.
"In such matters one should be careful to distinguish the written and spoken forms of language, as the latter is conservative and slightly more responsive to institutional dictates."
I think writing also serves to constrain the development of the spoken language considerably. I'm not sure of any comprehensive studies on the question, but I'd be surprised if a pack of illiterate hunter-gatherers had a more stable language than a literate agrarian population. On the other hand, I suppose it is the case that their cultures (broadly speaking) can be pretty static, at least as far as technology goes, so maybe they would.
Anyhow, went to check on Iceland, and it seems like it's mostly true about the reading, but there was a vowel shift, like our own, such that the spoken form probably wouldn't be intelligible anymore. The Turkish seems to have been an artifact of the language being used as an administrative language, not as a vernacular.
To understand the debate in perhaps more familiar terms, imagine the three theories that Diamond presents as analogies to three incidents in British history:
1) The conquest of the Celts by the Romans, who brought technology and built things, but came in small numbers and vanished without leaving a strong genetic influence. (Romans analogize to China better than Korea, though.)
2) The Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, where the Normans were of significant number to influence, especially among the nobles and royalty, but not enough to replace the existing Anglo-Saxon people, only to meld. (Here one of the Korean kingdoms, say Shilla, would be like Normandy.)
3) The conquest and driving out of the Celts and Picts to remote areas by the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, whereby the modern English see themselves as Anglo-Saxon, not Celts.
The first theory presented has a pro-Japanese version more similar to the Goths sacking Rome and gaining technology that way.
You may imagine Japan as a group of Little Englanders that look down on the Irish and Scots as primitive Celts (in looking down at the Ainu), yet still associate themselves with the earliest inhabitants of the island rather than admitting that they are descended from Norman French or even Anglo-Saxon Germans.
As usual Dimaond has some interesting anthropology, but his conclusions regarding modernity lack relevance. How do you write this essay and never mention the North/South Korean dichotomy?
Today, Japan and Korea are both economic powerhouses, facing each other across the Korea Strait and viewing each other through colored lenses of false myths and past atrocities.
This is an odd statement. North Korea is an economic powerhouse? South Korea is hostile to Japan? Japan and South Korea have pretty normal relations for two liberal democracies, with gobs of trade and investment. Lately, even S Korean culture has become very popular in Japan.
The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.
The political future of Korea is dependent the resolution of the conflict between free market capitalism and totalitarian Communism. Like Western Europe, current and future ties between South Korea and Japan are based on liberal democracy and aren't affected much by the past.
South Korea and Japan are very hostile to each other.
They have nearly gone to war over the Dokdo Islands within the last few years.
You can start a fight if you say "Dokdo Islands" to a Japanese individual.
You are correct that S Korean culture is very popular in Japan.
Black entertainers were very popular among racist whites in the US in the 20s, 30s, 40s...I think Aryan supremacists enjoyed quite a bit of art created by Jews, too; apparently humans generally find it extremely easy to enjoy the music and movies of people they detest and/or abhor.
I had not been aware that the Japanese were nearly as touchy as the Koreans on the subject of Dokdo/Takeshima. My experience with Koreans (cousins) is that Koreans are hypersensitive about what word to use. When talking Japanese, I even feel the impulse to code-switch to Korean. I think the President got into trouble for that back in the 90s -- Kim Dae Jung, I think, who inadvertently said Takeshima or something, when talking with the Japanese PM in Japanese.
The piece was written about a dozen years ago. There must surely be lots more evidence by now, particularly genetic evidence?
P.S. I liked "In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren't supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world." Historians know better.
I think it's because during written history, island countries like Britain became powerful due to trade using shipbuilding and navigation technology that didn't exist in prehistory.
I enjoyed Diamond's TTC and GGS a lot, but his theories break down badly when they enter the age of nation-states.
Did the Japanese accidentally-on-purpose
pave over the ancient imperial burial sites,
which they have avoided excavating, less out
of respect for departed ancestors, than fear
that they would find proof that the Japanese
came from Korea ? :)
Just an anecdote, but one of the Korean family names is "Chun" and is the pictograph for 'field'. The Japanese have the same radical "Den" and assign it the same meaning (but do not use it for family names).
Of course the Korean vocabulary is rather skeletal, and Koreans are taught from a young age Chinese characters to expand their literary range. The Chinese "Tien" also means 'field', and is also a family name in that culture.
Since we are considering origins, did you know that native American babies, from the Eskimos down to the Hopi down to the descendants of the Mayans all have a high incidence of the "Mongolian spots" seen in Japanese/Korean/Chinese babies?
Re: Japanese and Koean relationship with other languages: Not mentioned in the article (probably because it's too much off topic) is the Greenberg Eurasiatic hypothesis which posits a relationship among many languiage groups of Europe, northern Asia and North America (Indoeuropean, Uralic, Altaic, several Siberian languages, Japanese and Korean, Eskimo-Aleut, maybe Ainu, maybe the extinct Etruscan and Sumerian). If this is correct Japanese and Korean aren't Altaic languages as such, but rather are independent members of the super-family, more closely related to Altaic than to the other families.
As for the conservatism of different languages, some do change faster than others, even in written form. Someone fluent in Italian can handle Dante, and a Spanish speaker isn't too challenged by El Canto De Mio Cid. A Russian can slog through Church Slavonic, and of course Arabic speakers can manage the Qu'ran (which is 1400 years old). On the other hand, speakers of English, French and German struggle (respectively) with Shakespeare, Rabelais and Luther's Bible, while Middle English, Middle French and Middle High German are completely out of reach without special education.
Heh. Only to people who look out the window of their plane. For most visitors, the first (and last) impression is of concrete. Much of the forest land is concentrated in remote areas, especially mountainous areas. He knows this, as he mentions that "80 percent of Japan's land consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture." Thus, axiomatically, 50% of its land is both forest and mountain; at least five-sevenths of the forest land is mountains.
"For most visitors, the first (and last) impression is of concrete." Maybe. If you take the Narita express, though, you pass by some lovely verdant farmland on the way to the airport from Tokyo. Or at least, you used to, five or six years ago (the last time I was there). Maybe it's all built up now.
First impressions can be deceiving. There is much to love about Japan, but its excessive addiction to concrete is not one of them. Alex Kerr, in Dogs and Demons, points out that Japan in the 1990s used 30 times as much concrete per unit of area as the US does and spent three to four times as much on public works (mainly bridges to nowhere, as anybody familiar with the nations (non-rail) infrastructure can attest). You'll struggle to find a river or coastline in Japan that is not encased in concrete. And some of the worst abuses are in the most remote areas. I've spent a great deal of time in and around the Inland Sea, and it's stunning - and heartbreaking - how many even uninhabited islands - have had their shorelines buried under concrete, like some Christo stunt gone horribly wrong...
I think that's correct, but I also think that part of what frustrates traditional linguistic analogies here is that for both Korean and Japanese, vast swaths of "native" vocabulary have been replaced by Chinese loanwords in historical time. Who knows what kinds of wholesale borrowings occurred before people were writing things down?
Additionally, when Diamond writes: "However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features," I think he's understating the similarities between Japanese and Korean quite a bit. Not only is word order largely the same between the two (slightly more consistent in Japanese, as I think Korean breaks the "head-last" orientation in forming negatives), but verb constructions are frequently precise analogues of one another. E.g. hago issoyo and shite imasu ("is doing") match up gramatically as close as anything in English or French -- the way they're constructed is the same, but the underlying words have just been substituted out.
Also this: "Since languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged." -- I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Languages don't necessarily evolve at the same pace, do they? If I recall correctly (based, on what one of my professors at university said, from her work on Icelandic), Icelandic barely changed between the 10th and the 19th centuries, such that 19th and even 20th century Icelanders could read the old sagas without difficulty. With English, meanwhile, we struggle to read Chaucer, let alone Beowulf. I have also heard that Turkish remained largely consistent from the Fall of Constantinople until Ataturk's language reforms.
Also this: "If the Japanese did replace the Ainu in Japan south of Hokkaido, that replacement must have occurred before A.D. 500." Really? I'm pretty sure we see the replacement continuing in historical time, in the 8th and 9th centuries, certainly with respect to the Emishi, probably the Ainu as well. Don't the various Heian era records bear out that conflict over the northern half of Honshu was continuing throughout that period?
I think that the argument based upon linguistics is mostly sound. Even if one of two compared languages is very conservative, the other will not necessarily be and even if it is, knowledge of similar conservatism should make them comparable in a useful way.
Languages change at varying rates, but no spoken language will keep frozen for very long. Icelandic, and the less famous Faroese, is a conservative language, but has still diverged substantially from Old Norse. In such matters one should be careful to distinguish the written and spoken forms of language, as the latter is conservative and slightly more responsive to institutional dictates. I think that the statements about modern Icelanders being able to read the old sagas is myth, but even if they were able to read them, that might just be an artifact of conservative orthography and conventions.
I very much doubt that modern Icelanders would be able to understand the sagas if they were read aloud in Old Norse. In the case of Turkish, if it was frozen, it was almost surely a matter of a rigid written standard. Atatürk's reforms were largely a matter of reviving old Turkish words that has been replaced by Arabic and Persian borrowings. Commands by authorities that a language change or not change seldom have much effect, L'Académie française is something of a joke and even the nationalistic fervor of the time wasn't enough to make the Turks adopt all of Atatürk's changes or to eliminate foreign borrowings in the speech of older Turks.
"In such matters one should be careful to distinguish the written and spoken forms of language, as the latter is conservative and slightly more responsive to institutional dictates."
I think writing also serves to constrain the development of the spoken language considerably. I'm not sure of any comprehensive studies on the question, but I'd be surprised if a pack of illiterate hunter-gatherers had a more stable language than a literate agrarian population. On the other hand, I suppose it is the case that their cultures (broadly speaking) can be pretty static, at least as far as technology goes, so maybe they would.
Anyhow, went to check on Iceland, and it seems like it's mostly true about the reading, but there was a vowel shift, like our own, such that the spoken form probably wouldn't be intelligible anymore. The Turkish seems to have been an artifact of the language being used as an administrative language, not as a vernacular.
To understand the debate in perhaps more familiar terms, imagine the three theories that Diamond presents as analogies to three incidents in British history:
1) The conquest of the Celts by the Romans, who brought technology and built things, but came in small numbers and vanished without leaving a strong genetic influence. (Romans analogize to China better than Korea, though.)
2) The Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, where the Normans were of significant number to influence, especially among the nobles and royalty, but not enough to replace the existing Anglo-Saxon people, only to meld. (Here one of the Korean kingdoms, say Shilla, would be like Normandy.)
3) The conquest and driving out of the Celts and Picts to remote areas by the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, whereby the modern English see themselves as Anglo-Saxon, not Celts.
The first theory presented has a pro-Japanese version more similar to the Goths sacking Rome and gaining technology that way.
You may imagine Japan as a group of Little Englanders that look down on the Irish and Scots as primitive Celts (in looking down at the Ainu), yet still associate themselves with the earliest inhabitants of the island rather than admitting that they are descended from Norman French or even Anglo-Saxon Germans.
As usual Dimaond has some interesting anthropology, but his conclusions regarding modernity lack relevance. How do you write this essay and never mention the North/South Korean dichotomy?
Today, Japan and Korea are both economic powerhouses, facing each other across the Korea Strait and viewing each other through colored lenses of false myths and past atrocities.
This is an odd statement. North Korea is an economic powerhouse? South Korea is hostile to Japan? Japan and South Korea have pretty normal relations for two liberal democracies, with gobs of trade and investment. Lately, even S Korean culture has become very popular in Japan.
The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.
The political future of Korea is dependent the resolution of the conflict between free market capitalism and totalitarian Communism. Like Western Europe, current and future ties between South Korea and Japan are based on liberal democracy and aren't affected much by the past.
South Korea and Japan are very hostile to each other.
They have nearly gone to war over the Dokdo Islands within the last few years.
You can start a fight if you say "Dokdo Islands" to a Japanese individual.
You are correct that S Korean culture is very popular in Japan.
Black entertainers were very popular among racist whites in the US in the 20s, 30s, 40s...I think Aryan supremacists enjoyed quite a bit of art created by Jews, too; apparently humans generally find it extremely easy to enjoy the music and movies of people they detest and/or abhor.
I had not been aware that the Japanese were nearly as touchy as the Koreans on the subject of Dokdo/Takeshima. My experience with Koreans (cousins) is that Koreans are hypersensitive about what word to use. When talking Japanese, I even feel the impulse to code-switch to Korean. I think the President got into trouble for that back in the 90s -- Kim Dae Jung, I think, who inadvertently said Takeshima or something, when talking with the Japanese PM in Japanese.
The piece was written about a dozen years ago. There must surely be lots more evidence by now, particularly genetic evidence?
P.S. I liked "In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren't supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world." Historians know better.
I think it's because during written history, island countries like Britain became powerful due to trade using shipbuilding and navigation technology that didn't exist in prehistory.
I enjoyed Diamond's TTC and GGS a lot, but his theories break down badly when they enter the age of nation-states.
Hmm...
Did the Japanese accidentally-on-purpose
pave over the ancient imperial burial sites,
which they have avoided excavating, less out
of respect for departed ancestors, than fear
that they would find proof that the Japanese
came from Korea ? :)
Just an anecdote, but one of the Korean family names is "Chun" and is the pictograph for 'field'. The Japanese have the same radical "Den" and assign it the same meaning (but do not use it for family names).
Of course the Korean vocabulary is rather skeletal, and Koreans are taught from a young age Chinese characters to expand their literary range. The Chinese "Tien" also means 'field', and is also a family name in that culture.
Since we are considering origins, did you know that native American babies, from the Eskimos down to the Hopi down to the descendants of the Mayans all have a high incidence of the "Mongolian spots" seen in Japanese/Korean/Chinese babies?
Re: Japanese and Koean relationship with other languages: Not mentioned in the article (probably because it's too much off topic) is the Greenberg Eurasiatic hypothesis which posits a relationship among many languiage groups of Europe, northern Asia and North America (Indoeuropean, Uralic, Altaic, several Siberian languages, Japanese and Korean, Eskimo-Aleut, maybe Ainu, maybe the extinct Etruscan and Sumerian). If this is correct Japanese and Korean aren't Altaic languages as such, but rather are independent members of the super-family, more closely related to Altaic than to the other families.
As for the conservatism of different languages, some do change faster than others, even in written form. Someone fluent in Italian can handle Dante, and a Spanish speaker isn't too challenged by El Canto De Mio Cid. A Russian can slog through Church Slavonic, and of course Arabic speakers can manage the Qu'ran (which is 1400 years old). On the other hand, speakers of English, French and German struggle (respectively) with Shakespeare, Rabelais and Luther's Bible, while Middle English, Middle French and Middle High German are completely out of reach without special education.