[knolax]

>I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested.

That's quite a strong and controversial claim to be making without strong evidence. From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. As one of the other replies pointed out, it's also a bit anachronistic to be applying terms like China and Japan in this situation.

[Mediterraneo10]

> From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea.

Japan is a country where even in academia, people often have an unshakable belief in the "uniqueness" of their culture. This has made Japanese unwilling to consider connections to other Asian regions and peoples. Consequently, a lot of the scholarly consensus on Japanese history has been formed by scholars from outside Japan who don't have an attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.

Generally, Korean has been seen as the probable source of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, not China, and there were Japanoid populations on the Korean peninsula centuries ago. However, Alexander Vovin (one of the world's most respected scholars on the history of Japanese) recently gave a thought-provoking conference presentation arguing that the Japanese language and certain aspects of Japanese culture may well ultimately spring from coastal China.

[sgrove]

Do you have a link to Alexander Vovin's presentation somewhere online? It sounds fascinating.

[Mediterraneo10]

I believe he posted it to his academia.edu.

[knolax]

>Japanoid

Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities.

>attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.

Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.

[Mediterraneo10]

How is "Japanoid" pseudoscientific language? It is standard practice in linguistics and archaeology to add -oid to X to denote languages that the historical record shows were related to X, but were not necessarily the same as X. (Another example are the dialects further north in the Balkans in the first millennium that were related to Albanian but not necessarily Albanian, hence Albanoid).

> Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors.

Again, Japanese shares the same family with neighbours they had on the Korean peninsula before the Korean peninsula's demographics changed. Almost no one disputes this. Longer-range connections like Altaic or Martine Robbeet's Transeurasian hypothesis are more controversial, but still within the scholarly mainstream.

[chubot]

See my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713685

As mentioned, the Chinese exaggerate their history to claim power. But "modern Japanese historians" aren't exactly disinterested either.

I'd be interested to read more informed sources on the topics, rather than vague policing of words.