JAPANESE
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
The Japanese people (日本人, Nihonjin) is the dominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries are referred to as Nikkeijin (日系人, Nikkeijin). The term "Japanese people" may also be used in some contexts to refer to a locus of ethnic groups including the Yamato people, Ainu people, and Ryukyuans.
Language
The Japanese language is a Japonic language that is usually treated as a language isolate, although it is also related to the Okinawan language (Ryukyuan). The Japanese language has a tripartite writing system based upon Chinese characters. Domestic Japanese people use primarily Japanese for daily interaction. The adult literacy rate in Japan exceeds 99%; however, this may not accurately reflect functional literacy rates due to the complex nature of the Japanese writing system.
Yamato People
The Yamato people (大和民族, Yamato-minzoku) are the dominant native ethnic group of Japan. It is a term that came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the residents of the mainland Japan from other minority ethnic groups who have resided in the peripheral areas of Japan such as Ainu, Ryukyuans, Nivkhs, Uilta, as well as Koreans, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese aborigines who were incorporated into the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century.
The name "Yamato" comes from the Yamato Court that existed in Japan in the 4th century. It was originally the name of the region where the Yamato people first settled in Nara Prefecture. In the 6th century, the Yamato people founded a state modeled on the Chinese states of Sui and Tang which were the most advanced polities in Asia at the time. As the Yamato's influence expanded on the island, their language replaced Old Japanese becoming the common spoken language. Ryukyuan, the languages of the Okinawa Islands, split from Old Japanese somewhere between the 3rd and 5th centuries.
There is however a controversy on whether to include the Ryukyuans in the Yamato, or identify them as an independent ethnic group, or as a sub-group that constitutes Japanese ethnicity together with the Yamato because of close similarities suggested by genetics and linguistics. Shinobu Origuchi (折口信夫) argues that Ryukyuans are the "proto-Japanese" (原日本人), whereas Kunio Yanagita suggests that they were a part of the ancestors of the Japanese who came from the south and parted at the Ryukyu Islands from the rest who eventually reached the Japanese archipelago and became the Yamato.
Asia Ex-Japan
The first Japanese emigration to the rest of Asia was noted as early as the 12th century to the Philippines; early Japanese settlements included those in Lingayen Gulf, Manila, the coasts of Ilocos Norte and in the Visayas. A larger wave came in the 1600s, when red seal ships traded in Southeast Asia, and Japanese Catholics fled from the religious persecution imposed by the shoguns, and settled in the Philippines, among other destinations. Many of them also intermarried with the local Filipina women (including those of pure or mixed Spanish descent), thus forming the new Japanese-Mestizo community. During the American colonial era, the number of Japanese laborers working in plantations rose so high that in the 1900s, Davao soon became dubbed as a Ko Nippon Koku (Little Japan in Japanese) with a Japanese school, a Shinto temple and a diplomatic mission from Japan. There is even a popular restaurant called "The Japanese Tunnel", which includes an actual tunnel made by the Japanese in time of the war.
There was also a significant level of emigration to the overseas territories of the Empire of Japan during the Japanese colonial period, including Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Karafuto. Unlike emigrants to the Americas, Japanese going to the colonies occupied a higher rather than lower social niche upon their arrival. However, after World War II, most of these overseas Japanese repatriated to Japan. Only a few remained overseas, often involuntarily, as in the case of orphans in China or prisoners of war captured by the Red Army and forced to work in Siberia. During the 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 6,000 Japanese accompanied Zainichi Korean spouses repatriating to North Korea, while another 27,000 prisoners-of-war are estimated to have been sent there by the Soviet Union.
In recent years, Japanese migration to Australia, largely consisting of younger age females, has been on the rise. There is also a community of Japanese people in Hong Kong largely made up of expatriate businessmen.
Japanese Occupation may refer to:
- Occupation of Japan, the occupation of Japan by United States forces following World War II
- Japanese occupation of Burma
- Japanese occupation of Guam
- Japanese occupation of Hong Kong
- Japanese occupation of Indonesia
- Japanese occupation of Malaysia
- Japanese occupation of the Philippines
- Japanese occupation of Singapore
- Japanese occupation of Thailand
- Second Sino-Japanese War, during which the Imperial Japanese Army occupied significant portions of China
* An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus (大和民族を中核とする世界政策の検討) was a secret Japanese government report created by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and completed on 1 July 1943. The document, comprising 6 volumes totaling 3,127 pages, deals with the rationale behind policies adopted by wartime Japan towards other races, while also providing a vision of Asia under Japanese control. Some statements coincide with the then publicly espoused concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, while most others suggested that Japan, as a purportedly racial superior people, intended to dominate all other peoples of Asia. It included plans for Japanese colonisation of most of the eastern hemisphere including New Zealand and Australia, with projected populations in 1950. The authors rationalised this expansion as "securing the living space of the Yamato race", a very clear echo of the Nazi concept of Lebensraum. The document was unknown until 1981, when one of its volumes turned up in a used bookstore in Japan. In 1982 the Ministry of Health and Welfare then released the full 6 volume version along with another 2 volumes entitled The Influence of War upon Population.
Taiwan Under Japanese Rule
The Japanese colonial period, Japanese rule or the Imperial Japanese occupation, in the context of Taiwan's history, refers to the period between 1895 and 1945 during which Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The expansion into Taiwan was a part of Japan's general policy of southward expansion during the late 19th Century.
It has been argued that Japanese rule in Taiwan was markedly different from in Korea and other parts of Asia. As Taiwan was Japan's first overseas colony, Japanese intentions were to turn the island into a showpiece "model colony". As a result, much effort was made to improve the island's economy, industry, public works and culture. However, Japanese rule of Taiwan also had a negative side, such as the prostitution of Taiwanese women as comfort women.
The relative failures of immediate post-World War II rule by the Kuomintang led to a certain degree of nostalgia amongst the older generation of Taiwanese who experienced both. This has affected, to some degree, issues such as national identity, ethnic identity and the Taiwan independence movement. The comparative lack of anti-Japanese sentiment amongst Taiwanese society is often not understood by overseas Chinese communities and mainland Chinese.
Imperial Japan had sought to control Taiwan since 1592, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi began extending Japanese influence overseas. In 1609, the Tokugawa Shogunate sent Haruno Arima on an exploratory mission. In 1616, Murayama Toan led an unsuccessful invasion of the island. In 1871, an Okinawan vessel shipwrecked on the southern tip of Taiwan and the crew of fifty-four were beheaded by the Paiwan aborigines. When Japan sought compensation from Qing China, the court rejected the demand on the grounds that the "wild"/"unsubjugated" aboriginals (台灣生番) were outside its jurisdiction. This open renunciation of sovereignty led to a Japanese invasion of Taiwan. In 1874, an expeditionary force of three thousand troops was sent to the island. There were about thirty Taiwanese and 543 Japanese casualties (twelve in battle and 531 by endemic diseases).
Qing China was defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan in perpetuity in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Inhabitants wishing to remain Chinese subjects were given a two-year grace period to sell their property and remove to mainland China. Very few Taiwanese saw this as plausible. On May 25, 1895, a group of pro-Qing high officials proclaimed the Republic of Formosa to resist impending Japanese rule. Japanese forces entered the capital at Tainan and quelled this resistance on October 21, 1895.
The Japanese were instrumental in the industrialization of the island; they extended the railroads and other transportation networks, built an extensive sanitation system and revised the public school system. Still, the ethnic Chinese and Taiwanese aborigines were classified as second- and third-class citizens. Large-scale violence continued in the first decade of rule. Around 1935, the Japanese began an island-wide assimilation project to bind the island more firmly to the Japanese Empire. By 1945, just before Japan lost World War II, desperate plans were put in place to incorporate popular representation of Taiwan into the Japanese Diet to make Taiwan an integral part of Japan proper. Japan's rule of Taiwan ended when it lost World War II and signed the Instrument of Surrender on August 15, 1945.
