Modern Japanese ancestry blends ancient potters with later rice-farming migrants
The people of the Jōmon era made some of the oldest pottery on Earth, up to 16,000 years ago. Around 300 BC newcomers from Northeast Asia arrived with paddy rice, bronze and iron. Most researchers now think today's roughly 119.9 million Japanese residents descend from both, and perhaps from a third ancestral group.
Humans reached the archipelago in the Paleolithic, between 39,000 and 21,000 years ago, crossing a land bridge from mainland Asia. The Jōmon culture that followed takes its name from the cord-pressed patterns on its pots. These people mostly hunted and gathered but also grew azuki beans, and at least one site shows early rice cultivation. Their own roots were varied, linked to Southeast Asia, the Tibetan Plateau, ancient Taiwan and Siberia.
The Yayoi arrivals changed everything. Wet-rice fields fed larger communities and laid foundations for the Kofun era's institutions. Population estimates rise from about 800,000 in the late Jōmon period to some three million by the Nara period, implying perhaps one and a half million immigrants. Kazuro Hanihara's dual structure model of 1991 proposed that newcomers largely replaced hunter-gatherers in Kyushu, Shikoku and southern Honshu but not in the Ryukyu Islands or Hokkaido, which is why Ryukyuan and Ainu people show mixed characteristics. Some recent studies argue for three ancient source populations rather than two.
Who counts as Japanese has shifted with politics. Narrowly the term means the Yamato majority of the main islands; broadly it includes Ryukyuans and the Ainu. Under colonial rule from 1895 to 1945, colonial subjects such as Koreans and Taiwanese held Japanese citizenship while ethnic Japanese were officially called inland people, labels that aided forced assimilation. Today Japanese people make up 97.1 percent of Japan's population, and about five million descendants live abroad as the Nikkeijin; roughly 60 percent of Japanese Brazilians are Catholic.
Religion at home is traditionally syncretic, most people identifying with both Shinto, a native faith without a scriptural canon, and Buddhism, which arrived in the sixth century. The language, first attested as Old Japanese in the 8th century, mixes three scripts, and adult literacy exceeds 99 percent. Cultural landmarks run from Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji in 1021 to Noh drama, ukiyo-e prints, and the manga and anime now followed worldwide.
Source: Japanese people
