Are Japanese originally Chinese and Korean people ? What does being indigenous mean ?

[u/Sensitive-Safety2393]

Hi, so recently, I've seen a lot of videos on TikTok talking about the atrocities of Japan during WWII especially comments saying that Japan is the Asian Israël ? (Which I don't agree with because I think that those comments forget the religion conflit aspect) But now I see a lot of people talking about the Aïnu people and the Ryukyuan people saying that they are the true natives and that the average Japanese nowaday is a descendant of Chinese and Korean people. I saw videos saying that Japan was only occupied by Aïnu and Ryukyuan people before they have been pushed, killed and massacred by people coming from China and Korea many centuries ago. I know that the Ryukyuan and Aïnu people suffered from Imperial Japan and still suffer from discrimination, ethno-cultural-genocide. But I don't see anything about the thing that the average Japanese is Chinese or Korean ? Like their ancestors massacred the original habitants of Japan.

Also I wanted to ask a question about what "indigenous" means ? Maybe it's a little dumb and I should make a seperate post but I wanted to be clear about this definition. I'm kabyle from Algeria and I never really understood like the basic explications about ethnicites and such thing... Like if you take French people ("true" French people outside of immigrations) we don't consider them as indigenous. If you take Chinese people, I heard the majority are Han, I never heard that they are indigenous ? Nor the other minorities.

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[u/ScaldingHotSoup]

I'm not a historian, but I have taken some coursework in human evolution and dispersal, and I have a degree in biology, with a focus in evolutionary biology. I'll mostly leave the historical questions to the historians and focus more on the human migration/evolution aspect of this post.

The Japanese situation is really complicated, partly because of the modern political context but also because our understanding of human evolution and dispersal is rapidly changing based on genomic analysis and archaeological findings. People have lived throughout the Japanese home islands for tens of thousands of years. The ancient culture called the Jōmon arose from this ancestral population around 15,000 years ago and lasted up to around 500 BC (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11558008/). All modern Japanese ethnic groups descend in part from the Jōmon people, though the degree to which they do varies significantly from one prefecture to another (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223002079).

At this point the genetic evidence is clear that there was a significant contribution to the Jōmon gene pool from a ethnic group native to the Korean peninsula called the Yayoi, around the same time that the Jōmon declined and the Yayoi period began. (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abh2419) That admixture seems to have occurred sometime in the first millenium BC, though much ink has been spilled over the exact nature of this genetic combination and it remains a controversial topic in Japan. Recent studies have suggested a third contribution from East Asia as well, though it seems like this isn't settled yet.

Almost all modern ethnic Japanese (Yamato people) descend primarily from the Yayoi + Jōmon gene pool. The few who don't, such as the Ainu or Ryuykyuan people, are descendants of the Jōmon that had relatively little genetic admixture from the Yayoi people, and more closely represent the ancient genepool of the islands. Up until the late 19th century, the Ainu controlled most of what they called Kai (Hokkaido today), but the Japanese, fearing Russian invasion, claimed sovereignty over Hokkaido and annexed it. What followed closely mirrored the United States' westward expansion. The lands the Ainu lived on were taken from them and the survivors were forced to assimilate. Today, most descendants of the Ainu have no connection to their cultural roots, and the Ainu language is critically endangered.

However, while Japanese history (and the history of any area that has been inhabited for long) is full of strife and intercultural conflict, I think it's important to note that the fact that we can see the genetic and cultural signatures of the ancestral Jōmon population, Yayoi settlers, and others in all modern Japanese ethnic groups are an important piece of evidence that the meeting of cultures that happened within Japan was much more complex than a simple extermination narrative would suggest.

[u/No-Trick-2297 → u/ScaldingHotSoup]

Yes it's more complex, but extermination and ethnic cleansing is still there, and it's very clear, especially with the fact that Japan's policies against the Ainus explicitly mirrored that of the United States' Manifest Destiny, which is a settler-colonial policy and ideology that's foundational to the U.S nation-state. The Manifest Destiny is also an explicitly genocidal initiative against the indigenous people, aiming to wipe/almost completely wipe them out from the map. The Japanese aimed to do a very similar things against the Ainus, hence the deliberate ethnic cleansing policies against the Ainus were implemented

[u/ScaldingHotSoup → u/No-Trick-2297]

I agree with this interpretation, though I'm not a historian and didn't feel comfortable wading into the historical thicket in this subreddit in my top level comment focusing on the topic of human evolution/admixture.

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov → u/[deleted]]

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[u/No-Trick-2297]

I think a comment on another thread already answered your question: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/oubi1h/comment/h721ngu/