I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised.
If you take the “1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights” (the full 17 volume Sir Richard Burton edition) and you mark out on a map where many of the stories journeyed, you will find that to get to the Land of the Djinn (which is done in several stories), you will travel across Asia, through India, China and then to the Korean Peninsula then you will across the sea to Japan where the Djinn live. I suppose that means that the Japanese are the Djinn.
And you’ll also discover that Aladdin was from China.
OF course! it all makes sense now...the Djinn are what we call Ninjas!
I just finished a book on the history of Japan.
It is pretty much a tangled web, maybe even weird.
One thing that is pretty much agreed on is that the current occupants originally settled in the South and came from Korea.
The word for "person" in Japanese is "jin", pronounced jean. I wonder if at the time it meant "the people". Also, the sounds for j and dj is fluid between regions of Japan.
Distance was not a problem....... Stephen Lekson