The person playing the "Last Samurai" is a tall guy that looks less 'Asian' than one would expect. This article may explain why.
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Well, we are one big happy family. /sarcasm
The level of racism in Japan never ceases to amaze me.
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Good eye and good thinking. They are the Samurai!
Has DNA affirmed that or just skull features?
I lived on Hokkaido when I was in high school. The Ainu are very easy to spot and were very friendly towards Americans.
Archaeologists and historicans worldwide are fascinated with thousands of artefacts that have been dug up all over Japan that belonged to and that tell us about the prehistoric people we call the Jomon people.
Who were the Jomon people and where did they live?
The Jomon people were hunter-gathers who lived in pit dwellings and who lived roughly in the area that we call Japan today. The Jomon culture is noted for having produced the earliest (or at least among the earliest) pottery in the world.
When did they live?
The Jomon people lived during postglacial times from 13,680 BC to 410 BC. They were a hunting-gathering-fishing tribal culture that existed roughly around the times of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Nile and the Indus Valley.
What was so amazing about the Jomon culture?
#1. One thing amazing about the Jomon culture is how long the Jomon way of life lasted … over 13,000 thousand years as well as the early date of the beginning of the period.
#2. The Jomon people are thought to have produced the oldest surviving examples of pottery in the world.
#3. Jomon people achieved sedentism which means they settled down in one place to live as early as 9,000 years ago and maintained a high level of craft production…all very unusual for hunter-gatherers in early postglacial times.
#4. Archaeologists think the Jomon hunting-gathering culture was unusual because although it was a stone age culture (historians call prehistoric people who used stone tools a Mesolithic culture), it also had some highly complex characteristics of Neolithic cultures which usually refers to people who: made many clay vessels,
had an organized and sophisticated lifestyle of collecting and foraging for food and practiced a simple kind of agriculture by cultivating a small number of plants.
“That end of the Ice Age was accompanied by the first of the two most decisive changes in the Japanese history: the invention of pottery. In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago,” said Jared Diamond, a non-fiction science author.
What is the Jomon culture famous for?
Jomon culture is most famous for its pottery — Jomon pottery pieces are possibly the earliest existing pottery artefacts, or at least among the earliest pottery discoveries in the world. Jomon culture is also well known for the expressiveness of its ceramic art, for the variety of surface textures, decorations, shapes and styles.
The most elaborate forms of pottery made in the deep central mountainous areas are especially admired. In fact, the Jomon culture takes its name from a typical form of decoration of its pots, cord marking which is called Jomon 縄文 in Japanese.
The different periods of the Jomon era are divided according to the different characteristics of pottery of each period, see this Chronology here.
The Jomon culture is also renowned for the fishing technology. The fishhooks and togglehead harpoons that the Jomon hunters used to catch fish and sea mammals with, were state-of-the-art technology, for prehistoric times that is.
They also used a written language that is very similar to Nordic runes
About 1300 years ago, during the demise of the Korean Three Kingdom period, the Baekje in the southern third of Korea may have migrated into the Kagoshima area. Today, the people of Kagoshima maintain that they came into Japan from Korea and may have conquered all the way up into the Kanto Plain or the mainland center of Japan.
