A Bit More Detail

• blogTO looks at Toronto's old neon signs and its still-visible ghost signs.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly looks at Donald Trump as a bully.


• Dangerous Minds shares vintage photos from the set of Labyrinth.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a not-unexpected non-detection of Proxima Centauri b.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the presidential debates through the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu.


• Joe. My. God. notes Glenn Beck's endorsement of Hillary Clinton.


• Language Log looks at how foreigners pronounce "ni hao".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Donald Trump has been using material from Russian disinformation campaigns directly.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer reports on very odd fiscal legislation in Brazil that seems unlikely to end in controlling spending.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the marginalized Ainu of Kamchatka and suggests Sufism in central Asia is doomed.

A vast amount of data was collected in the 16 days Owsley and colleagues spent with the bones. Twenty-two scientists scrutinized the almost 300 bones and fragments. Led by Kari Bruwelheide, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian, they first reassembled the fragile skeleton so they could see it as a whole. They built a shallow box, added a layer of fine sand, and covered that with black velvet; then Bruwelheide laid out the skeleton, bone by bone, shaping the sand underneath to cradle each piece. Now the researchers could address such questions as Kennewick Man’s age, height, weight, body build, general health and fitness, and injuries. They could also tell whether he was deliberately buried, and if so, the position of his body in the grave.

Next the skeleton was taken apart, and certain key bones studied intensively. The limb bones and ribs were CT-scanned at the University of Washington Medical Center. These scans used far more radiation than would be safe for living tissue, and as a result they produced detailed, three-dimensional images that allowed the bones to be digitally sliced up any which way. With additional CT scans, the team members built resin models of the skull and other important bones. They made a replica from a scan of the spearpoint in the hip.

As work progressed, a portrait of Kennewick Man emerged. He does not belong to any living human population. Who, then, are his closest living relatives? Judging from the shape of his skull and bones, his closest living relatives appear to be the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, a remote archipelago 420 miles southeast of New Zealand, as well as the mysterious Ainu people of Japan.

[. . .]

Not that Kennewick Man himself was Polynesian. This is not Kon-Tiki in reverse; humans had not reached the Pacific Islands in his time period. Rather, he was descended from the same group of people who would later spread out over the Pacific and give rise to modern-day Polynesians. These people were maritime hunter-gatherers of the north Pacific coast; among them were the ancient Jōmon, the original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands. The present-day Ainu people of Japan are thought to be descendants of the Jōmon. Nineteenth-century photographs of the Ainu show individuals with light skin, heavy beards and sometimes light-colored eyes.

Jōmon culture first arose in Japan at least 12,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 16,000 years ago, when the landmasses were still connected to the mainland. These seafarers built boats out of sewn planks of wood. Outstanding mariners and deep-water fishermen, they were among the first people to make fired pottery.

The discovery of Kennewick Man adds a major piece of evidence to an alternative view of the peopling of North America. It, along with other evidence, suggests that the Jōmon or related peoples were the original settlers of the New World. If correct, the conclusion upends the traditional view that the first Americans came through central Asia and walked across the Bering Land Bridge and down through an ice-free corridor into North America.

• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies writes about the end of his career as a financial analyst.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper discussing the brown dwarfs of 25 Orionis.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that Uranus' moon system is still evolving, with the moon Cupid being doomed in a relatively short timescale. It also wonders if North Korea is exporting rare earths through China.


• Far Outliers notes the Ainu legacy in placenames in Japanese-settled Hokkaido.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig examines the complexities surrounding language and dialect and nationality in the Serbo-Croatian speech community in the former Yugoslavia.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes the terribly high death rate among Europeans in colonial Indonesia, and how drink was used to put things off.


• The Russian Demographics Blog examines the prevalence of sex-selective abortion in Armenia.


• Torontoist notes Rob Ford's many lies and/or incomprehensions about Toronto's fiscal realities.


• Towleroad suggests that one way to regularize HIV testing would be to integrate it with dentistry appointments.


• Window on Eurasia notes a water dispute on the Russian-Azerbaijan border and argues that the election of a pro-Russian cleric to the head of the Ukrainian section of the Russian Orthodox Church is dooming that church to decline.

By week's end, Ryota Yamada hopes to slip his sea kayak gently into the Columbia River at Clover Island, embarking on the first leg of a 10,000-mile adventure to Japan.

The retired scientist who did nanotechnological research intends to paddle downriver to the ocean, then via the Inland Passage north to Alaska, and eventually across the Bering Strait to the Asian continent.

It will take him four summers, but if he succeeds in reaching his homeland, Yamada said, he will have shown that Kennewick Man could have made his way by boat 9,300 years ago from Japan to North America.

"That is my main purpose," he said Monday from his temporary camp on Clover Island in downtown Kennewick.

The 42-year-old Japanese native who lives near Tokyo said the story of Kennewick Man, whose skeletal remains were found on the shores of the Columbia River near Kennewick in July 1996, inspired him to attempt the adventure of a lifetime.

[. . .]

Kennewick Man's bones, which are being held for research at the University of Washington's Burke Museum in Seattle, are controversial.

While the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Nation believe Kennewick Man is one of their ancestors, researchers believe the ancient bones are not Native American in origin, but may be genetically linked to the Ainu people, who have lived in Japan for thousands of years and appear to have a genetic link to Northern Europe.

A professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, C. Loring Brace, told the Herald in a 2006 interview that Kennewick Man's heritage likely connected with the Ainu of Japan, or the Jomon people, who were ancestors of the Ainu.

[. . .]

Yamada said he has been collecting the necessary equipment for his trip since arriving in Washington. He used a rental car to go to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he purchased a new sea kayak that is about 20 feet long and weighs barely 20 pounds.

It will take Yamada about four summers to complete the journey, paddling about 2,500 miles on each leg. He expects to get as far as Whitehorse in British Columbia this summer, including a side trip of about 50 miles up the Yukon River.

There were three races in ancient Japan: Japanese, Emishi (later Ainu) and Ashihase (possibly Okhotsk). Historical literature supports the theory that the Emishi were considered rebels by the Japanese, and therefore potentially subjects by way of conquest. Consistently, the Japanese divided them into those who had submitted themselves to Yamato rule as allies and subjects, and those who were outside their authority. Those outside imperial authority were seen as "barbarians" beyond the frontier. Michinoku, the name the Yamato Japanese had given for the Tohoku, literally translates as "deepest road" with the connotation of a far away place: the Emishi were seen as inhabitants of this far away land, beyond the frontier. The Ashihase were thought of as a foreign people altogether, and it is not clear who they were; however, in the latest research there are tantalizing clues that the relationship between the Ashihase and the Emishi mirrored the relationship between the Japanese and the Emishi . That is, just as the Japanese were completing their conquest of the Tohoku region, Emishi began to consolidate more of Hokkaido. The Ashihase were most likely an Amur river people who were definitely East Asian hunter-gatherers who moved south from Sakhalin into Hokkaido and were either absorbed or conquered by the Emishi of the Satsumon culture. The Satsumon consolidated their hold about the same time that the Tohoku Emishi began to migrate into Hokkaido (see especially Yamaura 1999:42-45, and the in-depth discussion by Crawford implying that the Tohoku Emishi may have actually created the Satsumon culture. Satsumon is a name of a culture that is ancestral to the Hokkaido Ainu.

According to archeological findings from the fifth to the seventh centuries AD, the northern half of Tohoku (roughly extending from northern Miyagi prefecture to Aomori) and the western part of Hokkaido formed a single cultural area, and many Ainu place names are left in the Tohoku. It is beyond the discussion of this introduction to go into the Jomon, Epi-Jomon and Yayoi cultures as they affected the Tohoku region, but to simplify this discussion, it is now believed that evidence points to the Emishi tie in with the Tohoku Middle Yayoi pottery culture that is heavily influenced by Jomon forms--almost as if these peoples were gradually adopting Yayoi culture from the seventh to the eighth centuries.

[. . .]

The place where the Emishi fit into this picture follows in the descriptions given about them in the historical period. They are known as mojin or kebito (hairy people) by their Japanese conquerors, and contemporary Chinese court historians of the T'ang. And this is where history begins to corroborate physical anthropology. The Ainu are known for their abundant hair, both on the torso and limbs, and mostly in their heavy beards. It is absolutely certain that people ancestral to the Ainu lived in northern Honshu in this time period. The cultural area of the Emishi coincides with the areas that used to be under Ainu control. The very word Emishi is probably a Japanese derivation of the word "emchiu" or "enjyu" which translates to "man" in the Ainu/Emishi language. The kanji characters for Emishi are identical to Ezo. Before Ainu came into usage in the Meiji period they were known as Ezo.

Even if we accept these arguments plenty of questions remain. What were the differences between the Ainu and the Ashihase? What happened to the Emishi who migrated to Hokkaido, and how did they influence the development of Satsumon culture? What is the relationship between the Hokkaido and Tohoku Emishi, and when did the Ainu emerge? One thing is certain: we shouldn't even think of Ancient Japan as being composed of a single ethnic group like it appears today. Racial or ethnic affiliation did not determine who were or were not Japanese subjects: the connection between culture and blood came after centuries of political unity. For example, ethnic Korean and Chinese immigrants migrated to Japan at this time to help consolidate the bureaucracy and form artisan groups.

Even if we answer the earlier question about Emishi ethnic affiliation as positively Ainu, they were different culturally from both Japanese and Ainu. They cannot be seen as either one or the other. First of all, as you will begin to see in the following web pages, the Emishi had a distinctive culture that differed from that of the Ainu. Like the North American Indians, there were different cultural groups among the Jomon tribes, and the primary difference was that the Emishi were horse riders, and much of their culture and style of warfare were adapted to the use of the horse. Second, the Emishi had a profound influence on the emerging Japanese Yamato state: they basically forced the Yamato to adopt much of their style of warfare, and even the title of Shogun came out of warfare against them. Historically, they certainly rejected affiliation with the Japanese. Further, to complicate matters, many Emishi became subject to the Japanese state and eventually disappeared as a separate ethnic group, becoming intermarried with other ethnic Japanese. It is almost certain that this intermixing took place in different degrees according to the time period and location. The western side of the Tohoku (towards Akita) probably has seen less due to the mountains making the western side less accessible, whereas, the Pacific side has seen to more thorough assimilation because of the broad Sendai plain, but even here not until the modern period when movement has been aided by economics (job concentration in Tokyo, for example) and transportation has the mixing become more complete.

Much earlier, during the Nara and early Heian period, the Tohoku (northeast Japan as a whole was seen as the frontier in the same sense [as early modern Hokkaido]. That is, the area was described as michi-no-oku or "deep road" meaning an area that lay beyond Japanese culture, ethnicity and norms: an area that lay outside the known world. It was considered to be foreign territory when Taga fort was constructed close to what is now Sendai in 724 as a frontier outpost of Japan in its attempt to take the territory from the Emishi. This region looked to its cultural and trade ties with northeast Asia, to the Matsukatsu, a sinified Tungus power, that controlled the Amur river trade, and to the Okhotsk of Sakahlin and Hokkaido. The fur trade flourished in this region at the time, but its culture contrasted from the Japanese who were more influenced by the Korean and Chinese states to the south.

By the Early Modern period the Ezo in Hokkaido had become sharply contrasted to the Japanese on the main island, but this was not always the case. This of course has lead to the reification or static view of both societies that does not seriously take historical change into account. Truth be told, there were two cultural directions that met, struggled and contested what became Japan, one influenced by a northern cultural tradition that was influenced by native peoples of Siberia, Sakhalin and the Amur river valley. The other, Yamato, was influenced by the centralized states of Korea and China. The winning side eventually became the Japanese state. However, we cannot forget the shadow of the past when a competing people and culture held sway in northeast Japan, one that was as different from what came after as can be imagined.

Koji Yuki was 20 years old when he turned against his father and buried his Ainu identity. That was the year Shoji Yuki died; a radical activist, he had long fought to win legal rights for the Ainu, Japan's underclass, and have them recognized as an indigenous people. More than a century of government-backed racial and social discrimination and forced assimilation had stripped the once-proud hunter-gatherers and tradesmen of their identity and livelihood.

The Ainu cause had torn apart the Yuki family. "My father divorced my mother when I was young and devoted himself to the Ainu liberation movement," says Mr. Yuki. "I couldn't understand the way he lived his life."

Years later, Mr. Yuki changed his mind about his father's efforts, and today the son is himself a powerful voice for the Ainu. But he speaks through culture rather than politics, as one of the leaders of a remarkable revival of Ainu arts, dance and music -- with a cool, contemporary edge.

[. . .]

The Ainu eventually settled in Japan's north, and for centuries their villages dotted Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. (These were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, though Japan has disputed the claim for four of the Kuril Islands.) The Ainu culture fell victim to Japanese expansion in the 1800s, and most Ainu now live in Hokkaido, the second-largest of Japan's four main islands. In 2006 the Hokkaido government put the number of people of Ainu ancestry there at about 24,000; the national census doesn't include such a count, but after generations of intermarriage the total is far larger. Many hide their Ainu identity, still fearful of discrimination.

Handsome with a powerful gait, Mr. Yuki, 45, reveals a shyness as he explains his work as a hanga (wood block print) artist. "Hanga is not part of the Ainu traditional arts, but woodcarving is," he says. "So I asked my favorite Japanese hanga artists to teach me. I might be the only Ainu doing this professionally." His prints are mainly of animals native to his Hokkaido homeland, such as the deer, fox, bear, owl and magnificent red-crowned crane. The island, known for its severe snowy winters (it's a popular ski destination), is the site of breathtaking mountain ranges, volcanoes, lush forests and crystal lakes, and unique flora and fauna. It's easy to understand the Ainu reverence for nature and the animistic belief in spirits.

"My prints are based on traditional Ainu legends, mainly animal spirits," says Mr. Yuki at a one-man exhibition in Tokyo. "The bear is especially important." Among the Ainu, the bear is considered the most sacred of animals; one of the works in the exhibition is "Hepere Cinita," or Dream of the Baby Bear. (All the works in the exhibition carry titles in the Ainu language.) His "Sarorun Kamuy," or Crane God, he says, "represents the Ainu's desire to return to their roots, like the great cranes that migrate back to Hokkaido every winter."

He created the work in 2008, after the Ainu won official indigenous status from the Japanese government. That followed the U.N. General Assembly's passage in 2007 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and came just before a 2008 Group of Eight wealthy nations summit in Hokkaido.

Mr. Yuki the hanga artist and carver is also a musician, founder and leader of the Ainu Arts Project, a decade-old community-based music group. "We're a native rock band based on traditional Ainu music," says Mr. Yuki, explaining that he was inspired by the aboriginal Australian band Yothu Yindi and Native American bands. The 25 members, from kids to seniors, perform 50 to 60 times a year. They sing mainly in the Ainu language and dress in the splendid Ainu attusi robe. Along with the guitar, drums and bass, they play the Ainu tonkori (like a zither) and mukkuri (similar to a jew's harp).

"We've chosen a rock sound because we don't want people to associate the Ainu with just old tradition," Mr. Yuki explained. "With hanga, music and singing I can convey the traditional Ainu culture and spirit with new expressions, just like Oki and Mina Sakai."

The Ainu’s traditional heartland is Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, on which the G8 summit has just been held. Not long ago, they were also found in Sakhalin and the Kurile islands. Although there had been a Japanese presence in south-west Hokkaido since the Middle Ages, it was only in the 19th century that it was annexed to become what the West was for America: a new frontier to be opened by persecuting the hunter-gatherers already there. While the Ainu called their place Ainu Mosir, "the land of human beings", Hokkaido means "the road to the northern sea", and the Japanese settling of their new frontier was every bit as brutal as America’s.

Today only 24,000 call themselves Ainu, most of them of mixed blood. Only ten native Ainu speakers remain, while a solitary century-old woman is thought to have a tattooed lip. The Ainu’s origins are vague. Certainly, they are related to ethnic groups in Russia’s far east. But one genetic marker is shared only by people in Tibet and the Andaman Islands. Jared Diamond, a biogeographer, says their mystery makes the Ainu the world’s most studied indigenous group. One thing is increasingly clear: they are more obviously the descendants of Japan’s original inhabitants, the Jomon, inventors of the world’s earliest pottery, than are modern Japanese, who are descended from later settlers from Korea. This infuriates Japan’s racial chauvinists.

So only now—and partly because of the spotlight from hosting the G8—has Japan’s parliament passed a resolution recognising the Ainu as a people in their own right. The first law about the Ainu that was passed, in 1899, defined them as aborigines in need of assimilation. But until the law’s repeal in 1997, Japan officially denied having any indigenous minorities.

The recognition, says Tadashi Kato, head of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, comes dangerously late. But it may encourage more Ainu to admit to their identity, having concealed it because of discrimination at school and work, and in the marriage market. Mr Kato thinks that maybe ten times more than the official number think of themselves as Ainu, even if many are of mixed blood. He argues that the parliamentary resolution is just a first step. It offers no legal protection, and carries no obligations for the state. There is little talk yet of an apology for Japan’s past treatment of the Ainu, let alone a restitution of lands or hunting rights.