History of Japan from an early age

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

I have read vaguely into this area. The legend goes that Inazumi and Inazuki(sp?) were brother and sister. They got jiggy and produced a number of deities.

Namely Amaterasu. She is the Goddess of the Sun or simply the sun[/b]. She gave birth to the first Emperor of Japan (I forget his name) and so the line has gone on from then.

This is obviously according to the Shinto beliefs. Iam interested to know that whether you think this has some truth or is completely false.

Also if it is true then where do the Ainu fit into the picture?

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He is the Messiah
[I]No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Tachikaze]

I think that Jimmu (the name you were missing) may have been the first emporer, but he was not the grandson of jiggly dieties and son of a yellow-white dwarf star.

The Ainu were pushed to the far-north by invaders from the Pacific, south of Japan. At least, that's one theory. Probably, modern Japanese are a mixture of Polynesians and Ainu (with a little Korean thrown in), since they don't very closely resemble any other ethnic group around them.

Their language is so unique, however, it's almost as if they were dropped from the sky like droplets off a spearpoint.

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Asante sana
Squashed banana
Wewe nugu
Mimi apana

[This message has been edited by Tachikaze (edited 04-11-2002).]

[Tac]

I wouldnt call it "so unique"... any group of people isolated long enough change their language dramatically.

Look at the Marshallese language.. totally different from any others around it. Just like Japenese http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

Only thing I really dont like is they adapted the chinese characters for their writing... ouch ouch ouch. Mondo complicated http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

[tootee]

I recalled a myth that the first emperor of China, in the Qin dynasty, sent 300 virgin boys and girls to Japan to get the elixir of longivity. But they were left on the island and later intermarrying the locals. The local didnt have any written form of the language and adopted the Chinese characters. It also explained why the jap have babes like noriko sakai today. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

hmm.. who told me this..

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tootee the goldfish,
headmaster of Shogun-Academy (http://shogun-academy.tripod.com)
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[This message has been edited by tootee (edited 04-11-2002).]

[Tachikaze]

tac,

The Marshallese were more isolated. Japan is within sight of Korea, and almost as close to China. There are some similarities between the two languages in grammar (heavily inflected, using relationals, for instance), but according to linguists, the two languages are not related.

Of course, it's even stranger that Korean has no close relatives, since it borders many other cultures directly.

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Asante sana
Squashed banana
Wewe nugu
Mimi apana

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

Quote Originally posted by Tachikaze:
I think that Jimmu (the name you were missing) may have been the first emporer, but he was not the grandson of jiggly dieties and son of a yellow-white dwarf star.
[/QUOTE]

Read your religious backgrounds Tachi, especially the background of the Shintoists and where they think their religion started.

------------------
He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Tac]

True Tachi.. but I bet theres a lot of korean words and terms in Japanese, just as there are chinese. Throught thousands of years they surely become distorted by different way of pronouncing them that they became "japanese".

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

So on a very broad sense, Japanese could just be a very very very coloquial language of intermingled Chinese and Korean.

Is that what you mean?

------------------
He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Tachikaze]

Toda,

It's just the vocabulary that they share. Chinese was a kind of highbrow language of learning in Japan and Korea, so many of their terms were adopted. Most Chinese terms in Japanese have a native equivilent (san and yama for mountain, ki and moku for wood, kin and kane for gold, etc.). Korea shares these words with slightly different pronunciation.

This is comparable to French for the British, who have good and beneficial and lamb and mutton from Saxon and French, respectively.

Grammatically, Chinese and Japanese are about as different as you can get. It is commonly joked with irony that Japanese and German are actually related, and English and Chinese are related.

I'm not saying that it is really amazing that Japanese and Chinese are not related. There are many such examples in Europe (Basque, Finnish, Hungarian). But when I first ventured into Asia linguistically, I expect to see a relationship, and thar ain't none.

And, in answer to your second post:
Quote Read your religious backgrounds Tachi, especially the background of the Shintoists and where they think their religion started.[/QUOTE]

I was answering (a little tongue-in-cheek) whether I thought there was some truth to the legend. The only part I think may be real is the name of the first emperor.

[This message has been edited by Tachikaze (edited 04-11-2002).]

[Gothmog]

Toda:

Many nations have that kind of myth. Just like in Greek mythology, the demi-Gods, or the heroes, such as Heculus, Jason, etc, were born from the intercourse of Gods and human women.

Why? I think it has something to do with that, in the beginning, the human societies were dominated by females. The "rulling" female gender wanted to glorify themselves, thus created such tales. Basically saying: hey, you are not good enough to be my hubby or the father of my daughter.

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Pain is weakness leaving the body.
http://members.fortunecity.com/argus1000eyes/fighter.gif

[Tac]

"So on a very broad sense, Japanese could just be a very very very coloquial language of intermingled Chinese and Korean.
Is that what you mean?"

Tachi said it best. When societies have been in contact for so long, they influence each other in both customs and language. However, in those times comunication was hard and sporadic, so what flowed were ideas, terms and knowledge. Most notable the Kanji that came from China, as well as many of their words and ideologies.

Korea used kanji-like characters up until one of their leaders decided to order his wise men to make up a simple written language.. and that's the korean we see today. The Japanese also saw the chinese characters as being quite complex.. so they were drastically simplified.. result: Hiragana and Katakana. Both are spinoffs of "Kanji" (and many nippon kanji characters are also simplified from original chinese!).

Just look at what happened to all the latin languages! Latin became warped and distorted to such extremes that today we have French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc etc. Each one considered quite different from the other.. and yet..!

And even today Spanish is SO warped in South America that the only thing we (im from S. America) share is our writing/spelling! You can take a guy from Spain and put him in Paraguay or Peru or Argentina.. and he will have one hell of a hard time trying to communicate just because the accents, words and sentence-form and jargon are very,very different. In a thousand years or so, if we had no instant communications (phone, internet) it would become a unique language on their own.

Like Alabama and South Carolina rednecks.. WTF do those people speak in anyway?? http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

[Tachikaze]

Just to add, without trying to steer us off-topic, the Korean script, called hangul, is perhaps the most logical written language in the world. It is really well-designed. Consonants (square and round shapes) and vowels (vertical and horizontal lines) are combined in a character that represents a syllable. Thus, hangul is like a combination of Japanese kana and the Western phonetic alphabet.

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Asante sana
Squashed banana
Wewe nugu
Mimi apana

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

Ok so since the title is history, lets get away from the religious ideals and concentrate on what really/supposedly took place.

Ainu (eskimo's?) where did they come from?

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He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

Quote Originally posted by Toda Nebuchadnezzar:


Ainu (eskimo's?) where did they come from?

[/QUOTE]

Eskimos? erm. I think Ainu came from Hokkaido. (?)

Tera.


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Proud member of Clan Kenchikuka (http://www.totalwar.org/kenchikuka).
evil is within us... http://www.totalwar.org/site/emomalta.gif

[Minamoto Yoritomo]

I agree that there is a lot to be said for Korea's writing system. It is probably the easiest language to learn to read on the planet. It is nicely phonetic, it fits the spoken language almost perfectly(unlike English, obviously) and is not horribly redundant (like the Japanese phonetic systems).

That being said, I think that the Chinese written language has seriously positive aspects that those critics who claim it to be ridiculously hard tend to overlook. As a case in point I offer Taiwan's extremely low illiteracy rate as an example that it's not excessively hard to learn (even people in my generation who never went to high school can read newspapers and books with no problem).

The biggest benefit of an ideographic language like Chinese, however, is its universality. People who speak mutually unintelligible languages (don't be fooled by people who mistakenly call them dialects) such as Hokkien, Mandarin, and Cantonese can still communicate almost perfectly using the common written language. Even speakers of rather different languages, such as Japanese and Korean (at least back when Koreans still used Chinese characters to some extent, which wasn't that long ago), could communicate tolerably well with Chinese speakers using what is common between the written languages.

Anyway, I still curse it, too, when I run across a character I don't understand (which is all too often). I guess now we're WAY off topic.

[Tac]

Yes, I find that to be incredible. People from completely different spoken languages being able to understand each other in a written form. Simply amazing.

I wanted to learn korean, but the language has a lot of vowel pitch changes (like Chinese/mandarin) and my horrible monotone voice cant do it =P

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

HHHMMM... maybe I will try to learn some Korean then. Does that mean I will be able to pretty much read Japanese but not speak it.

Seems like a good deal in my view.

------------------
He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Tac]

No toda, you can learn mandarin/chinese characters and you will be able to communicate with the japanese and the koreans in a written form.

Koreans use some (well, quite a number) of chinese characters even today, although their own korean writing (the new one) is totally different. That is why sometimes its hard to tell if a character is chinese or japanese.. but a korean character is so easy to spot its like it was smacking you in the face.

Hey, want to know something funny?

Look up the Kanji for "cheap".

Then look up the kanji for "woman"

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

HHHMMM thanx Tac. I will try to get some books to learn. I would like to learn Mandarin, but Japanese and Korean would also be very useful.

Maybe even Cantonese if I can find time.

Thanx again.

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He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Gothmog]

Quote Originally posted by Toda Nebuchadnezzar:
HHHMMM thanx Tac. I will try to get some books to learn. I would like to learn Mandarin, but Japanese and Korean would also be very useful.

Maybe even Cantonese if I can find time.

Thanx again.

[/QUOTE]


Just curious, are you learning these for fun? Because none of these is easy to learn. Also, Cantonese and Mandarin are basically two completely diffrent languages.

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Pain is weakness leaving the body.
http://members.fortunecity.com/argus1000eyes/fighter.gif

[Tac]

A recent study showed that worldwide, the main reason why young males around the world are interested in learning japanese is so they can understand and surf their porn sites.

sugoi! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

[Scipio3]

I find the Korean language very interesting because if yous tudy the history of Korean they invented their language totally from scratch by a king named sejong around 1446. This shows an interesting cultural difference between the Koreans and the Japanese. The japanese modified their language and stretched it out into three scripts to allow for foreign languages, chinese, and their own spoken tongue. The koreans however invented their own writing i dont know what this shows you but i thought it was interesting

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Shoot straight you bastards and don't make a mess of it!
Executed by firing squad.
~~ Harry Harbord "Breaker" Morant, Australian poet & national hero, d. 1902

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

I always planned to work in China when I was older because in about ten years it will modernise like Japan did and so there is a lot of money to be made there soon. For that I would learn mandarin, simply because it would give me an edge over other people in the same line of work who do not speak the language.

But anyway I'm always interested to talk to people so learning languages is fun for me not a chore.

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He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Tac]

I dont know.. I really dont see China as going on "stage" as an economic power to reckon with during my lifetime.

Japan and Latin America have the best chances now to really become a market to behold.

Russia is also one to come to importance. Their huge oil reserves makes them an ideal "alternative" to mideast oil, and with the current situation im sure most countries would like to separate themselves from their dependance on them.

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

Trust me mate, China will be the next super economy country. With the resources they have the man power to put into the work-force, and the communist regime China will be big in the next 10 - 20 years.


The government can simply move half of the population from primary to secondary.(ie. from farming to manufacturing) They would still have enough man-power to supply the country with food and to even sell it to other countries.

They can then after say 10 years of the move to secondary, shift a lot of people over to the tertiary market (services) although there will already be a lot of people working there.

While all of this is going on their Quaternary market will be researching the latest technology. The government can organise it all, since there is no-one to question their authority.

Their military backing will protect against any USA/Britain/UN move into the country because the UN don't like what China are doing with their man-power and so on.(eg. Wages, living style, food, health etc)

China will then be able to supply to all the other communist countries still out there (Cuba etc) and so will become even more wealthy.

The government can teach the students what they want, they can do whatever they want simply because they have the power to do it. There will be demonstrations but like Tianamen Square, those demonstrations will be suppressed.

If the Chinese government get their act together they could even become the most powerful country in the world.(economy, technology, military etc)

It's gonna happen maybe not today or tomorrow but it will very soon.

Plus China at the moment have enough money to do that sort of re-arrainging.

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He is the Messiah
No i'm not the Messiah
Only the true Messiah would deny it.
Alright then I am the Messiah.
HE IS THE MESSIAH HOORAY!!!

[Minamoto Yoritomo]

Communist China has the same set of problems that plagued imperial China. Each provincial governor, army general, local magistrate, and village chief holds a certain amount of power and skims a certain amount of money off of the economy. No one in the lower echelons receives any personal benefit from carrying out the national policy that can't be far surpassed by bending matters to his or her own gain.

Just look at what happened over the whole spy plane incident. Beijing would promise something, but the military officials in Hainan would either claim to know nothing of the promise or just refuse to do what Beijing said they would.

Even with admittance into the WTO, the high levels of corruption and the difficulty in moving capital will soon discourage many investors who are currently rushing to pour their money into China. Even if this doesn't kill the economic miracle taking place there, the social structure of China will. Because profits made in China mainly go to making a few rich people much richer, the increasing socioeconomic disparity between the rich and the rest will not lead to Tiananmen-like protests by relatively educated students. It will lead to widespread dissatisfaction and unrest that can only be alleviated by taking steps to reduce social inequality.

Which brings us back to the first point. China is in no position to end corruption at a local level. Without being able to centralize power (something almost impossible in such a large country), China cannot maintain its delicate balance between its authoritarian heart and its free-market economy.

So I guess you're right. "If the Chinese government get their act together they could even become the most powerful country in the world." But that's not very likely, what with 4000+ years of precedent to overcome.