This piece presents Masayuki Takayama’s essay, which draws on a Y-chromosome sequence map announced by graduate students at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Science to discuss the continuity between modern Japanese and the Jomon people, the distinctiveness of the Japanese nation, and the meaning of patrilineal imperial succession.
Touching as well on older theories associated with Ryotaro Shiba and Namio Egami, and on advocacy of a female-line emperor by the Asahi Shimbun and the Japanese Communist Party, it sharply reexamines the foundations of Japanese historical awareness and ethnic identity.

2019-07-11
According to the Y-chromosome sequence map recently announced by graduate students at the Faculty of Science of the University of Tokyo, present-day Japanese and the Jomon people are the same.
As I have already noted, I subscribe every week to Shukan Shincho in order to read the serialized columns of Masayuki Takayama and Yoshiko Sakurai.
In this week’s issue as well, Masayuki Takayama proves to the fullest that he is a truly unparalleled journalist in the postwar world.
Everyone who read it must surely have thought how extraordinary he is.
Yoshiko Sakurai too is a person worthy of the People’s Honour Award… together with the late Shoichi Watanabe, from the age when the Asahi Shimbun dominated Japan up to the present, she has truly fought a lonely battle, correcting the abnormality of that newspaper, the many fabricated reports born of its anti-Japanese ideology, and continuing to criticize its steady service to anti-Japanese propaganda from China and the Korean Peninsula.
First of all, I deliver Masayuki Takayama’s splendid essay to all the people of Japan and to people throughout the world.
Smelling of Asahi.
Masayuki Takayama.
Even when the wife is a bad wife, once she dies first, the husband somehow loses his vitality and dies as though following after her.
But conversely, even if the husband dies, most wives instead seem filled with vitality and absolutely never do anything like follow after him.
The average life expectancy of Japanese is 80 for men and 87 for women.
This shows that after their troublesome husbands die, wives spend seven years in peace of mind.
Why do men die young?
It is because they are men, that is, because they possess a Y chromosome, and so it is determined.
Sad though it is, that is fate.
What follows is something I learned in an interview with Kumiko Takeuchi and Mary Button, but at the stage of the fertilized egg all human beings were “female.”
The proof of that is the nipple on a man’s chest.
It gives no milk and is not even an erogenous zone.
It is an object of no use whatsoever, but it is proof that before becoming male, he had been female.
Then when does a male become male?
Six weeks after fertilization, when cell division begins, the sex-determining factor on the Y chromosome causes the seminal vesicles to begin functioning and to emit large quantities of the male hormone testosterone.
Like a shower, it drenches everything from the brain to the farthest corners of the body in testosterone and tells it, “You are a man.”
The male organ also develops by that means.
However, the male organ of a congenitally homosexual man becomes one size larger than that of a normal male.
Why God made such a useless excess is still not known.
Those born as men in both mind and body are constantly exhorted by the brain: you are a man, behave more manfully, and they grow beards and body hair that women do not have, and their muscles bulge more and more.
MacArthur was mocked by his first wife, who said, “You may be a general by day, but aren’t you a second lieutenant at night?”
Men are thus required to keep striving day and night.
In fact, it is also the Y chromosome that supports that striving, preventing cells from becoming cancerous, preventing arteriosclerosis, and even removing amyloid plaques that attach to the brain.
Thanks to that, a man can continue striving without falling ill, can marry a beautiful wife, and can have children.
But once the proper reproductive age has passed, the Y chromosome gradually lowers its functions.
As a result, hardening of the arteries begins.
Plaques accumulate in the brain and senility begins, and cancer cells also begin to run rampant.
The fatigue accumulated from continuing to strive also begins to gather.
Pinpin korori refers to an ideal way of life in which one stays healthy and active, then passes away suddenly before becoming oversized household rubbish.
The decline of the Y chromosome seems precisely like a law of nature designed to bring that about.
Japanese men likened to cherry blossoms that fleeting way of life in which one continues to strive as a man, does one’s best, and yet once one’s role is finished, is made to scatter swiftly away.
Having lived fully and reached his sixtieth year, Motoori Norinaga wrote, “If one should ask of the Yamato spirit of Shikishima, it is the mountain cherry blossoms fragrant in the morning sun.”
Saigyo too sang, “Would that I might die in spring beneath the blossoms, around the full moon of the second month.”
The sorrow of men appears vividly in these lines.
Such is the Y chromosome, but in fact it has come to be understood that the base sequence of its genes differs according to ethnicity.
According to the Y-chromosome sequence map recently announced by graduate students at the Faculty of Science of the University of Tokyo, present-day Japanese and the Jomon people are the same.
In other words, for more than ten thousand years, from the age of the Sannai-Maruyama site onward, the Japanese have remained Japanese throughout.
When this Jomon factor is compared with that of Chinese or Koreans, there is almost nothing in common.
That is a great discovery.
Ryotaro Shiba said that the Japanese were “of the same ancestry as Koreans.”
Namio Egami also said that “a horse-riding people crossed over and created the Yamato court,” but that turned out to have been a complete lie.
In Japanese history people are taught that Yayoi culture was brought by immigrants, but there were no such immigrants.
Regarding ethnic identity, Hiroaki Nagahama also writes in The Birth of Japan that until now people have “examined it on the basis of women’s mitochondria, but that is child’s play. The Y chromosome is decisive.”
Even so, the Japanese are remarkable.
Early on they understood the sorrow of the Y chromosome, and for that reason not only loved the cherry blossoms, but also made the imperial line a male line linked by the Y chromosome as a means of preserving the ethnic purity of the nation.
Now the Communist Party and the Asahi Shimbun advocate a female-line emperor.
They think that is the best way to defile the Japanese nation.
Does not ignorance and malice rise in fragrance from Asahi?