Published on August 16, 2019.
This article introduces the preface to Masayuki Takayama’s book Korea and the Media Shamelessly Lie, discussing Jomon culture, flame-style pottery, the Yayoi period, immigrants from the continent, cultural transmission through the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese language, the reception of Chinese characters, and the invention of man’yōgana.
Through skepticism toward Ryotaro Shiba’s claim that Japan and Korea share the same ancestry, and through accounts by Xavier and foreign observers in the late Edo and Meiji periods, it argues that the Japanese were never a people who merely “stared blankly.”

August 16, 2019.
To put it plainly, it does not ring true.
If they share the same ancestry, why are the languages completely different?
There are no common nouns.
Words such as hijikata and takuan were words Japan taught them under Japanese imperial rule.
Moreover, the level of civilization and the nature of the heart are different.
The following is from the preface to the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, published by Tokuma Shoten on June 30, 2019, under the title Korea and the Media Shamelessly Lie.
It is a book that every Japanese citizen must read, and they must go immediately to the nearest bookstore to purchase it.
It is also a book that people throughout the world must read, and although I am sorry for my poor English ability, I would like to make it known to people all over the world as much as possible.
The ones who were staring blankly were not Japan, but China and Korea.
When I was a child, I was taught that the Jomon period was extremely primitive, that the Jomon people picked up shellfish by the sea and gathered beech acorns in the mountains to eat, and that they did not even seem to have settled lives.
When we went to the seaside on an elementary-school excursion, the teacher picked up a small shellfish that was densely attached to the rocks and said, “In the Jomon period, they ate this.”
Its name was tamakibigai.
It looked like a very small turban shell.
When I became a little older, after diving in the sea and gathering turban shells and abalone-like tokobushi, I also picked up some tamakibigai and boiled them.
When I took out the flesh with a toothpick and ate it, it tasted quite good.
Even so, why did the Jomon people eat tamakibigai rather than turban shells?
Were they really that dull?
If that was strange, they were also making flame-style pottery in that same period.
Its well-balanced, novel, and free style is far more refreshing than the distorted, shrunken Korean pottery of much later times.
Tamakibigai and flame-style pottery.
I could never understand how the two coexisted.
Textbooks say that such a poor-looking Jomon period suddenly ended 2,000 years ago.
They say that immigrants brought rice cultivation and metal-tool culture, and the Yayoi period began.
But when one asks where the Jomon people went, the textbooks do not answer.
A little of the Jomon line remained.
Someone said that sticky earwax is Jomon-type, while dry earwax is immigrant-type.
It seems that Japan’s indigenous Jomon people were mostly killed by immigrants, like the Neanderthals of Europe or the Indians of the American continent, but such savagery also did not ring true.
However, for the next five hundred years, the Yayoi people left no records, perhaps because they were busy working in the rice fields.
Around the time of Emperor Ojin, the Thousand Character Classic came from Korea, and one hundred years later, in 538, King Seong of Baekje transmitted Buddhist scriptures to Emperor Kinmei.
There was even a mnemonic phrase, “The Buddha picked up by gomiya,” meaning 538.
It is said that Japan finally began to become a full-fledged country from this point, but this makes it sound as though immigrants and culture via the Korean Peninsula were the ancestors of the Japanese people.
Indeed, Ryotaro Shiba also says in A Journey to the Land of Han that “Korea has a history of having maintained a dignified civilization and independent state from earlier times than Japan,” and also says that “Japan and Korea share the same ancestry.”
To put it plainly, it does not ring true.
If they share the same ancestry, why are the languages completely different?
There are no common nouns.
Words such as hijikata and takuan were words Japan taught them under Japanese imperial rule.
Moreover, the level of civilization and the nature of the heart are different.
For example, in the first century, the “Gold Seal of the King of Na of Wa under Han” arrived.
This was the encounter between the Japanese and Chinese characters.
Around the same time, Vietnam and Korea also encountered Chinese characters and immersed themselves in them.
Koreans abandoned half of their own language and rushed into Chinese-character words.
But in Japan, nothing happened.
Foolish scholars say that “the Japanese thought they were merely patterns.”
They say that until the Thousand Character Classic was transmitted, the Japanese were simply staring blankly.
To those same Japanese, Xavier spoke of the Copernican heliocentric theory he had picked up by hearsay.
Then he wrote a letter to Macau saying, “The Japanese put Jesus aside and, with eyes changed in intensity, begged to hear about the stars and the sun.”
The late Edo period.
When the British ship Phaeton committed outrages in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese immediately created an English-Japanese dictionary, the Angeria Gorin Taisei.
A Dutchman recorded that “they studied in order to know the enemy.”
The foreign employees of the Meiji Restoration were also astonished by the curiosity and drive of the Japanese.
Only two years after Edmund Morel taught them the mechanism of railways, the Japanese ran a train from Shiodome to Yokohama.
There are no Japanese anywhere who merely stared blankly.
Rather, the ones staring blankly before the European whales and American tigers were China and Korea, the homelands of the immigrants.
In other words, it is better to interpret that immigrants who would simply stare blankly did not come to Japan.
Then why did Japan appear to stare blankly at the time of the “Gold Seal of the King of Na of Wa under Han”?
In The History of Japan, Nishio Kanji explains that the Japanese certainly saw Chinese characters, were astonished, and were fascinated by them, but they saw through the fact that if they became absorbed in them, they would have to give up expressing the supple emotions of the Japanese people.
And then, five hundred years passed.
He explains that “the Japanese invented man’yōgana and found a way to use Chinese characters without killing the Japanese language.”
This article continues.