By Runoko Rashidi
"For a Samurai to be brave, he must have a bit of Black blood."
--Japanese Proverb
THE BLACK PRESENCE IN EARLY JAPAN
Although the island nation of Japan, occupying the extreme eastern extensions of Asia, is assumed by many to have been historically composed of an essentially homogeneous population and culture, the accumulated evidence (much of which has been quietly ignored) places the matter in a vastly different light, and though far more study needs to be done on the subject, it seems indisputable that Black people in Japan played an important role from the most remote phases of antiquity into at least the ninth century.
Meaningful indications of an African presence in ancient Japan have been unearthed from the most remote ages of the Japanese past. To begin with, and as a significant example, a February 15, 1986 report carried by the Associated Press, chronicled that:
In his last major text, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (published posthumously in English in 1991), the brilliant Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986) pointed out that:
http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/shogun.html
"For a Samurai to be brave, he must have a bit of Black blood."
--Japanese Proverb
THE BLACK PRESENCE IN EARLY JAPAN
Although the island nation of Japan, occupying the extreme eastern extensions of Asia, is assumed by many to have been historically composed of an essentially homogeneous population and culture, the accumulated evidence (much of which has been quietly ignored) places the matter in a vastly different light, and though far more study needs to be done on the subject, it seems indisputable that Black people in Japan played an important role from the most remote phases of antiquity into at least the ninth century.
Meaningful indications of an African presence in ancient Japan have been unearthed from the most remote ages of the Japanese past. To begin with, and as a significant example, a February 15, 1986 report carried by the Associated Press, chronicled that:
"The oldest Stone Age hut in Japan has been unearthed near Osaka....Archeologists date the hut to about 22,000 years ago and say it resembles the dugouts of African bushmen, according to Wazuo Hirose of Osaka Prefectural of Education's cultural division. `Other homes, almost as old, have been found before, but this discovery is significant because the shape is cleaner, better preserved' and is similar to the Africans' dugouts."
In 1923, anthropologist Roland B. Dixon wrote that "this earliest population of Japan were in the main a blend of Proto-Australoid and Proto-Negroid types, and thus similar in the ancient underlying stratum of the population, southward along the whole coast and throughout Indo-China, and beyond to India itself." Dixon pointed out that, "In Japan, the ancient Negrito element may still be discerned by characteristics which are at the same time exterior and osteologic."In his last major text, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (published posthumously in English in 1991), the brilliant Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986) pointed out that:
"In the first edition of the Nations negres et culture (1954), I posited the hypothesis that the Yellow race must be the result of an interbreeding of Black and White in a cold climate, perhaps around the end of he Upper Paleolithic period. This idea is widely shared today by Japanese scholars and researchers. One Japanese scientist, Nobuo Takano, M.D., chief of dermatology at the Hammatsu Red Cross Hospital, has just developed this idea in Japanese that appeared in 1977, of which he was kind enough to give me a copy in 1979, when, passing through Dakar, he visited my laboratory with a group of Japanese scientists.
Takano maintains, in substance, that the first human being was Black; then Blacks gave birth to Whites, and the interbreeding of these two gave rise to the Yellow race; these three stages are in fact the title of his book in Japanese, as he explained it to me."
As to linguistics, in 1987 former Senegalese president Leopold Sedar Senghor noted that, "The people who populate the island of Japan today are descendants from Blacks....Let us not forget that the first population of Japan was Black...and gave to Japan their first language."http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/shogun.html