| NOTA |
(★)(1.Chronologically the book covers a span of over 1,500 years from about 400 BC to AD 1200. This time frame may seem somewhat idiosyncratic to anyone brought up on European history, but it reflects the integral position of the Japanese Islands in cultural developments on the Eurasian mainland. The period begins with the spread of rice farming to the Islands in the fifth to the fourth century BC, a process that was probably in turn related to the diffusion of ironworking through East Asia. The end of the period corresponds with the East Asian medieval economic revolution. By the twelfth century AD, trading contacts with China and her satellite states led to major social and ethnic changes at both the northern and the southern ends of the Japanese archipelago, in Hokkaido and Okinawa. It would be wrong to propose that 1492 is a date unimportant to East Asian history, since the arrival of the Europeans in Far Eastern waters in the early sixteen century led to the establishment of a new,´global´ trading system. As recent historical research has made abundantly clear, however, for the most part European merchants used existing Asian trade networks. No better example of this process exists than the kingdom of the Ryukyus, which became an important trading state in the early 1400s, before Columbus had even been born. [from´PREFACE´] 2.The focus of this book is the origins of the peoples of Japan. More precisely, the book looks at the processes of ethnogenesis --the formation of ethnic groups-- in the Japanese Islands from the early agricultural Yayoi period until the beginning of the Middle Ages. The book begins in Part I with a discussion of previous theories on the formation of the Japanese people. After discussing the historical development of these nationalistic views of Japanese ethnogenesis, Part II goes on to present a model for the formation of a Japanese core population in the early agricultural Yayoi period [ca. 400 BC-AD 300]. In Part III of this book, the emphasis shifts toward the cultural construction of ethnicity out of the basic core population that was established in the Yayoi. [from ´INTRODUCTION´] ◆PART I〜Japanese Ethnicity : Histories of a Concept ◆PART II〜The Yayoi and the Formation of the Japanese ◆PART III〜Post-Yayoi Interaction and Ethnogenesis) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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