Where do Japanese come from?

In case this sounds like a silly question, Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs & Steel fame) goes into four different answers in depth, including the high stakes riding on the outcome.  Earlier in my journey towards cultural competence, I justified my own stubborn remnants of white-asian racism by reference to inter-asian racism – something like “they do it too, only worse!”.  But whereas white-asian racism is sometimes as dumb as fear of difference, this article shows how centuries of war and colonisation lend an entirely different substance to the racism that exists between the different asian cultures. It’s more like the racism between the British and the Irish, the Catholic Irish and the Protestant Irish, the Israelis and the Palestinians.

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