JOHON “Japanese matsuri (festivals) resemble so much Balinese ones that one could wonder if one was not copied from the other. During cremations in Bali, the dead body is carried on a portable shrine, very much in the way that the Japanese carry their mikoshi. Balinese funerals are joyful and people swinging the portable shrine in the streets are making loud noise to scare the evil spirits. Basically, Balinese religion is a form of Hinduism that has incorporated the aborigenal animist religion. Japanese Shintoism is also a variety of animism, and is practised side-by-side with Buddhism, a religion derived from Hinduism (Buddha himslef was born a Hindu). There are lots of other cultural similarities between ancient cultures of Indonesia and Japan. For example, both Balinese temples and Japanese shrines, as well as traditional Japanese and Balinese houses have a wall surrounding them, originally meant tp prevent evil spirits from penetrating the property. Despite the radical changes that Indonesian culture underwent after the introduction of Islam and Christianity, and the changes that Buddhism brought to Japan, it is still possible to observe clear similarities between the supposed original prehistoric cultures of the two archipelagoes.” Things get even weirder when one considers the linguistic connection: “From a linguistic point of view, Bahasa Indonesia/Malaysia and Japanese language share only a few similarities, but nonetheless striking ones. Apart from the very similar pronunciation in both languages, there is the same hierarchical differences in personal pronouns. For example “you” is either anda or kamu with the same meaning and usage as anata and kimi in Japanese. Likewise, the Japanese verb suki (“to like”) translates suka in Bahasa. Such similarities are probably more than mere coincidences, and may reveal a common origin.” So how is one to explain this? Well, research in genetics has turned up compelling evidence of migratory links. “The Paleolithic Jomon people appear to have come from Austronesia during the Ice Age, before Japan was resettled by Bronze-age rice farmers from the continent. The Chinese had previously expanded southward to South-East Asia. The original inhabitants of Indonesia and the Philippines might have been related to Dravidians of Southern India. Y-haplogroup C, which has been associated with the first migration of modern humans out of Africa towards Asia, is relatively frequent in Kerala (southern tip of India) and Borneo. These early Austronesians are thought to have been the ancestors of the Ice Age settlers of Japan.”
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 15:28:10 +0000
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