Ainu "Japan" and its possible role in East Asian history

[ramones1986]

Yesterday, I revisited the topic of an Ainu/Emishi/Jomon-dominated Japan, and here's what I've found:

If they became fishermen it could help them a bit.
They see a Korean boat wash up on the beach, get some ideas from it and start using the maritime resources more efficiently. They get a population boom and form some villages and more structured society based on fish.
When the farmers come over, they won't be so overwhelmed and can either absorb the first few new comers, getting the crops that way, or raid them and get the crops anyways.

The Ainu (Ezo?) would probably end up importing most of the Chinese package, though they might very well keep their native grains (foxtail millet, deccan grass etc) more than OTL Japanese did, thus leading to less reliance on paddy agriculture. So, one difference might be that the idea of a centralised government could be so difficult to enforce, and so expensive to try, that it would, at most, remain an ideal.
OTL Japanese were bad enough pirates to China, and they theoretically revered Chinese civilisation. Our Ainu might even conquering some of China's coasts, or at least be an even worse plague to east Asia. They might look further afield than China, too, and adopt more from India/Indonesia.
Buddhism and Confucianism have been so successful, they'd probably make inroads here, too. But Confucianism's reverence for tradition might end up reinforcing nativism, and Buddhism remain a slandered minority.
One detail...the Chinese have fox demons. If the natives have to fight them long and hard, they might feel the foxes are somehow the national symbol, or even claim some descent.

This is extremely challenging to do, but the best POD would be to butterfly away the arrival in the Japanese islands of the mainland newcomers in the Yayoi period, starting around 300 BC. If this component of the OTL Japanese ethnicity remained on the mainland - in Korea or Manchuria, as much of the archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates - then potentially the Ainu (and whatever other Jomon-period ethnic groups may have existed) could have continued to occupy the Japanese islands and maybe taken the place of Japan in this ATL. There would likely still be heavy influence from Chinese civilization, but the specifics of *Japan would be based on Ainu/Jomon culture rather than OTL Japanese culture. At the same time, Korea and Manchuria would likely be more ethnically/culturally/linguistically diverse in this timeline, potentially including cultural and linguistic forms recognizable as Korean and Japanese, or at least close relatives. So, assuming a pre-Yayoi POD of 300 BC or earlier, we would at least create the conditions necessary for a TL that meets the OP's specifications.

This would essentially require a PoD long before the 8th century BC, which might in turn render the alternate East Asia entirely unrecognizable from that of IOTL. Specifically, the chaos from the Spring and Autumn/Warring States Periods may have caused migrants from China to flee to the archipelago, while later developments led to friction between the Yan and Gojoseon, in which Liaoxi was conquered from the latter, triggering migrations southward into the peninsula, pushing many of the inhabitants eastward into Japan.
In order for the widespread chaos to be butterflied away altogether, China would have had to remain stable for a far longer period of time. This may well have been impossible as remote frontier regions began to assert their independence from the Zhou, making it essentially inevitable that neighboring entities would eventually go to war with each other.
Also, Japanese toponyms are only found in areas south of Pyongyang, with none in Manchuria, which has a high density of Korean ones. Genetic research also suggests that the respective populations in the peninsula and the archipelago may not have changed significantly, suggesting that founder populations gradually assimilated local inhabitants.

In summary, with a PoD that ranged between 8th and 4th century BCE, with possible later immigration from Korean peninsula, particularly from the south (Yayoi) and the spread of Chinese influence in the later centuries, what would the possible role of an Ainu "Japan" in the regional history of East Asia?

(I know it's almost far-fetched, but it's irresistible...)

 

[ramones1986]

Bumping....

 

[Dragos Cel Mare]

I don't really know anything about the subject, I'm afraid.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Did proto-Ainu even dominate Japan (all of it) before the arrival of the modern Japanese? I thought the case was otherwise. Now, you can expand the range of the Emishi, but Emishi Kyushu? I'm not sure that would be immediately doable. What would allow them to conquer Kyushu? What would stop Kyushu from being like Hokkaido was to the Japanese for the longest of time, or perhaps Taiwan to the Chinese?

 

[ramones1986]

Did proto-Ainu even dominate Japan (all of it) before the arrival of the modern Japanese? I thought the case was otherwise. Now, you can expand the range of the Emishi, but Emishi Kyushu?

Personally, I think this scenario would probably stop in Kyushu, at least, because the previous Ainu Japan AHCs never defined the extend of their supposed territroy.

 

[Dragos Cel Mare]

Bumpity bump.

 

[Admiral Matt]

The first comment you quote about fishing stands out as a little whacky - their diet was predominately fish and nuts as it was, supplemented by meat from hunting and dolphin trapping as well as a little grain on the side.

The second comment you include doesn't explain how or why rice paddies - by far the most productive form of farming available - would be adopted substantially less in this scenario. That said, if rice farming were adopted less, chr92 is right. The realities of rice farming have a profound impact on the structure of the society that relies on it, including on government forms.

With respect to Qhapaq Inka, I totally disagree with his premise. "Butterflying" in it's literal sense doesn't apply at all. Even in the colloquial sense, it is flat out impossible. The Yayoi ancestors and the native peoples of Kyushu had been across the Straits from each other for perhaps a thousand years. Maybe longer. Before wet farming of cold-resistant strains arrived in southern Korea, the Jomon lifestyle was superior in terms of supporting stable populations, which meant colonization was impossible. Once that style of farming and those varieties of rice reached Korea, the reverse was true, and colonization was impossible to prevent. Obviously these are not things that can easily be "butterflied".

On the source of a POD, democracy101 has it essentially correct: You need the Chinese. I disagree, though, with the refugee model he cites. If refugees came, and were successfully established, they'd keep coming. A Sinitic Japan would be interesting, and a Japan colonized earlier and differently likewise, but we're talking about an "Ainu" Japan. Perhaps a Chinese or China-associated (see: Yue) coastal state could attempt to establish a colony. It would have the organization to be established before cold-resistant rice was available, and could eventually be abandoned during the Warring States period. The latter is important because if it is sufficiently supported by a Chinese patron the result would (again) be a Chinese-colonized Japan. If it is small and unsupported enough, it's knowledge would spread by diffusion, and cold-resistant rice could be developed locally.

 

[Admiral Matt]

But back to the OP, metalinvader665 has the right of it: Jomon Japan =/= Ainu Japan.

There's a narrow strip of Japanese language isoglosses where the island narrows near Nagoya. One explanation of that would be that modern Japanese expanded over the island in two phases, and that isthmus was merely the end of the first phase. But that doesn't hold up. East of the strip you find Ainu toponyms and the Matagi villages that purportedly are cultural descendants of the Ainu. West of the strip you find nothing of the kind.

It's supremely unlikely that the original settlers to Japan would have made use of none of the local place names. In fact, we'd expect the reverse to be true - that the largest number of toponyms would be found near where the settlers first arrived: Kyushu. This is fairly strong evidence that Jomon Japan itself had a linguistic divide near Nagoya before mainland farmers began colonizing the islands, and that west of there resided one or more now-extinct language families. Possibly on the southern coast east of there as well, for all we know.

With no remnant of those languages remaining, we probably look at their toponyms all the time, and have no way of distinguishing them from "Japanese" toponyms.

Assuming this is the case, and you can get Chinese wet-farming to Japan well before the practice gets to southern Korea, and you can somehow preclude a large Chinese influx.... then whichever group adopted rice-farming would spread and dominate the islands. It's quite possible that the new farmers would even displace the Ainu just as the OTL Yayoi did, or that rice-farming proto-Ainu might drive Kyushan and Shikokuese languages into extinction.

Side note: The Pacific Northwest in North America is probably the closest model to Jomon Japan that exists in a clear historical record. Well-fed societies that could rely so easily on fish, game, and plant protein that resorting to grain had no value. Until it was too late.

 

[ramones1986]

It's supremely unlikely that the original settlers to Japan would have made use of none of the local place names. In fact, we'd expect the reverse to be true - that the largest number of toponyms would be found near where the settlers first arrived: Kyushu. This is fairly strong evidence that Jomon Japan itself had a linguistic divide near Nagoya before mainland farmers began colonizing the islands, and that west of there resided one or more now-extinct language families. Possibly on the southern coast east of there as well, for all we know.

I recently discovered that Joman Japan was linguistically diverse as I thought that a single language dominated the archipelago before the arrival of the Yayoi from Korea.

Assuming this is the case, and you can get Chinese wet-farming to Japan well before the practice gets to southern Korea, and you can somehow preclude a large Chinese influx.... then whichever group adopted rice-farming would spread and dominate the islands. It's quite possible that the new farmers would even displace the Ainu just as the OTL Yayoi did, or that rice-farming proto-Ainu might drive Kyushan and Shikokuese languages into extinction.

Side note: The Pacific Northwest in North America is probably the closest model to Jomon Japan that exists in a clear historical record. Well-fed societies that could rely so easily on fish, game, and plant protein that resorting to grain had no value. Until it was too late.

I prefer the later scenario, although I believe that the ATL proto-Ainus would be divided into two groups: Western/Rice Ainu, whose culture were influenced by immigrants from China (and later Korea) mostly through intermarriage, and the Eastern/Millet Ainus.