Japan, Korea, and China: The Problem of Defining Continuities

要旨

Kyushu, about 230 km, and from Kyushu directly across to the Yangtze delta, about 480 km. The Pacific boundary of the East China Sea is guarded by the Ryukyu Islands or Nansei Shoto, in which each succeeding landfall can be seen before the preceding island sinks from sight, with the exception of the southern islands of Miyako and Yaeyama. In terms of vegetation and other natural resources, western Japan, the southern tip of Korea, the Ryukyus, and central China are all part of a zone of rich broadleaf forest characterized by bamboos, oaks, camellias, tea, chestnuts, and many other edible and useful plant resources (Hotta n.d., Pearson 1975, 1976; Pearson and Pearson, 1978). We do not know clearly the total range of prehistoric cultural responses to this environmental zone at this point, but suspect that there may be many common elements related to similar subsistence systems in this area. The ties which have been developed across this Mediterranean-like sea are relatively well-known for the periods following the emergence of states on the Korean peninsula and in Japan; yet the extent of prehistoric contact, and the question of "genetic relationships " of the array of local cultures on the shores of the East China Sea, remain thorny and much-debated issues. Egami (1964) has postu-lated that the Japanese people and the Japanese state both developed from extensive migration from different parts of the Asian continent, and Murayama has stated that the Japanese language is a product of the overlay of a language or languages

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