Comments by "Yo2" (@yo2trader539) on "TAKASHii"
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@Alexandra_Indina Tuva, Altai, Sakha...people who descend from original Turkic people. They're sometimes called "Siberian Turkic" to differentiate from Kipchaq Turkic (like Kazakh, Nogai Tatars, Kazan/Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars, etc.)
Original Turkic was a nomadic Northeast Asian language and culture, and homeland was in South Siberia and Mongolia. We know from their tombs and inscriptions that they lived near Altai Mountains to Lake Baikal region, and ruled the Mongolian Steppe before the Mongol Empire. (The Sakha/Yakut people were also originally from Lake Baikal region.) Xiongnu, Gokturks, Uyghurs, Yenisei Kirghiz were all descendants of Turkic clans who lived around the Altai Mountains.
Contrary to popular perception, Mongolian clans actually were historically more dominant in Inner-Mongolia to Manchuria region. Some of the Turkic clans (known as Huns, Avars, Bulgars, or Khazars) eventually migrated all the way to modern-day Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
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@harryhaller7153 People have been migrating and mixing in all directions in Eurasia since the last ice age. Thus, language, culture, and identity is not the same as genetics.
Rus are already a pre-mixture of Scandinavian and Baltic people. Have you not learned why Russian phonetics diverged from Belarusian and Ukrainian (aka Ruthenian) in the past few centuries? Or why some in Russian aristocracy had Tatar ancestry, or why Turkic/Tatar words entered Russian vocabulary.
Just look at a map from 500 years ago, you'll quickly realize that many "ethnic Russians" living in modern Russian Federation are descendants of Russified indigenous people who were absorbed into the Russian sphere. (Ironic as it may sound, Tatars were the most loyal supporters of Imperial Russia till the end. And Turkic-speaking Gagauz in Moldova are still loyal to Russia.)
And it's not just in Russia. Ukrainian "Cossack" is also a Turkic/Tatar word, having the same cognate with the name Kazakh. Cossack weapons, music, culture, hairstyle, or lifestyle is heavily Turkic/Tatar in nature. They Slavicized and became foot soldiers of Imperial Russia, and were given lands all across newly conquered territories. So a descendant of a Ukrainian Cossack living in Krasnodar...is he a Ukrainian, Russian, or Tatar?
By the way, Putin also has partial East Eurasian genetics, but his family roots is with Belarus. And he identifies as an ethnic Russian. There is nothing wrong with that, because culture/identity is not the same as genetic ancestry.
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He attended international school in Japan, and they mostly speak/teach American English. Since international schools were initially founded to educate children of expats, many of the teachers and students are US-educated. (British scholars and Japanese with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge often teach English Literature in Japanese universities and high-schools.)
International schools can be challenging for children of foreign-nationals growing up in Japan if they wish to stay in Japan as an adult. They're receiving a US-style education in Japan and many of them attend universities in English-speaking countries. Their education may be useful in their home countries, but not so much if you wish to pursue a professional career in Japan. If you cannot understand Japanese newspapers, you'll never be a lawyer, doctor, accountant, etc in Japan.
And without a formal education from a Japanese university, employment opportunities may be limited in Japan too. International students who graduated from Japanese universities, foreign students who studied Japanese in their home countries, or Japanese nationals who went through Japanese education and have studied abroad for university and grad school will almost always have more opportunity. This is because international schools were set up to educate children of expats who plan to return to their home countries after a few years. It was never their mission to educate their students so they can succeed and thrive in Japan.
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@freedomisbrightestindungeons Japan does have a permanent residency, nearly 845,000 people have it. Most people return to their home countries even before they are eligible to apply.
That said, of all the foreign nationals living in Japan, they are mainly Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipino, Brazilians, and Nepalese (followed by Indonesians). Sadly, the overall collective experience and social integration of the Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese was challenging, to say the least. I suspect that's why Japanese people are generally scared of changing immigration policies.
It used to be the Koreans who fled during/after the Korean War, then it became the Chinese, and now it's the Vietnamese who commit the most crimes in Japan.
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Language is culture. It is the logic of society. And Anglos, Saxons, Danes, or Normans/Norsemans who migrated, invaded, or ruled over England and created "English" were your distant Germanic-speaking cousins (or Latin-speaking Vikings). The Scandinavian Vikings during Danelaw had mutual-intelligibility with Old English speaking Anglo-Saxons up to 1,000 years ago. So for a Swede, learning English is like learning a dialect.
It's why the famous Swedish lady who used to be on NHK is highly respected and appreciated. We understand how fundamentally different the two languages are, yet she managed to master Japanese language and culture. From what we've witnessed, ethnic Korean, Mongolian, and Turkic-speakers from China are able to obtain near-native fluency in 2-3 years, because they instinctively understand SOV grammar and know most of the KANJI used in Japanese. And the Slavic/Russian natives speak very classy and elegant Japanese, due to phonetic overlap and excellent linguistic training.
But Germanic language speakers tend to struggle the most in terms of grammar, phonetics, and expressions. It's also why most Japanese will never be able to master Germanic languages. Basically, there is no overlap of anything. No overlap in grammar, phonetics, or cognates. (US State Department classifies Japanese as Category 5, or the most difficult to learn for a native English speaker. Conversely Germanic-Nordic languages are Category 1, or the easiest to obtain fluency. The opposite is true as well.)
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In most cases, naturalization requires 5 years of consecutive residency in Japan. Student visa years are not included in that calculation. You don't need to be a Permanent Visa holder to apply for Naturalization. But Japan doesn't allow dual-citizenship like other countries, so please be aware.
Common requirements are financial stability, basic language fluency, no criminal records in Japan, and massive paperwork to explain/prove your entire life to Japanese immigration. Everything from birth certificate, parent's marriage/divorce papers, and diploma...you will need to submit with a Japanese translation. It's a very long and detailed vetting process, because naturalized citizens will be able to run for office and vote. They have the exact same legal rights and obligations as any natural-born citizen.
Permanent Visa is actually more difficult to explain because the residency requirements are diverse. Highly-skilled professionals can obtain Permanent Visa in 3 to 4 years. Spouses of Japanese citizens also have shorter time periods. On paper, it's 10 years of consecutive residency to apply for Permanent Visa. In reality, depending on your income, education, professional background, technical skills marital relations...there are many exceptions to the residency rule.
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@mikloridden8276 Oh no. Thanks for explaining, and sorry for your experience. American "racial" classification and identification is interesting yet so unique. I suspect it can be difficult if one doesn't fall under a ready-made category.
But I do vividly remember Korean-American neighborhoods in LA were getting attacked when a White police officer shot a Black suspect. That was very confusing. You may have had a vastly different childhood--and even a different type of prejudice/discrimination--if you were raised in Mexico or Japan. If you were raised in Japan, I'm fairly certain you wouldn't be treated any better or worse just because you're half-Mexican, Peruvian, Colombian, Brazilian, Spanish, etc...
There is a famous actor by the name of SHIROTA Yu (Spain) and a TV anchor by the name of MASAI Maya (Mexico). On our national volleyball team, MOMII Aki (Peru) played in the Olympics. Ironically, our limited exposure and knowledge may be the reason why we don't really have strong stereotypes or prejudices against those countries. Cuz I know there are strong stereotypes in Japan against Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc.
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@mon_avis2978 I've met and worked with a few Japanese-Canadians, -Brazilians, -Peruvians, and -Americans. Honestly, having Japanese ancestry isn't anything special for us, because we all have Japanese parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.
Having Japanese ancestry doesn't mean we click automatically either. And a lot of Japanese immigrants don't speak Japanese or know Japanese culture, so it's not like we can speak to them in the same manner.
But the person who I found most fascinating was an Indonesian lady with a Japanese grandfather, who fought for Indonesian independence and later permanently resided in Indonesia. Her family history was beyond interesting.
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@julianneheindorf5757 There is no shame. If they wish to become a Japanese citizen, they can always naturalize. Foreign-nationals who were born, raised, and educated in Japan are given special advantages in the naturalization process.
And of all the different naturalization requirements, the bar is set the lowest for people with Special Permanent Residency. SPR is a hereditary legal residency, for people who migrated from Taiwan and the Korean peninsula, when they were legally "Japanese" citizens. Due to historic circumstances, they accidentally became "foreigners" after WWII. They only things that will prohibit naturalization is if they have criminal records, ties with foreign governments, etc.
In reality, people with Special Permanent Residency have all the necessary legal privileges they need to thrive in Japan. They are perfectly happy to keep their Taiwanese, South Korean, or North Korean nationality as well as identity while living in Japan as permanent residents. (This is in stark contrast to ROC citizens living in South Korea who were banned from owning property up to a few decades ago.)
The only obstacle for SPR holders is if they wish to work run for office or vote. There were people like ARAI Shokei who naturalized and joined the Ministry of Finance and later became a Member of Parliament. And there are also other naturalized citizens serving as politicians in Japan, who don't have a SPR background. I actually like our Jus Sanguinis citizenship rules, because it avoids creating accidental citizens who have no kinship or loyalty to Japan.
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@dfhgghf-b2j The brutal reality is Japanese society historically didn't perceive children of foreign fathers to be Japanese. It's because everything from KOSEKI, property, tombs, and surname are passed down from the paternal side of the family.
Which is also why Japan didn't grant Japanese citizenship to children of foreign fathers born before 1985, unless it was a special case like a single mother. Even today, only male lineage with a Japanese surname are described as "Nikkei-jin" in Japanese press. I think most people in Japan still wouldn't consider people like Nootbaar, Dave Roberts, or Adm Harry Harris to be Japanese or a Japanese Descendant. The press will never refer to them as NIKKEI-jin either. They just write they have/had a Japanese mother.
FYI, Japanese GEINOUKAI have long said that half celebrities with Japanese fathers tend to be more popular and successful than the other way around. There are many theories on why that is case, but it could be because they tend to physically look more Japanese, that their foreign mothers tend to match Japanese beauty standards, or that they're perfectly assimilated/integrated into Japanese society.
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@yummychips_ Sorry I'm just a hopelessly curious person. You may be surprised that we have small numbers of ethnic Tibetans from India and Nepal, Hmong from Laos, Tibeto-Burmese speakers from Northeast India, ethnic Shan (Mountain Thai), Kachin, and Karen tribes from Myanmar among others, ethnic Kazakhs from Mongolia, Yakut/Sakha and Buryat from Russia, Koryo-saram from Uzbekistan, as well as Hazara from Afghanistan living in Japan. Central Asia, Siberia, Northeast India, Southeast Asia, and Southern China are one of the most ethnically complex regions in the world...and it's very interesting.
FYI, There was a famous Japanese anthropologist named Kenzaburo TORIGOE who spent his entire life researching various ethnic groups in Southern China and Southeast Asia. He was most surprised by the Akka people living in Northern Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Yunnan Province in China. (They are related with the ethnic Hani people in Southern China who are famous for their terrace rice fields.) His observation was that their cuisine, architecture, animism, terrace rice fields, music, clothing....resembles that of ancient Japonic people. I was personally interested by the Ifugao people in the Philippines who have similar rice terrace field culture.
(This type of ethnic research is very popular in Japanese academia because we still don't know the point of origin of the Yayoi people who migrated to the Japanese Isle and southern regions of the Korean peninsula around 3,000 years at the latest. They were the people who lived in stilt-homes, built mega-tombs, had facial tattoos as social status and insignia, dived/fished, and introduced irrigated rice-farming to the Japanese Isle and southern regions of Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, we still don't even know whether Japanese is based on Jomon or Yayoi languages, or perhaps hybrid of the two.)
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You're not wrong but there is a Japanese context. We've always casually referred to all people under Imperial Russia and Soviet Union as "Russians." Therefore, Russian beauty in Japan is referring to all people who live in the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
And Japanese exposure and interaction is mostly with people from Siberia and Russian Far East, which has an unusually high percentage of "Russians" with Ukrainian ancestry due to past voluntary and involuntary relocations. (If I'm not mistaken, Russian Far East was briefly independent after the Russian Revolution and called itself Green Ukraine.) Just by historic accident, Japanese perception of "Russian" beauty is actually heavily Ukrainian.
I suspect most Japanese people don't realize that many of their favorite Russian ice-skaters have Tatar ancestry. Or that Lenin had partial Kalymk/Oirat/Mongol ancestry. But again, if one were to look at a map of Russia 500 years ago, there is no way 80% of current Russian citizens can have Rus/Eastern Slavic ancestry.
In other words, they are mostly indigenous people who were Russified/Slavicized under Imperial Russia. Which I presume is why a number of Russian aristocracy had Tatar ancestry. And Russian vocabulary has words derived from Tatar/Turkic, because Turkic was the common language for trading in the Eurasian Steppe for over 1,000 years. Turkic was used from the Mongolian Steppe all the way to Modern-day Hungary and Romania.
(Put differently, Ukrainians and Russians are fighting over Crimea which should historically belong to the Crimean Tatars.)
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@ohhi5237 I don't wish to sound like Putin, but defining "Ukrainian" genetics, culture, or ethnicity isn't easy.
I'm sure you're aware of the Greek-origin city names along the Black Sea coast of Ukraine and Russia, because they were once Greek outposts in ancient times. (Homer was writing about real Greek expeditions.) Scythians were highly civilized Eastern-Iranic speakers, who descended from proto-Indo Europeans that didn't migrate to Western Europe, North India, or Iran. Scythian artifacts are found in the border region of Ukraine and Russia.
They were eventually absorbed by successive waves of nomadic Eastern Eurasian Turkic clans (such as the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, and Khazars) who ruled the Caspian Sea and Black Sea coastal region. They heavily mixed with indigenous people and migrated all the way to modern-day Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria by 5th or 6th centuries. Which happens to be why Turkic/Tatar was the common trading language of the Eurasian steppe for over a thousand years.
And the ethno-genesis of the "Rus" are Scandinavian Vikings/Varyags who mixed with indigenous Baltic people, and settled along the Dnieper River, casually known as the "Kievan Rus." They were trading with/along the Black Sea, particularly with Constantinople/Istanbul as it was the cornerstone of the Silk Road trading route.
Descendants of all these various migrations mixed heavily. In later centuries some became Slavs, some became Tatars. Some identify as Ukrainians, others identify as Russians. There is varying degree of Eastern and Western Eurasian genetic admixture, but the classifications and divisions are often political, religious, linguistic, or cultural...but not genetics.
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I don't think we have a word for "Xenophobia" because the translation is 外国人嫌悪症, which is an artificially created word, and not widely used in Japanese. I've met many half-kids, and how they're treated depends on personality, upbringing, and education.
These days there are a number of popular actors, singers, and models who are half-Filipino and half-Japanese. Also I doubt anybody in Japan would consider athletes like DARVISH Yu, TAKAHASHI Ran, SAKAI Gohtoku, or TAIHO to be foreigners. (TAIHO was the most popular Yokozuna in the post-war era.) Our national Judo team has many half-kids. We also have politicians who are half-Japanese.
But I must say you do have a point on skin color and phenotype and general acceptance in Japan. But this is mostly for people with Japanese heritage. I believe Kaori-san, the Half-Colombian girl in this video, will almost always be treated as a Japanese person in Japan. (Perhaps the Colombian side also has mixed European and Indigenous/Asian ancestry.) And it's not just about her appearance. Her mannerism, voice, fashion, body-type, and make-up fits within Japanese expectations and beauty standards.
Many of the half-Filipino and half-Japanese celebrities who are popular in Japan don't look noticeably different from full-Japanese either. They either look full Japanese or quarter-foreign at most. So they are a bit exotic but not too exotic-looking, which does seem to match overall Japanese beauty standards these days. AKIMOTO Sayaka, TAKAHASHI Maryjun, and HAYAMI Mokomichi are well-known here.
Aside from half-Filipino background, there are so many famous half-people. There is a well-known announcer by the name of MASAI Maya, who is half-Mexican. TAKIGAWA Christel is half-French. SAWAJIRI Erika is half-Algerian-French. She was a popular actress until she got in trouble with the law. The MICHIBATA sisters are also well-known...for a variety of reasons. If I recall Leah Dizon was also popular in Japan some time ago, and she has Chinese-Filipino-French ancestry. While she didn't have any Japanese ancestry, and her Japanese was limited because she's from the US, her looks and personality made her very successful as a model.
As such, if you're half-Asian, most of us won't even notice it. If you're half-European, depends on the mixture and phenotype. Sadly, I suspect the people who struggle the most in Japan would be the half-Black kids, particularly those who look more Black than Asian.
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@sunglee3935 I suspect the Korean girl in this video was partially educated/raised in Japan or spent a very (very) long time in Japan. I've studied and worked with quite a few people from South Korea, but I've never encountered somebody with that level of native fluency, even for Koreans who have graduated universities in Japan. Her intonation, choice of words, expressions, timing/pause between words, and mannerism is that of a native speaker.
I'm assuming it's a similar situation in South Korea. Native speakers are exposed to all sorts of regional and generational speech, so people have a high degree of tolerance when it comes to conversational speech. We'll often be able to identify a Korean or Chinese from the way they speak Japanese, but we can still understand what they're asking/saying regardless.
Koreans usually struggle with ざじずぜぞ as well as certain vowel sounds because it doesn't exist in Korean phonetics. And Chinese often struggle with grammar, but there are certain regional differences based on the Chinese dialect they speak. For reasons I'm not really sure, Mongolians often speak Japanese like they spent their entire life in Japan. (Ethnic Koreans and Mongols from PRC have the easiest time of all people due to grammar and KANJI.)
In theory, if one can pronounce あいうえお correctly, one should be able to pronounce most Japanese sounds correctly. Interestingly, Romance/Latin and Slavic speakers seem to have the easiest time due to phonetic overlap. In contrast, some people from Asia have incredible difficulty in pronouncing the basic vowels. (It's exactly same when Japanese people study foreign languages. Accurately pronouncing basic vowel sounds is much harder than people think.)
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If you wish to become a near-native speaker, I'd focus on mastering pitch accent, intonation, and rhythm of the language. You may use the correct words, sentence order, or expression, but if you speak in a different melody it becomes increasingly challenging for natives to understand you. A native speaker will have no difficulty understanding slight pronunciation deviations. We are used to regional and generational accents, but if you were to speak Japanese with a Cantonese melody it becomes a different language. It's because we judge the meaning, context, or intent from the pitch accent.
I've noticed that aside from Mongolia, South Korea, China, and Taiwan...those who have studied Japanese in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe speak incredible Japanese. Their level of fluency in language and culture is just beyond my comprehension. I wish they could teach us on how to study foreign languages/cultures because many of them in Japan are near-native Japanese speakers. And Japanese is like their 3rd, 4th, or 5th language.
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