on the non-violent japanese of today

dennis has a post up re. how orderly and altruistic the japanese have been|are being during this god-awful disaster they’re living through.

and i agree with him: obviously their behavior is not just a product of their culture or the high living standard that they have enjoyed since … well since for a very long time, afaics! … or whatever.

kurt9 reminds us that, after the great kantō earthquake in 1923, a couple (or more?) thousand koreans and chinese, who were living in japan at that time, were killed by the japanese, who blamed the foreigners for all sorts of troublemaking after the quake.

the question arises, then — why isn’t that happening now? (maybe it will yet?) what has changed?

i don’t know very much about japan and the japanese, so i’m not sure. but i do want to point out one thing, having to do with one of my favorite topics, that may be a contributing factor — consanguinity. over the past couple generations, the levels of inbreeding in japan have decreased. in fact, from the 1940s/50s to the 1980s, the consanguinity rates dropped by about half (data from consang.net):

from the 1940s to the 1980s, then, the japanese became much less clannish. presumably, the consanguinity rates have not increased since the 80s, so it’s likely that the japanese of today are even less clannish that those of 30 years ago.

keep in mind, too, that most of the data from the 40s/50s shown above were collected from urban centers, and urban centers tend to have lower consanguinity rates as a rule — compare, for instance, Tokyo & Osaka in 1981 (0.4%) with All Japan in 1983 (3.9%). so, it’s very likely that the “All Japan” rate for the 40s/50s was much higher than what you see here. extrapolating back to the 1920s, and … yeah … the japanese were probably pretty gosh-durned clannish at the time of the great kantō earthquake.

i’m guessing that the japanese pattern of cousin marriage was (is) prolly matrilineal like in much of east and southeast asia, but i don’t know for certain. if so, then that’s very different from what you see in the middle eastern|north african|south asian world and, no doubt, goes a long way to explaining why the japanese are not a bunch of lunatic tribal peoples. (because all cousins are not created equal.)

still, the japanese are not like us. even though they may be marrying their cousins less, kinda like us, they are still much more endogamous than we are — japanese people mostly marry other japanese people — which probably accounts for why they’re generally not so keen on mass immigration to their country. (good for them!)

update 03/19: see also Genes, Not “Culture”—Why the Japanese Don’t Loot from jared taylor

update 03/20: see also the japanese ARE raping and pillaging!

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