Kaka and Neymar lead the rout of Brazil to Japan

In an international friendly the Canarinha  won 4-0 against the Japanese . Santos striker and midfielder for Real Madrid made ​​a difference to those of Menezes. A comparison of preparation was played in Wroclaw (Poland), after having defeated Brazil 6-0 Iraq. After single game against the Middle East (played in Sweden), Brazil faced Japan, directed by Italian Alberto Zaccheroni , who was presented as a challenge because the Japanese  were coming to beat France 1-0 in Gaul. Those of Mano Menezes had not, however, impose greater difficulties: first was Paulinho , at 12 minutes the first time, who with a shot from outside the area provided for the 1-0. At 23 minutes, the Canarinha  were 2-0 after  Neymar  goal changed to a penalty that he committed to Kaka.  Santos striker  also scored the 3-0 at 2 minutes after complement overflow and send the izquieda a center that deflected off a defender Japanese. The icing on the cake put  Kaka , one of the most loved by the fans, who defined a perfect one against which decreed the  end 4-0 , in the 30th minute of the second part. 

READ MORE - Kaka and Neymar lead the rout of Brazil to Japan

Seeking the Yayoi

The conventional pre-history of Japan involves horseback riding soldiers called the Yayoi entering Japan around the area where it comes closest to Korea around sometime in the middle of the first millenium before the current era, where the indigeneous people, who had lived there for 30,000 years, called the Jomon, a fishing oriented pottery making people who were linguistic and ethnic close relatives of the modern Ainu minority of Northern Japan were assimilated into the Yayoi superstrate in a process of ethnogenesis that gave rise to the modern Japanese people.

Until around 1000 CE, the northern Honshū island was inhabited by the Emishi to whom we can be quite definitive in attaching an Ainu ethnicity and language affiliation, and Ainu related people also inhabited the region known as Ezo, consisting of the island of Hokkaidō; and were formerly spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. So, for the first 1300 years, the Yayoi were pretty much confined to Southern Japan.

The Yayoi may have been some manner of Korean people, although which of the ancient Korean kingdoms they (and the modern Korean language) have the strongest affinity to is disputed.

As I noted in a wikipedia article on the origin of the Japanese language that is linked above: "Current estimates are that "wago" (i.e. words attributable to the original Yaoyi language) make up 33.8% of the Japanese lexicon, that "knago" (i.e. words with roots borrowed from Chinese since the 5th century CE) make up 49.1% of Japanese words (and in addition, the Chinese ideograms used in the Japanese written language), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8.8% of Japanese words, and that 8.3% of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages. This account attributes only a small number of words in modern Japanese to Ainu roots." Almost all of the various characters used to write down Japanese are also borrowed from Chinese.

I'd instinctively favor an account that suggests that the Ainu linguistic contribution is undercounted, but because Ainu is a living language that is well attested, as is Chinese, and given that Japanese and Chinese have been a literary language for most of the time period in question, I suspect that an identification of wago words with the original Yayoi language is probably pretty accurate.

There are strongly suggestive indications that the Yayoi language was Altaic, a language family that also has as core members, the Turkic languages, the Mongolian languages, and the Tungusic languages of Manchuria. The geographic scope of the proposed Altaic language family members is considerable as this map from Wikipedia indicates:

But, historically, this spread was quite recent.

The Turkic languages reached Central Asia, Europe and Turkey within the last seventeen hundred years or so. Their ethnogenesis is associated with the arrival of the Bronze Age and horses in the Northeastern Asian region sometime in the vincinity of 1500 BCE to 700 BCE.

The traditional date for the Yayoi arrival in Japan is 2700 years ago, and most evidence to date suggest an actual arrival a few hundred years later. This would be consistent with the Yayoi as a cultural offshoot of the proto-Turkic peoples.

While the empire of Ghengis Khan was the largest on land known to man, in the late middle ages, until a eight or nine hundred years ago, it was confined to Mongolia, Northern China and perhaps Eastern Siberia where it is found today (the only linguistic legacy of its expansion is the Oirat language spoken by peoples on the Caspian plains of Russia. The Mongolians first entire recorded history in the 4th century CE in Manchuria and Mongolia as a nomadic people called the Khitan people.

The Tungusic languages have remains at all times largely confined to Manchuria.

Japanese and Korean are clearly not Tibet-Burmese languages, despite their heavy borrowing from Chinese, and the linguistic case of the an Altaic affiliation for Japanese and Korean (presumably via its Yayoi roots) is not trivial. The Altaic languages, Old Japanese and Korean all have a linguistic feature called vowel harmony that is rarely, if ever, found in other languages. Similarities have also been found in verb conjugation classes, and there has been some success in matching tonal aspects of Japanese to consonants found in other Altaic languages. Vovin has suggested that as many as 15 to 23 core Old Japanese words have Altaic proto-language counterparts, far more than chance would suggest, and almost all of the Altaic-Japanese correspondences are wago words. The Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean are also notable for a lack of noun classes and lack of grammatic gender.

So far, so good. There is a problem, however. While Japanese population genetics do parse rather neatly into East Asian and Jomon components, the East Asian genetic component looks far more like the Chinese than it does like the Altaic populations of Northeastern Eurasia.

It isn't so hard to imagine how this could happen. In the same vein, Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia don't have a very strong genetic link to the Turkish language speaking people of Anatolia. One imagines that an ethnically Chinese population in and around Korea may have been a subject people of a Altaic language speaking elite leading to a language shift in the population (at least among the elites that would go on to conquer Japan as the Yayoi), with little Altaic genetic admiture from the ruling elite to the soldiers who went on to conquer Japan.

This pushes the genetic forebears of the Yayoi to the Southwest, and the linguistic and cultural forebears of the Yayoi to the North, probably North of Korea entirely.

Given that Japanese appears to have more lexical similarity to Proto-Turkic than to other Altaic language family languages, that Proto-Turkic was the first of the Alataic languages to experience an expansion out of Asia, and that Japanese lexical links to Altaic languages appear to be mediated through Proto-Turkic, one imagines the linguistic forebears of the Japanese to be Proto-Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia.

This would have been some time after the 4th millenium before the current era, when the horse appears to have been domesticated (probably reaching the Turks as a cultural transmission from Indo-European language speakers such as the Tocharians or their immediately predecessors in Central Asia), but no later than the 3rd millenium before the current era when the Yayoi arrive in Japan, which is strongly consistent with Proto-Turkic ethnogenesis.

The Proto-Turkic expansion would presumably start a little later than the Indo-European expansions, given the direction of horse domestication transmission and Bronze Age technology transmission across the Russian Steppe, and Finno-Urgic a.k.a. Uralic languages of that region appear to be older still than Indo-European languages. In addition, some of the region, prior to the expansions of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages with the horse would have spoken Paleo-Siberian languages such as Yenesian which has linguistic links to the Na-Dene languages of North America.

READ MORE - Seeking the Yayoi

Fukishima Risk

Japan did some good things to respond to the Fukishima reactor disaster. Most importantly, they evacuated people close to the reactor promptly. Radiation intensity declines as a function of distance squared from the source. Harm from radiation is roughly proportional to duration time intensity. Thus, the sooner you evacuate people who are closest to the scene, the more you mitigate harm.

At 50 km away from the source, the intensity is 1% of intensity at 5 km away, which is in turn 1% of the intensity at 500 meters away. The intensity at 500km away is about one millionth of the intesity at 500 meters away. The intensity at 5000 km away (the continental U.S. perhaps) is about one hundred millionth as great.

How Great Was The Exposure?

The risk at 50 km away in this case for twenty-four hours on the peak days (March 16/17), 3.6 microSv was at an intensity that was exceed unsafe levels if sustained for a week or two, and about three times as much as the highest exposure of anyone outside the plant received for the entire duration of the Three Mile Island incident and about the same as a half an hour at a typical spot at the Chernobyl plant in 2010. The risk at 300 km away would be safe almost indefinitely.

This intensity of exposure hasn't been sustained, but radiation levels have been elevated.

The exposure at 5km away for the same twenty-four hours (360 microSV), is close to the amount necessary to induce immediate radiation poisoning, would be about seven times safe levels for an entire year in that day alone, is about three hundred times as much as the highest exposure of anyone outside the plant received for the entire duration of the Three Mile Island incident, and is about the same as fifty hours at a typical spot at the Chernobyl plant in 2010.

At 500 meters away from the source in that time period, a four and a half hour exposure is almost inevitably fatal, and thirteen and a half minutes would be enough to induce immediate radiation sickness. At 50 meters away from the source in that time period, a three minute exposure is almost inevitably fatal and eight seconds would be enough to induce immediate radiation sickness. At 5 meters away from the source in that time period, a two second exposure is almost inevitably fatal.

Some plant employees and accident response workers may face deadly doses of radiation (and they were probably acutely aware of that risk and heroically did their jobs anyway), but the general population of Japan isn't at nearly that risk.

Also in the good news department is that the quite low levels of radioactivity found at greater distances from the plant have been mostly in form of radioactive iodine that has a quite rapid half life and won't be a continuing source of high level radioactivity exposure.

Implications

The Fukishima accident is still a big deal. It is at least the second worst civilian nuclear power plant disaster in the history of the world. It is far worse that Three Mile Island. Time will tell if this is worse or not as bad as Chernobyl, although it seems likely that it will be not as bad, and a swift response should help as well to mitigate the impact. On the other hand, the harm can only be mitigated if a sustainable way to limit ongoing radiation exposure can be found fairly swiftly. Progress is being made on this front, but it isn't clear that a sustainable solution has been found yet.

While low level nuclear waste rapidly decays to non-dangerous radioactivity levels, high level nuclear waste from the core of reactors continues to be dangerous for much longer time periods.

Even if a solution is found to stop intense radiation from escaping the plant, unless it can be almost perfectly contained, there is a real likelihood that the plant will have to be abandoned and that some radius around them will have to be put off limits as a hot zone. The proximity of the plant to the ocean (it is about 200 meters from the ocean), while good for short term cooling resources, also makes keeping radioactivty materials confined to the plant in the long term harder.

The evacuation has disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousand of people for weeks, the disaster will probably lead to permanent loss of large amounts of real estate and tangible person property for tens of thousands of people (in excess of the losses directly caused by the tsunami and earthquake) probably on the order of a billion dollars worth, will probably kill tens of people from radiation exposure, will probably cause something on the order of a billion dollars of damage to the plant, and will seriously inconvenience hundreds of millions of people. The harm is on the order of magnitude of several billions of dollars, or even tens of billions of dollars depending on remediation costs, etc.

This may still be an acceptable cost if very infrequent compared to coal that kills 30,000 people a year in the United States alone (about the same as the entire toll of the tsunami and earthquake scaled to Japan's population), but it isn't nominal either.

READ MORE - Fukishima Risk