|
Race is simply an exercise of how far you want to go back in history to differentiate your particular group. Go back far enough, and every human being is from the same "race." Go back a little less than that, and we actually belong to one of five "races" (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Dravidic, Austronesian, Negroid). Go back even less than that, and we might subdivide that list further by language (Sino-Tibetan, Altaitc, etc.) Even less, we can add in some culture, nationalism, and modern politics. And finally, might as well consider your direct family lines, since it's more likely than not that you're a mix of some kind.
In Aso's case, "race" is clearly used more as a modern designation of ethnicity than a historical definition of ancestry. Japan is very mixed. All of East Asia is. South Koreans and Japanese arguing who's more "pure" is sheer hilarity, but even more hilarious is the frequent attempt to use modern genetic studies to "prove" political viewpoints. People have to realize that all of modern anthropology is a work-in-progress. Nobody knows for sure how the various migrations happened, and all the current population studies are more or less incomplete. Maybe in a hundred years we can have a clearer picture of who's related to who, but even then, I suspect, this whole "race" controversy will not end - simply because race, as I said earlier, is a politically-motivated cutoff of a certain moment in human history.
|