First, ‘arigatou’ does not originate from Portuguese ‘obrigado’, as someone claimed. It is a polite form of the still-existing word ‘arigatai’ which originally meant ‘rare’ (lit. ari+gatai, ‘exist+difficult to do’) and then by extension ‘worthy of gratitude’. There is an old form of keigo (respectful Japanese) by which adjectives ending in -ai are changed to -oo, for example ‘wakai’ would become ‘wakou’, although this is rarely used anymore. The word ‘arigatou’ was used to show gratitude long before contact was made between the Japanese and Portuguese.

Secondly, someone noted that ‘ the Japanese language is nothing like any other asian language. It has more in common with Hebrew and other languages of the middle east including Turkish. (Same sentence structure.)’ Japanese syntax is extremely similar to Korean, and they are both vaguely similar to Turkish, Estonian, and other members of the Ural-Altaic language family. This has nothing to do with Hebrew, and Japanese does not have any noteworthy syntactical similarities to any Middle Eastern languages besides Turkish (which is actually Indo-European). It also has other (non-syntactical) similarities to several Asian languages (southeast Asian, Mongolian, Pacific Island, etc.) I don’t think a case can be made that Japanese has a genetic relationship to Hebrew, aside from perhaps a few lexical borrowings.

Also, the linguistic similarities presented in the video do not have me convinced. It is well-attested that Hiragana and Katakana are originally kanji shorthand, and it is easy to figure out both from historical records and simple observation which kana stood for which kanji. And while I can believe that a tribe of Israelites settled in Tokushima and influenced some aspects of art, religious customs, and vocabulary related to those customs, I find it hard to swallow that this one tribe in Shikoku would change such basic words in the vocabulary as ‘write’ and ‘take’ for the entire nation of Japan. And the word 拍手(hakushu, ‘clap’) is obviously from Chinese – it is written the same in both languages, the first character meaning ‘tap a rhythm’ and the second meaning ‘hand’. In Cantonese this word is ‘paaksau’, in Korean, ‘paksu’.

When comparing languages, it is easy to fall into the trap of fishing for random similarities and then deciding there are so many that it couldn’t possibly be coincidence. People have made this mistake many times throughout history. It is when there is a systematic pattern to the similarities, and when the similarities are not just lexical but also phonological/syntactical that it is worth our attention.

In order to test the veracity of this claim of an Israeli tribe in Tokushima, I would research further into the art history of the Hata clan (for more evidence of ‘Western-influenced art’ than a big-nosed mask), language specific to awa-ben (the dialect spoken in Tokushima), and mitochondrial DNA. I’m actually going to be living in Tokushima starting at the end of this month (and very close to the site mentioned – I have friends there!), so I wonder if I can find anything interesting!

Isaac Kazansky

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