Customer Reviews

The Zuni Enigma: A Native American People's Possible Japanese Connection

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I disagree with my fellow Zunis that the contents of the book couldn't have been possible or suggest discrediting it. The fact that the book is titled "Zuni Enigma" is correct in the true sense of the word enigma. It raises many more questions than can be answered and the author states this intention up front. She makes the plea that all these questions require further study. Whether you call it a theory or a hypothesis, it is to her credit that she recognized something that no one else had and now it is up to the experts in their respective fields to confirm or disprove her theory. As she mentioned, it took her over 40 years of gathering evidence and consulting before she wrote the book. I don't think anyone could accuse her of rushing to get the book out.
I can see how someone can be threatened by the mere mention of a connection to another culture such as the Japanese. Maybe it is a reaction to typical anthropological ideas where a Native American culture couldn't possibly have original or distinct ideas. This may be one reason that the typical Zuni would jump to conclusions about the author's intentions. I heard the radio talk show in Albuquerque, NM when the author was interviewed along with our governor and councilman. I felt ashamed as a Zuni how close minded and rude they were to Nancy Yaw Davis. She was very cordial to them and didn't get upset despite their behavior. She kept repeating that the material needed further study.
It seemed to me that the councilman only saw what he wanted to see and took several comparisons to words out of context. He seemed offended and thought that the book was about the Zuni's coming from Japan. It was a very uncharacteristically Zuni reaction. It is a part of our culture to treat everyone with respect and not to "hurt another's heart" whoever they might be.
The one aspect of the language that we might never know is the actual pronunciation of "old Zuni" words. Since Zuni is not a written language, it has changed throughout the years and some of the proposed identical words might have been more so in antiquity. One observation that stood out for me was the word "hai!" when listening to one another, to signify "I hear you, I understand, go on." As anyone who might have seen the "Shogun" series on TV, that was a Japanese response with the same meaning. The word might not be used with the younger people, but I remember hearing it a lot as I was growing up. The Zuni language is like no other surrounding Pueblo language or like any other in the world. I found the following observations compelling for this reason. Basic Zuni and Japanese syntax are both subject-object-verb. Both languages primarily alter words with suffixes, not with prefixes or internally. Japanese and Zuni employ 22 phonemes, and 17 are the same. All the vowels and 12 out of 16 consonants are identical.
I agree with the author about the uniqueness of our Zuni people and the rich heritage we still possess. I would recommend the book more for the respectful and appreciative explanation of our society in the first few chapters. I don't fully agree with the physical theories she introduces without the forensic investigations that can be conducted with modern technologies. If any contact was made in antiquity with the Japanese, both cultures might have benefited and contributed equally.
Again, the evidence shown in the book wasn't meant to be conclusive. It was meant to present a hypothesis that required further study. The only outright mistake I found was "Halona Itiwanna" being referred to as the middle place. Halona is across the river from the current location of Itiwanna. Halowa means to dream or make a mistake. Therefore, "Halona Itiwanna" means mistaken middle place. The true middle place is just called "Itiwanna."
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anyone has continued with her work. I hope to travel to Japan someday and see for myself.

What a great book. Facts are presented very clearly and in detail. If you're interested in either Japanese or Native American history this is worth the price of the hardcover. Is the author's thesis correct? Well, that's hard to say for sure but she poses very credible arguments and definately leaves the reader with a lot of fascinating possibilities on the origin of Zuni culture. The book is not necessarily light reading but it is a fairly easy read just because the subject matter is so well-presented. You can tell this was a real labor of love for the author. A must for any anthropology student!

I believe the premise Ms. Davis puts forward stands a good possibility of being proven someday. Unfortunately, this book doesn't prove it. Only after reading the book several times did I become convinced there's probably some solid fact behind the Zuni origin she proposes.
One of the problems with the book in my view is the temptation Ms. Davis indulges to become an apologist for the Native American past. This leads her into directions she needn't have followed with time better spent supporting her own premises. Her attempts to find unlikely possibilities to explain evidence of NA cannibalism are one example. The fact is we humans have such things in our history. All of us. There's no reason, nor any excuse for attempting to mitigate such facts, nor to apologize for them.
The Zunis are a strange people. I've read some of the other reviews suggesting Zunis look the 'same as other Indians in the southwest', which I'd disagree with. The various tribes, including Zunis don't look the same as one another. People who live in this area can usually tell a Zuni or a Navajo (or Acoma, Laguna, Mescalero) from one another from a distance. To suggest the tribes look alike is probably a matter most southwesterners would find objectionable. I'd say Zunis look more like Japanese than, say, Mescaleros do, or than Navajos do.
In any case I think the Davis book is worth reading because of the interesting premise. I wish she'd had the time to pursue the matter further than she did.

Anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis was first struck by similarities between a chart of yin-yang cosmology and the Zuni religious system she had already mapped as a grad student in 1960. Gathering suggestive evidence from a variety of disciplines, from ceramics and linguistics to medical/genetic, she has taken 40 years to bring it all together in this book, so one could hardly accuse her of rushing to publish!

Her thesis is that Japanese immigrants -- perhaps Buddhist priests, perhaps peasants fleeing persecution or seeking a better life -- crossed the Pacific and made their way to the Southwest interior by the late 13th century, to merge with the locals (Anasazi?) and give rise to the Zuni. Her evidence is all circumstantial, but quite suggestive, perhaps even persuasive.

Other reviewers have mentioned the Japanese chrysanthemum and Zuni sacred rosette, artwork, and kidney disease. Zuni creation myths, with their stories of ancestors coming from the west to escape earthquakes and find the middle of the earth, are tantalizing. There are considerable similarities between Japanese syntax and words, and Zuni, for which linguists have been able to find no other relations. The Type B blood allele tends to be absent in all other Native American tribes, high in Asians (20-40 percent), low in Caucasians (0-15 percent) -- but between 10-32 percent of Japanese carry it, and about 10 percent of Zuni.

There are many other disciplines into which Yaw Davis dips and finds commonalities between Japanese and Zuni: folk practices for training children, archeological deposits off the coast of California containing ancient iron spikes and huge, heavy, Chinese-style stone "doughnut" anchors, Asian coins woven into Tlingit armor. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that lead glazed pottery, found nowhere else in the Southwest but common in Asia, turns up among the Zuni in the late 13th century, but deteriorates and disappears soon after, which implies a sudden introduction that didn't last.

The book is easily readable -- sometimes TOO casually written (what does it mean to say that, after inventing language, humans "literally took off"?) -- and has plenty of maps and photos. Yaw Davis could have organized her case better, and restated her thesis and its strongest evidence at the end instead of cutting the book short rather abruptly.

But the case is compelling, and one looks forward to the specialists in various other fields putting her theory to the test.

I comment here on the linguistic material in Davis' book, which is scattered throughout but with a major concentration in Chapter 7. The book is challenging and interesting, and some of Davis' other evidence might perhaps hold up; but her expertise in historical linguistics (despite having taken a course in it) is inadequate for the task of demonstrating a link between the Zuni and the Japanese languages. She is more judicious and scholarly than most amateur historical linguists with bees in their bonnets, refers (not always with great insight) to the works of mainstream experts and discusses some structural features of the two languages. But she still ends up positing links (involving shared origin and later contact) on the basis of (a) very general and widespread structural features such as basic word order and (b) superficial similarities (often only very rough; not at all systematic) between Zuni and Japanese words with similar meanings. This kind of approach was found wanting over a century ago, and is now used mainly by fringe amateurs. Even the few linguists who still regard superficial similarities as potentially reliable use much larger samples of vocabulary and put more emphasis on systematic correspondences. In sum, Davis does not come near to proving her case in linguistic terms. It must also be said that her casual, throw-away style does not inspire confidence.

Not unlike Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, Nancy Yaw Davis, after decades of research, has been on a five-year journey to write this book and has returned with "my theory of a thousand themes". Did a group of thirteenth-century Japanese pilgrims journey to the American Southwest, there to merge with the people, language, and religion of the Zuni tribe? The beauty of this book is that she is a very articulate guide as she takes you back through time in order to understand the present. Why does the Japanese imperial emblem (the Chrysanthemum) look so much like the Zuni sacred rosette? Why are the nearby Hopi Indians the only ones that do sand paintings and why are they similar to Tibetan Buddhist mandalas? Why do the earliest pottery fragments in the New World occur near the tip of South America and not near the Bering Strait? Why do the Zunis and the Japanese share a rare kidney disease? Why did the Zuni veteran of World War II and a prisoner of the Japanese say: "I always wondered why I spoke Japanese so easily"? With 227 pages of easily read text, 98 figures, maps and tables, 49 pages of endnotes and 31 pages of bibliography, she offers the evidence and asks the scientific community to open their minds and begin to think differently. How many Ph.D. candidates will do their thesis on the evidence she offers and the many questions she asks? A good read for everyone and great conversation enhancer.

The author suggests that medieval Japanese sea-goers arrived just in time to join the Zuni Native Americans in their search for the center of the world. The Japanese, according to the author, were also on a search for the Western Paradise of the Jodo Shu and Shin-Shu Buddhists. Somehow these two searches became one and the Japanese group over time became part of the Zuni genetic and cultural heritage. Davis points to linguistic, genetic and cultural parallels between the Zuni and the Japanese, reconsiders ancient stories of the Zuni, and presents some dubious artifacts as evidence for her claims. I found myself wishing for more evidence more clearly presented. Still, the thesis is intriguing enough to warrant four stars.

This book develops Davis' theory that some Japanese, possibily motivated by a religious quest, migrated to North America and interbred with Native Americans, producing the people known today as the Zuni. She describes many points of physical and cultural similarity between the Zuni and the Japanese, though she does not provide direct evidence for a voyage across the Pacific. While Davis does not fully prove her case, her anthropological detective work has opened up some interesting leads. Some of this material may seem dry and technical to non-anthropologists. The book is well illustrated in black and white.

In this book Davis defends the premise that about 1350 AD (not BC!) a group of Japanese pilgrims went to America, mingled with Indians (Anasazi or their neighbors) to form the Zuni. The book lists those aspects of Zuni and Japanese culture and language in which the author sees enough correspondence. Common cultural features, however, do not always prove relationship: both the Egytians and the Meso-Americans built pyramids. I also find the linguistic part unconvincing; if anything it suggests a long-range relationship of both languages to Eurasian.

Worse, I think a serious problem with Davis' thesis is that 14th century Japanese pilgrims would have known about writing, and it is very hard to believe that they would have given it up. And even if they had, one would expect remnants of script to appear ornamentally. As the author says in the last paragraph: "These finding may nor be conclusive, but together they are suggestive." Whether it is more than that is doubtful.

Links between Asia and the Americas have long been suspected, presence of the sweet potato in Polynesia for example, yet little scholarly work has been available for the general public on this topic. This book takes a careful, scholarly approach to this controversial topic, yet does it in a gentle, disarming manner. A good scholar, the writer brings up many questions for others to pursue, while outlining her thesis steadily, point by point. The book covers links between Japan and Native America through archeology, comparitive linguistics, art, religion and even dental morphology. Yet despite a weight of evidence supporting her thesis, she never gets preachy, never talks down to her audience. Instead she takes a gentle tone of increasing interest in the idea that Japan and the Americas before Columbus had a meaningful and lasting connection. This book is well written, thought-provoking, insightful and a very good read.