> >"British" and "Japanese" are races?
>
> Yes.

So the Scots, the Welsh and the English are all members of the same "race",
which excludes Germans, Scandinavians, French, etc., unless they arrived in
Britain hundreds of years ago? And Black British are also of this "British
race"?

If so, what is the basis of the idea of "race"? Recent research indicates
that the Celts absorbed a large amount of the genetic make-up of the
previous Stone Age inhabitants and that the genetic composition of the
average Englishman is, in turn, about 50% Celtic, so there may in fact be a
greater degree of genetic continuity among the various longstanding
inhabitants of the British Isles than is generally supposed, but you'd still
have a lot of difficulty getting most Scots/Welsh to accept that they share
a racial identity with the Sassenachs/Saesnegs, and even among the English,
there are those with a greater degree of Viking traits, those with more
Saxon traits, etc.

In Japan's case, the four main islands were once connected and Kyushu and
Hokkaido were both joined to the mainland, whence came the people of the
Jomon period, although there are indications that at least some of the
inhabitants of the Jomon period were of Pacific island origin. The Yayoi
arrived much later (but recent evidence suggests it was quite a bit earlier
than archeologists had assumed), and can be traced to northern China
(though, having been forced from the region by the desertification of the
Gobi, they mainly entered Japan via Korea), but they were later
displaced/assimilated by later waves of immigrants. (That is a hugely
simplified summary of a very complex process.) People like Kaz are still
claiming Jomon and Yayoi ethnicity and culture persist even now as
identifiably distinct phenomena in different regions of Japan (much as
Celtic and Anglo-Saxon traits can still be differentiated in Britain).

I guess it depends what your definition of "race" is, but complications like
the above explain why anthropology has pretty much abandoned the idea of
race, and speaks instead of "breeding populations", which are generally made
up from a mixture of ethnic backgrounds, which are themselves made up from a
mixture, and generally have porous boundaries, so that further mixing is
constantly going on. The longer a breeding population has been isolated from
others, and the less porous its boundaries have been, the more it will
appear to be unique and distinct from other breeding populations. But trace
any breeding population back far enough and it will be found to be composed
of a mixture of other breeding populations. (The Kalahari Bushmen may be an
exception; no one as far as I know has convincingly related them to any
other breeding population.)

If by "race" you mean an ethnically coherent identity, no, neither the
British nor the Japanese are races, and the term race with this meaning is
no longer accepted by anthropologists (except perhaps a few who, on the
whole, have some kind of extreme right-wing "cultural supremacy" agenda). If
you mean a group of people who *perceive* themselves as having some kind of
shared identity then, yes, you can say they are races, but since that
approach is based on the premise that the word race doesn't have any
objective meaning,  it seems pretty pointless.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com