In this article, I intend to unveil the existence known as Wajin [倭人], a concept considered to constitute the ethnic bedrock of the Japanese people in ancient history. However, having drafted a significant portion of this inquiry, I sensed a friction. This insight is so dense that even when articulated in Japanese to a Japanese audience, it invites profound confusion. The risk of misunderstanding inherent in my usual long form structures is too great. Therefore, I have decided to distill this into a manageable volume and release it in several discrete pieces. Also, to preemptively cordon off misconception, let me suggest at the outset that the existence of Wajin does not designate a specific ethnic proper noun within Japan. It is rather a term that came into natural usage through historical convention after a certain era, a figure that remains nothing more than vague and abstract. Consequently, to say “this person originates from the Wajin” is not merely inappropriate in Japan but an impossibility. Such a recognition fails to reach even the minimum threshold for debate and is rendered completely meaningless. The point of contention is not to focus on the presence or absence of the Wajin, but to deepen our inquiry based on the fundamental question: What is the Wajin?
Another crucial fulcrum is to question whether a people called Wajin, or a specific ethnic group that could be positively identified as such, actually existed in the early historical period of Japan. That is to say, we must ask whether the Wajin functioned historically as a rigorous concept indicating a specific ethnicity or tribal collective equal to the name. However, as a practical matter, the examination of the Wajin up to the present day has been egregious. Even now, there is a strong tendency to abuse this abstract and nebulous concept of Wajin, employing it capriciously across various fields. I am weary of this strange situation where everyone speaks of the Wajin while knowing nothing of them, yet one could argue that the historical image of Japan is being distorted by this very phenomenon. Or perhaps, rather than distorted, it is fundamentally flawed from its very standpoint. If historical arguments are developed based on concept formation that ignores these basics, the innumerable ideologies deployed in the modern age will inevitably intervene and ensnare the discourse. Consequently, the outrage of meaninglessly producing ethnic problems is affirmatively manufactured. However, I will proceed by completely discarding the attitude of those who see only the signifier in history. From a strong stance of refusing to pander to such foolish perspectives, I wish to deepen the consideration of the Wajin, which floats as a phantom full of misunderstandings. The reason is that the Wajin is being exploited for indigenous issues, a problem that does not apply within the context of Japan.
First, the figure of the so-called Wajin ethnicity frequently posited as a premise is narrated as follows. It is a structure of binary opposition in the history of the settlement of the Shogunate forces in Hokkaido around the late Edo period, where the Wajin invaded the land of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido.