By Derek Dashwood

We all came out of Africa, and modern worldwide DNA take all women back, and all men, to a man and woman in central east Africa near the Oldavai Gorge and the eternal eden of tropical weather. This has only recently been confirmed. As we poured out of Africa at that narrow stretch into Asia minor, those who went east branched into two main and separate family groups. Those whose black skins moderated to golden went north of the Himalaya Mountains, across the Gobi desert and into the lush lands of coastal China, where they thrived into one billion, three hundred million people.

These golden people pushed on to the off islands of Taiwan and particularly to Japan, where by then even the beginnings of a very simple language style was taking form, very different from those who had gone south east into India, and it was they who later moved west through Persia into Europe. The golden people extended north to the Arctic sea and it was they who crossed into America and skipped down coastal routes, science now believes, bypassing the retreating ice age glaciers some 30,000 years ago.

In Asia, while Chinese peoples swept down through south Asia, China became the isolated yet highly civilized Middle Kingdom for thousands of years undisturbed. And off shore Japan followed this cultural model, including Buddhism, while adapting to a fierce feudal system that involved Samurai soldiers, swords, barbarity and noble acts, but little of the democracy of today. But for early Christian missionaries, to witness roadways of impaled people dying slow deaths seemed to speak of a hellish nightmare of a place, red ant madness, death to all black ants and make it slow.

And the Samurai soldier who could best defend the Shogun was mighty indeed, and welcomed into the inner court at will. For the swordsman, and the Shogun, both lived in such an untrustworthy world of their own father's creation, clung to each other while they inflicted more pain on others. Those magnificent swords parted many a black ant head from it's body. And if the swordsman did fail, himself would impale. A bloody history, magnificent swords. They did save Japan from the Great Khan of China. Twice.

Worth respect these Japanese swords; we know how the Great Khan greeted his new subjects. It usually involved pain, then death. So, progress. You can have the keys to the warehouse vault, no Shogun or Samurai on duty with sword, just for you to view. You could buy one, put up a photo of your worst Khan on a thick block of foam, and defend the homeland!

Derek Dashwood enjoys noticing positive ways we progress, the combining of science into the humanities to measure politics, wise use and mis use of power and protective love at Japanese Antiques