Japanese Ancestor In My Dna Test ; Question

margecat

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I had another DNA test, done by different company. I got the results last night. Apparently, I have ancestor that was born between 1690 and 1780, and was 100% Japanese. Well, that was unexpected!

I'm trying to figure out what happened here. Weren't Europeans first in Japan in the late 1500's, and later kept out until the 1860's? Does anyone know if the Japanese traveled to Europe in that time period? What I'm thinking happened: an European male went to Japan, and had a child with a Japanese woman. However, I suppose a Japanese female could've gone to Europe, perhaps with her family as a child, was raised in Europe, and married an European.

I know very little about Japanese history, so could someone fill me in? Thanks.
 

Willowy

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I think it's more likely that the Japanese woman was living in Europe rather than the other way around---mixed-race people are looked down upon in Japan even now, and back then the half-European person probably wouldn't have had the chance to marry and procreate. And even if they did, it would have been (by necessity) to a Japanese person and then you would have more than 1 Japanese person in your background ;).

I found this info saying that one ruler who was in power from 1767-1786 relaxed their isolationist policy somewhat, so maybe a family was able to move to Europe at that point. Tanuma Okitsugu - Wikipedia

UNLESS. . .you have a lot of Dutch in your background. Dutch traders were allowed into Japan in 1609 and have maintained a presence there ever since. Interbreeding was frowned upon but I'm sure it still happened. And it would have been more likely for the child to have been accepted into the Dutch community than into Japanese society.

Those DNA tests are interesting! My brother did one and it said that we have 1 Moroccan person in our background. Of course Morocco wasn't isolated at the time so it's not that weird but it's just plain unexpected.
 

doomsdave

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Hmm.

That's really interesting, Margecat!

I'd be curious to know why one test found the Japanese ancestor, and the other(s) didn't. How, exactly, was that determination made, if you'd be willing to share?

I'm considering getting one, too.
 

lalagimp

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My dad has a trace amount of Asia Central, but I got more European Jew.
These tests are funny because we're Irish, and his markers lit up all over for Irish, and mine exploded simply with "Great Britain=88%".
 
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margecat

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I may have Dutch, as this DNA test states that I'm "Northwestern European", which does included the Netherlands. However, when I look at my ancestry timeline, there is no Dutch--they lump French and German together. The other company said "German". The Portuguese had a slave trade in Japan, and many Japanese were sold into Europe. But, that ended well before my ancestor was born.

Doomsdave, that's a mystery to me, too! It was not expected whether I had my DNA tested or not.

When we're a bit more solvent financially, I may have it done by a third company, as now, I am intrigued. Apart from the Japanese, they pretty much had the same ethnic groups, but just in vastly different amounts. For example, in the Ancestry DNA profile, I was only 2% British (and my Mom was from England!), and 21% Irish. At 23&Me, they lump them together, but the math doesn't match. At Ancestry, I was 50% German/French. Here, I'm 18.5%.

One of the reasons I wanted to get this done is because Mom didn't really know who her Dad was. Her Mom was raped as a teenager. They think he was a family "friend", and a much older man. I had formed a theory of where he could have been from, after Mom told me little bits of the story. I thought that he could have been Eastern European: Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Jewish, but with an Anglicised surname, which was common in England then (there was a lot of nasty Anti-Semitism, sadly, and to do business, and he was wealthy, it helped to make your ethnic surname sound British). I think my DNA profile is proving at least the Eastern European part. When I ran my raw data from both companies through GEDMatch (it's free), there is some Ashkenazi Jewish DNA in my makeup. Of course, I can't prove this is my maternal grandfather--but 23&Me's ancestry timeline for the Eastern European DNA says that I had an ancestor in the time frame my Grandfather would have been born.

If you get your DNA done, I highly recommend uploading the raw data (and use the quick way of doing that--the old way literally takes HOURS to upload the 500+ pages of raw DNA) to GEDMatch.com. You can map each chromosome to see what ethnicity is on them, how much, and more useful tools to fine tune your raw DNA results. I found out so much more about myself there. Even Ancestry recommends it.
 

DreamerRose

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margecat margecat - Which test told you about the Japanese ancestor? I would love specific information like that.

I did the AncestryDNA one, and it only gave me ethnicities. Mine surprised me because it said I was 29% Scandinavian, and although I've done extensive research, I know of no ancestor from Scandinavia. So I written that off to the Vikings because 32% was the British isles. It did get the genetic community right - early settlers of the deep South.
 

doomsdave

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I may have Dutch, as this DNA test states that I'm "Northwestern European", which does included the Netherlands. However, when I look at my ancestry timeline, there is no Dutch--they lump French and German together. The other company said "German". The Portuguese had a slave trade in Japan, and many Japanese were sold into Europe. But, that ended well before my ancestor was born.

Doomsdave, that's a mystery to me, too! It was not expected whether I had my DNA tested or not.

When we're a bit more solvent financially, I may have it done by a third company, as now, I am intrigued. Apart from the Japanese, they pretty much had the same ethnic groups, but just in vastly different amounts. For example, in the Ancestry DNA profile, I was only 2% British (and my Mom was from England!), and 21% Irish. At 23&Me, they lump them together, but the math doesn't match. At Ancestry, I was 50% German/French. Here, I'm 18.5%.

One of the reasons I wanted to get this done is because Mom didn't really know who her Dad was. Her Mom was raped as a teenager. They think he was a family "friend", and a much older man. I had formed a theory of where he could have been from, after Mom told me little bits of the story. I thought that he could have been Eastern European: Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Jewish, but with an Anglicised surname, which was common in England then (there was a lot of nasty Anti-Semitism, sadly, and to do business, and he was wealthy, it helped to make your ethnic surname sound British). I think my DNA profile is proving at least the Eastern European part. When I ran my raw data from both companies through GEDMatch (it's free), there is some Ashkenazi Jewish DNA in my makeup. Of course, I can't prove this is my maternal grandfather--but 23&Me's ancestry timeline for the Eastern European DNA says that I had an ancestor in the time frame my Grandfather would have been born.

If you get your DNA done, I highly recommend uploading the raw data (and use the quick way of doing that--the old way literally takes HOURS to upload the 500+ pages of raw DNA) to GEDMatch.com. You can map each chromosome to see what ethnicity is on them, how much, and more useful tools to fine tune your raw DNA results. I found out so much more about myself there. Even Ancestry recommends it.
OUCH. Sorry to hear about your mother! Don't know if my late mom could have handled something like that.

But, thanks for sharing a fascinating backstory.

Curiosity is getting the better of me.
 
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margecat

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Hmm.

That's really interesting, Margecat!

I'd be curious to know why one test found the Japanese ancestor, and the other(s) didn't. How, exactly, was that determination made, if you'd be willing to share?

I'm considering getting one, too.
I have no idea why that was on one test, and not the other.
 
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margecat

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margecat margecat - Which test told you about the Japanese ancestor? I would love specific information like that.

I did the AncestryDNA one, and it only gave me ethnicities. Mine surprised me because it said I was 29% Scandinavian, and although I've done extensive research, I know of no ancestor from Scandinavia. So I written that off to the Vikings because 32% was the British isles. It did get the genetic community right - early settlers of the deep South.
It was 23 & Me.
 

NormSF

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I'd be very interested in which company gave you the Japanese ancestor result; I have delayed buying a DNA test until one or more companies compiles a decent Asian database. Hope some of the following may help you--
Here's what I know about cultural cross-seeding of Japanese and Europeans: (I hope you are not offended by social habits not within the ten commandments.) Until Japan closed its borders in 1639, Japan had been very international. A prosperous trading village in central Vietnam, Hoi An, prided itself on sending its best scholar-children to Japan and China for education in the 16th and early 17th centuries; after receiving the announcement to return immediately or never, some Hoi An Japanese families opted to remain and blended into the VN population. One daimyo (lord) even sent a samurai as its ambassador to the Vatican. It's unlikely the ambassador was celibate, although the daimyo was probably Christian and probably would have encouraged the ambassador (almost certainly Christian) to also be celibate, or at least not screw around with the Romans. The missionaries managed to convert a lot of the population, top-to-bottom, one reason the Tokugawa got alarmed, closed the borders, and tried to exterminate Christianity. I haven't read anything specific to this next point, but over a century of "missionary" work, not all of the Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch (etc.) would have been celibate, not all of the Europeans (esp Dutch) were clergymen with chastity vows (which of course, many popes ignored without leaving Italy). The Dutch were allowed to maintain a tiny trading post after 1639 on the manmade island of Deshima in Nagasaki and they were supplied with prostitutes. Abortion was not widespread as illegitimate children were regarded as potential labor and military resources. Some say the Dutch were allowed or required to send missions to Edo to inform the leadership on European advances in armaments and medicine, so they could have planted some seeds along the Tokaido (Great Eastern Road). When in the 1850s the USA and other nations set up consulates, the govt provided them prostitute services as a matter of course. My mother's family is from southern Kyushu royalty (for about 6-7 centuries, the clan owned a small fief resembling Switzerland) and her father's nickname was "the Russian" because he had a red beard; my siblings and I each have a few strands of red hair. DNA testing will shed some light on this, I hope.
Just before the Meiji took over Japan in 1868, two daimyo, from Yamaguchi (southernmost tip of Honshu) and Satsuma (southernmost tip of Kyushu, the other side of my mother's family) each smuggled out teams of 15-20 young samurai on British ships. Their instructions were to learn whatever they could about England for future use in the revolution. One of "my uncles" didn't quite follow the protocol: he fell under the tutelage of a Utopian, went with him to western New York where they tried to establish a colony that made wine. It failed, at which point, the boss returned to London and gave "my uncle" carte blanche. So he took the profits and founded the Sonoma County (CA) wine industry. He's now remembered as "the wine king" and hosted visiting dignitaries (Twain, Grant). This guy never married and perhaps due to his British period had a religious reason to be asexual. But there were at least 2 dozen other samurai on those trips.
Where that ambassador was concerned: total speculation but he could have taken his wife and children, who may have married an Italian. Also, in the 1980s, I encountered an African American genealogist who studied African-German relations. He maintained that medieval German explorers married African tribal royalty and brought them back home; as part of the proof, he showed coats-of-arms with clearly African heads, and names like Schwartzkopf (like our anti-Saddam general, literally, Black Head), and stories of how noted Germans like Beethoven were discussed to have black ancestry due to darker complexions. So cultural integration among Europeans and everyone else was the rule, not an exception.
PS my wife and I have 4 cats.
 
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margecat

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I'd be very interested in which company gave you the Japanese ancestor result; I have delayed buying a DNA test until one or more companies compiles a decent Asian database. Hope some of the following may help you--
Here's what I know about cultural cross-seeding of Japanese and Europeans: (I hope you are not offended by social habits not within the ten commandments.) Until Japan closed its borders in 1639, Japan had been very international. A prosperous trading village in central Vietnam, Hoi An, prided itself on sending its best scholar-children to Japan and China for education in the 16th and early 17th centuries; after receiving the announcement to return immediately or never, some Hoi An Japanese families opted to remain and blended into the VN population. One daimyo (lord) even sent a samurai as its ambassador to the Vatican. It's unlikely the ambassador was celibate, although the daimyo was probably Christian and probably would have encouraged the ambassador (almost certainly Christian) to also be celibate, or at least not screw around with the Romans. The missionaries managed to convert a lot of the population, top-to-bottom, one reason the Tokugawa got alarmed, closed the borders, and tried to exterminate Christianity. I haven't read anything specific to this next point, but over a century of "missionary" work, not all of the Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch (etc.) would have been celibate, not all of the Europeans (esp Dutch) were clergymen with chastity vows (which of course, many popes ignored without leaving Italy). The Dutch were allowed to maintain a tiny trading post after 1639 on the manmade island of Deshima in Nagasaki and they were supplied with prostitutes. Abortion was not widespread as illegitimate children were regarded as potential labor and military resources. Some say the Dutch were allowed or required to send missions to Edo to inform the leadership on European advances in armaments and medicine, so they could have planted some seeds along the Tokaido (Great Eastern Road). When in the 1850s the USA and other nations set up consulates, the govt provided them prostitute services as a matter of course. My mother's family is from southern Kyushu royalty (for about 6-7 centuries, the clan owned a small fief resembling Switzerland) and her father's nickname was "the Russian" because he had a red beard; my siblings and I each have a few strands of red hair. DNA testing will shed some light on this, I hope.
Just before the Meiji took over Japan in 1868, two daimyo, from Yamaguchi (southernmost tip of Honshu) and Satsuma (southernmost tip of Kyushu, the other side of my mother's family) each smuggled out teams of 15-20 young samurai on British ships. Their instructions were to learn whatever they could about England for future use in the revolution. One of "my uncles" didn't quite follow the protocol: he fell under the tutelage of a Utopian, went with him to western New York where they tried to establish a colony that made wine. It failed, at which point, the boss returned to London and gave "my uncle" carte blanche. So he took the profits and founded the Sonoma County (CA) wine industry. He's now remembered as "the wine king" and hosted visiting dignitaries (Twain, Grant). This guy never married and perhaps due to his British period had a religious reason to be asexual. But there were at least 2 dozen other samurai on those trips.
Where that ambassador was concerned: total speculation but he could have taken his wife and children, who may have married an Italian. Also, in the 1980s, I encountered an African American genealogist who studied African-German relations. He maintained that medieval German explorers married African tribal royalty and brought them back home; as part of the proof, he showed coats-of-arms with clearly African heads, and names like Schwartzkopf (like our anti-Saddam general, literally, Black Head), and stories of how noted Germans like Beethoven were discussed to have black ancestry due to darker complexions. So cultural integration among Europeans and everyone else was the rule, not an exception.
PS my wife and I have 4 cats.
You said, in a far more educated and detailed way, what I suspected! 23&Me says that I have a Japanese ancestor:

"You most likely had a fourth great-grandparent, fifth great-grandparent, sixth great-grandparent, or seventh great (or greater) grandparent who was 100% Japanese. This person was likely born between 1690 and 1780."

I'm thinking this ancestor was on my Dad's side. I don't know why ; Mom was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Englishwoman. Dad's side had black hair. It's just my gut feeling, nothing scientific in basis. Dad's side did have some Asian origins ; I have a tiny amount of DNA from India, and I think that I've found my Indian ancestor, who had a son by an Englishman in India. Looking at my raw DNA, I see some Chinese and Native American. 23 & Me, in the ancestry profile, states East Asian and Broadly East Asian. My paternal great-grandfather was a sea captain, born in 1818. He did travel to Asia. This old codger produced a child with his second wife, who was 27 years younger, at age 72, so I thought maybe old Jimmy B. may have been busy while in Asia, but that, given the 23 & Me time frame, doesn't make sense.

If you do a DNA test (I've done Ancestry DNA, also), I recommend uploading your raw DNA data to GEDMatch.com, a free database in which you can plug your DNA into various tests, and you can see what's on each chromosome. It fine-tunes your ethnicity, and even the DNA companies recommend that you upload to GEDMatch. Personally, I trust GEDMatch's data more. There, I test about 10% Asian, if you add up the different nationalities.

I'm a redhead. It's interesting how red hair appears in just about every ethnicity. Supposedly, there was a race of red-haired warriors in China once.
 

denice

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I have thought about getting this done. I have been told since I was a child that I have Cherokee in me but most people have been told that. I do have the coloring that fits for Native American and I do resemble the pictures I have seen of Cherokee women. A number of years ago a man who was Cherokee told me that I looked like pictures he had seen of his grandmother. It would be interesting to see if and how much.

It is interesting how red hair pops up in families. Before people began to understand genetics people assumed that when it happened the child was the result of an affair. There is even an old saying about a family outcast being the 'redheaded stepchild'. I have even caught myself using that phrase when someone is obviously being treated as an outcast.
 

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This is a very interesting thread. My husband gave me a subscription to Ancestry last Christmas. I have thought about doing their DNA test. Just have to get my nerve up.
 
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margecat

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This is a very interesting thread. My husband gave me a subscription to Ancestry last Christmas. I have thought about doing their DNA test. Just have to get my nerve up.
All you gotta do is just spit in that vial, honey! Easy-peasy! (Of course, the first time, it took me 30 minutes to well up enough saliva, and a lot of coaching from DH. Pathetic. ) :lol:
 

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I had another DNA test, done by different company. I got the results last night. Apparently, I have ancestor that was born between 1690 and 1780, and was 100% Japanese. Well, that was unexpected!

I'm trying to figure out what happened here. Weren't Europeans first in Japan in the late 1500's, and later kept out until the 1860's? Does anyone know if the Japanese traveled to Europe in that time period? What I'm thinking happened: an European male went to Japan, and had a child with a Japanese woman. However, I suppose a Japanese female could've gone to Europe, perhaps with her family as a child, was raised in Europe, and married an European.

I know very little about Japanese history, so could someone fill me in? Thanks.
I had another DNA test, done by different company. I got the results last night. Apparently, I have ancestor that was born between 1690 and 1780, and was 100% Japanese. Well, that was unexpected!

I'm trying to figure out what happened here. Weren't Europeans first in Japan in the late 1500's, and later kept out until the 1860's? Does anyone know if the Japanese traveled to Europe in that time period? What I'm thinking happened: an European male went to Japan, and had a child with a Japanese woman. However, I suppose a Japanese female could've gone to Europe, perhaps with her family as a child, was raised in Europe, and married an European.

I know very little about Japanese history, so could someone fill me in? Thanks.
I had another DNA test, done by different company. I got the results last night. Apparently, I have ancestor that was born between 1690 and 1780, and was 100% Japanese. Well, that was unexpected!

I'm trying to figure out what happened here. Weren't Europeans first in Japan in the late 1500's, and later kept out until the 1860's? Does anyone know if the Japanese traveled to Europe in that time period? What I'm thinking happened: an European male went to Japan, and had a child with a Japanese woman. However, I suppose a Japanese female could've gone to Europe, perhaps with her family as a child, was raised in Europe, and married an European.

I know very little about Japanese history, so could someone fill me in? Thanks.
It is funny how genes express themselves. I always thought I was 100% Japanese ancestry (all 4 grandparents immigrated from Japan), but I have 5 grandchildren and 3 of them have blonde hair with 2 also having blue eyes. My kids are all dark haired brunettes. I would think this is not possible unless I have some Viking blood somehow. My German American husband has brown hair.
 

Willowy

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. I would think this is not possible unless I have some Viking blood somehow. My German American husband has brown hair.
It's possible if your husband carries the blue eye and blonde hair genes, and he probably does if he's of German descent. If your own kids had blue eyes or blonde hair that would mean you carry the genes, but since it's your grandkids it's not an indication.
 

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It is interesting how red hair pops up in families. Before people began to understand genetics people assumed that when it happened the child was the result of an affair. There is even an old saying about a family outcast being the 'redheaded stepchild'. I have even caught myself using that phrase when someone is obviously being treated as an outcast.
My sister has red hair. Not bright red, definitely affected by all our brown hair genes, but definitely red. And she's tall, while we are short. My parents told everyone it was the mailman.

Go about 3 or 4 generations back on my mom's side and half the family were tall redheads. The only real question is why did the last couple of generations end up short with brown hair.
 
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margecat

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Apart from my nephew, I'm the only redhead in my immediate family. I checked my 16th chromosome for MCR1 and both parents gave a copy to me.

Any suggestions on how to find my Japanese ancestor that far back? I'd really like to know who it was.
 

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It's possible if your husband carries the blue eye and blonde hair genes, and he probably does if he's of German descent. If your own kids had blue eyes or blonde hair that would mean you carry the genes, but since it's your grandkids it's not an indication.
You could be right. He comes from a big family, though, 10 siblings, and no blue eyes or blondes in the siblings, the parents or the grandparents. I find this interesting, but not interesting enough to take a DNA test. I have a friend who told me that it must be awful to have grandchildren who don't look like me, but to me, they look like LOVE.
 
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