Japan celebrates 2000 years of Roman influence

[caesar novus]

Dateline April 1st 2016

 

Kyoto today celebrates 2000 years of receiving water from Lake Biwa via a Roman-built aqueduct:

 

 

How was this possible? In the year 16ce Tiberius wished to renew an alliance Caesar had made with the powerful Trinovantes tribe in Britain. He sent an expedition to build an aqueduct in their capital of Colchester, but their ship got caught in a storm which dragged them thru the then-open NW passage above Canada and down to Japan.

 

Faced with a "use it or lose it" budget allocation for the end of the year, the shipwrecked Romans built an aqueduct-to-nowhere south from Japan's largest lake. The Japanese happily responded by building a capital city at the end of it... Kyoto.

 

Lead piping in the distribution system made residents mentally challenged, but that fit with their stereotype of bureaucrats. Hundreds of years of "pipe sickness" finally led to moving the capital to Tokyo, leaving Kyoto as a preserved backwater that even escaped WW2 damage. For more info, google "Suirokaku Aqueduct".

 

Edited April 1, 2016 by caesar novus

[caesar novus]

Dear apparently offended reader, who immediately yanked material that this thread was linking to along the lines of below pic:

 

 

Do you not know about the tradition of April Fools Day joke? No offense was intended to Japan or your material. If you reinstall it, I promise to not link to it. There is a Kyoto tourism site that linked to much of your material, and now looks like a skeleton with dummy replacements. Here I link to a substitute video that doesn't support my joke so much, but shows Kyoto Aqueduct at it's best:

 

Edited April 3, 2016 by caesar novus

[caldrail]

There is no Roman influence in Japan. The Japanese are very keen on their cultural sincerity in the same manner as the Chinese, and Roman influence in the day would have been essentially zero.

[caesar novus]

News Flash: http://www.caitlingreen.org/2016/09/east-asian-people-roman-london.html

 

Above points out ancient Roman artifacts (bead, coin) found in ancient sites in Japan and China, and actual Japanese or east Chinese skeletons found in Roman south London sites. The skeletons did not grow up in London or even that continent, and appear to be genuine immigrants or travelers thru Roman Britain!

 

may well have spent the last decade of their lives in Britain, something that is in itself notable.

 

Needless to say, the presence of people of 'East Asian' ancestry in Roman London is a matter of considerable interest. As to the circumstances of their apparent residency within the western Roman Empire, it needs to be emphasised that these inhabitants of second- to fourth-century AD Londinium are not wholly alone nor without context. Most notably, a recent isotopic and mitochondrial DNA study of burials on the Imperial estate at Vagnari, southern Italy, has indicated that one of the adults buried there in the first or second century AD was likewise a migrant of 'East Asian' ancestry, given that 'all modern mtDNA matches to her available haplotype sequence are from Japan'

Edited September 21, 2016 by caesar novus

[caldrail]

The existence of travel between east and west in classical times is much debated now. Even the Chinese have admitted there is evidence of greek artisans working for the Chinese around 200BC (their influence is mooted as the reason for the sudden improvement in technique that led to the terracotta army). It isn't beyond speculation that a few made it the other way, but the historical record underlines how few occaisions this probably happened. Eight thousand miles is a very, very, long way without modern transport and infrastructure. To assume these finds indicate ordinary travel either way is taking a lot for granted.