What’s the “FDA” letter referred to in the OP?
The Food and Drug Administration.
I was thinking the Japanese markers might be pan Eurasian, entering the Scandinavian population via the Sami. Doesn’t seem to work that way, though.
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I recall that around that time, the Japanese allowed Dutch traders to continue trading in one small, insignificant corner of Japan for a while after kicking out the other Europeans for fear of missionary influence. The Dutch were the only ones willing to, among other things, trample on the cross on a beach to show their intentions were purely mercantile. I can see a scenario in which one of those traders ended up with a half-Japanese offspring whom he took back with him.
What really kills their credibility is their limited sampling.
The class-action suit claims that their results are “meaningless.” That may be more true for their predictions of future diseases than ancestry, but I wouldn’t put any faith in any consumer-level genetic testing at this point. They’re being run out of business, and for good reason.
The summary is that 23andme is marketing their DNA genotyping test as a “medical device” and they do not have FDA approval to do so.
I had results similar to the OP. The 23andme forums have a large number of people saying ‘WTF, Japanese really?’
Just in the past 72 hours I notice my result has been quietly revised from ‘0.1% Japanese’ to ‘0.1% East Asian’. :dubious:
Being as I am your basic Scotch-irish southern US redneck stock, did I really get only 0.1% African-American and 0.0% Native American, yet somehow a reportable amount of Japanese managed to sneak in there?
Take your 23andme results with a Fuji-sized grain of salt, is all I’m saying.
Oh, and here is what little detail they are giving to explain their report - I am no statistician but these sample sizes seem a little small to draw broad conclusions.
If your result says Hong Kong or Mongolia I would be kinda dubious about that.
Exactly as I asked in the IMHO and MPSIMS threads on this sort of thing.
Have they done or aggregated health and genetics studies of tens of thousands of people of different genetic backgrounds over a several decade period to determine the accuracy of the “medical” information they are purveying?
No?
Then the ‘results’ they’re providing are basically fraudulent.
Yeah, the Dutch were pretty much the only non-East Asian power allowed to trade with Japan during the bulk of the chained country era. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call Nagasaki a “small, insignificant corner of Japan”.
I’m not sure about the “trampling on a cross” thing, though. It may very well had happened, though to my knowledge the whole debacle was mostly a political game played by the Dutch and English against the dirty Catholic Spanish and Portuguese, convincing the Shogunate that the Iberian powers would be unable to trade without spreading their filthy religion. Maybe “stomping on a cross” was part of that, though I recall being told that was a legend. (Largely the Japanese were more concerned about Spain and Portugal’s colonial influence since they were conquering the New World at the time. The religion was just part of their fear of losing stability and worry about foreign conquest/subjugation, though admittedly a Christian uprising in Japan threatening the Shogunate’s stability right around that time didn’t help much either).
I could definitely see a Dutch trader getting a kid in Japan. I’m not sure it was overwhelmingly common, but it probably happened more than a couple times.
Interesting that other people have the same finding. Either there it’s a glitch, or those Japanese-Europeans really got around. It’s hard to tell- it seems likely a glitch, but at the same time you are likely to hear more from people with surprising results than those with obvious and clear cut ones.
In most cases these are supplemented with outside data sets, and when the data isn’t there, they’ll categorize it as non-specific. I believe the Japanese sample is over 200. They claim to look for the smallest sample she they can that still yield results- not sure why.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a legend, but I’d read it as fact.
You’re referring to the practice of fumi-e in which people who were suspected of being christians were forced to trample pictures of Jesus or Mary. It’s true that the Dutch not having any intension of proselytizing was a major asset over the Spanish and Portuguese. The notion that the Dutch willingly performed fumi-e is found in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift has Gulliver visit Japan pretending to be a Dutch sailor.
Some Japanese historians even suggest a hypothesis that the Dutch themselves introduced the practice to Japan, though the former Jesuit Cristóvão Ferreira is also cited as potential initiator of the practice, and of course there is also historical evidence that it’s something Tokugawa goons came up with.
.1% is quite small, 1/10th of 1%, how small do the tests go?
My point is that it seems unlikely for so many people to be coming up with the same glitchy result, 0.1% Japanese, and it seems suspicious that they’ve revised the report from ‘Japanese’ to ‘East Asian’ in the past few days.
Of course surprises are common in our ancestry. But you can’t overlook how much money there could be in selling statistical noise to affluent westerners eager to latch onto a more romanticized version of their ancestry.