weirdasscrap:

Long before the invention of agriculture or the domestication of animals, the Japanese already lived on villages and cooked their meals on pots. Ten thousand years before the Christian Era, possibly even earlier, the inhabitants of the eastern islands had already developed the art of ceramics, which would arise on the “Cradle of Civilization”, western Asia, three thousand years later. Reason for the Japanese to yell “Banzai!“, which actually means “ten thousand years”. Such ancient ceramics mark the so-called Jomon Jidai, a term from Japanese archeology: Jomon, meaning “rope pattern”, and Jidai meaning period or era. The word Jidai would become famousworldwide on a variation created by filmmaker George Lucas.

With his space knights with strict honor codes, Lucas was inspired by the “jidai geki”, Japanese period dramas with samurais. That’s where the Jedi knights come from. Our interest here is something that likewise links Japanese prehistory with the modern space fantasy. Beside pots, the Jomon Jidai ceramic artifacts include some figures, called Dogu. With an intriguing appearance, highly stylized, some of them were recently understood as “six thousand years-old space suits”, proof of ancient contacts with extraterrestrials. The idea of ancient astronauts antedates its most famous promoter, Erich von Däniken, in decades. And we can locate the association between the Japanese Dogu figures and“space suits” as early as an article by Russian scientist Viatcheslaw Zaitsev published on the soviet magazine Spoutnik in June 1967. This article was also the origin of the Fergana astronaut hoax — which was not Zaitsev’s fault — and also played a big role in the popularization of the legend of the Dropas. Curiously, though, real space suits were never exactly like Dogu figures.Granted, there’s a general resemblance, but made from flexible parts, like a clothe with many layers, real astronaut suits are not like the seemingly rigid round shapes that can be seen in the clay figures. The space suits we know have something very familiar: creases. More curious still is the fact that future space suits may become very similar to the thousands-years oldclay. …

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Whoa. All hail the Japanese?

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