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SEOUL, South Korea — Freighters carrying aid shipments of rice and instant noodles left for North Korea on Monday.

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A ship with 5,000 tons of rice left the port of Gusan and a freighter carrying 3 million cups of instant noodles left Incheon, according to an official with the Red Cross in Seoul, which is handling the delivery logistics. Both shipments were bound for Dandong, China, where the food was to be unloaded later this week and then trucked into North Korea.

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Rice, a staple of the diets in both Koreas, is also a highly symbolic item in terms of food aid throughout Asia. The 5,000 tons of rice in the shipment on Monday can feed about 325,000 people for a month, according to Red Cross estimates.

As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Beckwith’s theory pretty much puts the Japanese and Koreans as distant relatives - cousins at best and definitely not the “brothers” as Diamond would like them to be. Even if Koguryo and Paekche peoples were subsumed into the “Korean people,” they did not add much to the linguistic tradition. Beckwith talks about the fact that Koguryo may have been going extinct even before the fall of the kingdom since so many of the inhabitants spoke a Han Korean language. Once T’ang China took over Koguryo, they exiled many of the Koguryo people to the middle of China to die off there.3 At best, the modern day Koreans have a minority strain of Koguryo in their DNA and language. The means that the Japanese people’s cousins - Koguryo and Paekche peoples - happened to be the uncle in a big Korean family mostly made up of Han peoples. The Wa, therefore, have no blood relations to the Shilla side of the family and were never themselves “continental Koreans.” Before and after the fall of Paekche in 660, many Paekche elites fled to Japan. In fact, one-third of the nobility in Nara (in the Nara period) was “foreign” - which I assume to mean Paekche Koreans. Although this complicates the “racial purity” of the Japanese today, this still does not make the Japanese people directly related to the majority ancestor of Koreans.

Beckwith’s theory may not be the definitive account, but it gets closer to placing the Japanese people’s origin in the correct zone of the East Asian continent and helps break the age-old myth of the “isolated language.” The theory, however, creates greater historical questions regarding the link between the Japanese and Korean people. The Japanese are only “Korean” in a broad sense (related to peoples of the Korean kingdoms), but almost totally unrelated the primary ancestors of the modern Korean people. Since the “brother” argument may now fail in our attempts to pressure the two countries to take up better relations, I guess we should just ask them to get along for the 1,000 other legitimate reasons.