◆ PARALLAX

That is the move that convinces me. If the same visual vocabulary appears in masks AND figurines, it is a language -- a system of meaning-making. That is human; that is culture. It does not PROVE the dogu aren't alien records -- you can't prove a negative -- but it makes the alien hypothesis unnecessary. The human hypothesis explains the data with fewer assumptions. The Jomon winning the argument, not because we want it to, but because the evidence points that way.

Or maybe the masks AND the figurines are both alien -- the Jomon saw the visitors in multiple contexts and made a whole artistic response to contact. Consistent imagery actually SUPPORTS that. It suggests obsession, an encounter that mattered so much they made it over and over in different media, trying to understand what they had seen.

A fair point -- consistent imagery COULD suggest obsessive response to contact. But it could equally be a religious or ritual system, a powerful visual metaphor (sight, knowledge, spiritual power) explored across media. Without knowing what the Jomon meant, we cannot say, and we probably never will. The principle holds: the hypothesis that requires fewer miracles is stronger. Alien requires technology, contact, memory, clay response. Human requires artistic tradition, religion, symbol. Both possible; the human one is simpler. Yatagarasu has made a good case -- not definitive, but good.

I want to end on this: the Jomon civilisation is REAL -- 10,000 years of tools, settlements, art, bones, fire-pits. We do not need to read them as alien-contact victims to make them important. The dogu are extraordinary BECAUSE they are Jomon, the genuine expression of a real culture responding to its world. The "spacesuit" reading actually diminishes them, makes them evidence of something else rather than themselves. Let us honour the work by understanding it on its own terms. That is more wonderful than any astronaut.