A Tokyo surgeon and explorer plans to embark on a five-year journey Thursday to trace the origins of the Japanese people.
Yoshiharu Sekino, 55, of the western Tokyo suburb of Kokubunji, begins his new adventure roughly two years after completing a 50,000-km trek to trace the "great journey" that humans are believed to have taken as they migrated from Africa to other parts of the world millions of years ago.
He plans to trace what he calls the three possible paths that the ancestors of the Japanese are believed to have taken about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago to reach Japan.