I was speaking with a co-worker and we got onto the topic of Asia. She told me that the Japanese are just Descendants from Chinese prisoners that were shipped off to the island of Japan (in the same way Britain shipped off their criminals to Australia)

Is this true? I’m having a hard time finding out about. And a lot of things I’ve come up with are stating Japanese are closer to Koreans than the Chinese.
And having read “the rape of Nanking”, it is mentioned that one of the people who survived wanted to see a Japanese soldier so badly as he constantly heard they looked like the Chinese and he couldn’t believe it.

Which also led me to my next question, if this is true then how did Japan become such a vastly different race/country to China? If you look at Britain/Australia, while different they’re still similar no?