A History of the Japanese People. Kikuchi Dairoku
in the Records and Chronicles show that the muro of those days had a character similar to that of the modern Korean um-mak [Aston]. We read of a muro being dug; of steps down to it; and we read of a muro big enough to hold 160 persons at one time. The muro was not always simply a hole roofed over: it sometimes contained a house having a wooden frame lashed together with vine-tendrils, the walls lined with sedges and reeds and plastered with a mixture of grass and clay. The roof was thatched with reeds; there was a door opening inwards, and a raised platform served for sleeping purposes. A dwelling closely resembling this description was actually unearthed near Akita in O-U, in 1807. Muro were used in ancient times by the highest as Well as the poorest classes. Susanoo is said by the Izumo Fudoki to have made for himself a muro; Jimmu's sort is represented as sleeping in a great muro, and the Emperor Keiko, when (A.D.82) prosecuting his campaign in Kyushu, is said to have constructed a muro for a temporary palace. "In fact, pit-dwelling in northern climates affords no indication of race."
CONCLUSION FROM HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
Thus the conclusion suggested by historical evidence is that the Japanese nation is composed of four elements: the Yamato; the Yemishi (modern Ainu); the Kumaso (or Hayato), and the Sushen. As to the last of these, there is no conclusive indication that they ever immigrated in appreciable numbers. It does not follow, of course, that the historical evidence is exhaustive, especially Japanese historical evidence; for the annalists of Japan do not appear to have paid any special attention to racial questions.
ENGRAVING: ANCIENT HANGING BELLS
ENGRAVING: FUTAMI-GA-URA (The Husband and Wife Rocks)
CHAPTER VI
ORIGIN OF THE NATION: GEOGRAPHICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RELICS
JAPAN'S CONNEXION WITH THE ASIATIC CONTINENT
THE group of islands forming Japan may be said to have routes of communication with the continent of Asia at six places: two in the north; two in the southwest, and two in the south. The principal connexion in the north is across the narrow strait of Soya from the northwest point of Yezo to Saghalien and thence to the Amur region of Manchuria. The secondary connexion is from the north-east point of Yezo via the long chain of the Kuriles to Kamchatka. The first of the southwestern routes is from the northwest of Kyushu via the islands of Iki and Tsushima to the southeast of Korea; and the second is from the south of the Izumo promontory in Japan, by the aid of the current which sets up the two southern routes. One of these is from the southwest of Kyushu via the Goto Islands to southeastern China; the other is from the south of Kyushu via the Ryukyu Islands, Formosa, and the Philippines to Malaysia and Polynesia. It has also been proved geologically* that the islands now forming Japan must at one time have been a part of the Asiatic continent. Evidently these various avenues may have given access to immigrants from Siberia, from China, from Malaysia, and from Polynesia.
*There have been found in the gravel Tertiary mammals including elephas primigenius, elephas Namadicus, stegodon Clifti, and unnamed varieties of bear, deer, bison, ox, horse, rhinoceros, and whale. (Outlines of the Geology of Japan; Imperial Geological Survey).
CULTURE
Archaeological research indicates the existence of two distinct cultures in Japan together with traces of a third. One of these cultures has left its relics chiefly in shell-heaps or embedded in the soil, while the remains of another are found mainly in sepulchral chambers or in caves. The relics themselves are palpably distinct except when they show transitional approach to each other.
The older culture is attested by more than four thousand residential sites and shell-heaps. Its most distinctive features are the absence of all metallic objects and the presence of pottery not turned on the wheel. Polished, finely chipped, and roughly hewn implements and weapons of stone are found, as are implements of bone and horn.
It was, in short, a neolithic culture. The vestiges of the other culture do not include weapons of stone. There are imitations of sheath-knives, swords, and arrow-heads, and there are some models of stone articles. But the alien features are iron weapons and hard pottery always moulded on the wheel. Copper is present mainly in connexion with the work of the goldsmith and the silversmith, and arrow-heads, jingle-bells, mirrors, etc., are also present. The former culture is identified as that of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Yemishi; the latter belongs to the Yamato race, or Japanese proper. Finally, "there are indications that a bronze culture intervened in the south between the stone and the iron phases."*
*Munro's Prehistoric Japan.
PRIMITIVE CULTURE
The neolithic sites occur much more frequently in the northern than in the southern half of Japan. They are, indeed, six times as numerous on the north as on the south of a line drawn across the main island from the coast of Ise through Orai. The neighbourhood of the sea, at heights of from thirty to three hundred feet, and the alluvial plains are their favourite positions. So far as the technical skill shown by the relics—especially the pottery—is concerned, it grows higher with the latitude. The inference is that the settlements of the aborigines in the south were made at an earlier period than those in the north; which may be interpreted to mean that whereas the stone-using inhabitants were driven back in the south at an early date, they held their ground in the north to a comparatively modern era.
That is precisely what Japanese history indicates. Jimmu's conquests, which took place several centuries before the Christian era, carried him as far as the Ise-Omi line, but Yamato-dake's expedition against the Yemishi north of that line was not planned until the second century after Christ. Apart from the rough evidence furnished by the quality of the relics, calculations have been made of the age of an important shell-heap by assuming that it originally stood at the seaside, and by estimating the number of years required to separate it by the present interval from the coast at a fixed annual rate of silting. The result is from five thousand to ten thousand years. A book (the Hitachi Fudoki), published in A.D. 715, speaks of these kaizuka (shell-heaps) as existing already at that remote period, and attributes their formation to a giant living on a hill who stretched out his hand to pick up shell-fish. This myth remained current until the eighteenth century, and stone axes exhumed from the heaps were called thunder-axes (rai-fu) just as similar relics in Europe were called elf-bolts or thunder-stones.
There is great diversity of size among the shell-heaps, some being of insignificant dimensions and others extending to five hundred square yards. They are most numerous in the eight provinces forming the Kwanto. In fact, in these ancient times, the Yamato race and the aborigines had their headquarters in the same localities, respectively, as the Imperial and Feudal governments had in mediaeval and modern times. But there are no distinct traces of palaeolithic culture; the neolithic alone can be said to be represented. Its relics are numerous—axes, knives, arrow-heads, arrow-necks, bow-tips, spear-heads, batons, swords, maces, sling-stones, needles, drill-bows, drill and spindle weights, mortars and pestles, paddles, boats, sinkers, fishing-hooks, gaffs, harpoons, mallets, chisels, scrapers, hoes, sickles, whetstones, hammers, and drills.
It must be premised that though so many kinds of implements are here enumerated, the nomenclature cannot be accepted as universally accurate. The so-called "hoe," for example, is an object of disputed identity, especially as agriculture has not been proved to have been practised among the primitive people of Japan, nor have any traces of grain been found in the neolithic sites. On the other hand, the modern Ainu, who are believed to represent the ancient population, include in their religious observances the worship of the first cakes made from the season's millet, and unless that rite be supposed to have been borrowed from the Yamato, it goes to indicate agricultural pursuits.
There is, indeed, one great obstacle to any confident differentiation of the customs and creeds prevalent in Japan. That obstacle consists in the great length of the period covered by the annals. It may reasonably be assumed that the