A History of the Japanese People. Kikuchi Dairoku
aborigines were in more or less intimate contact with the invading Yamato for something like twenty-five centuries, an interval quite sufficient to have produced many interactions and to have given birth to many new traditions. An illustration is furnished by the mental attitude of the uneducated classes in Japan towards the neolithic implements. So completely has all memory of the human uses of these implements faded, that they are regarded as relics of supernatural beings and called by such names as raifu (thunder-axe), raitsui (thunder-club), kitsune no kuwa (fox-hoe), raiko (thunder-pestle), and tengu no meshigai (rice-spoon of the goblins). Many of the neolithic relics show that the people who used them had reached a tolerably high level of civilization.
This is specially seen in the matter of ceramics. It is true that the wheel was not employed, and that the firing was imperfect, but the variety of vessels was considerable,* and the shapes and decorations were often very praiseworthy. Thus, among the braziers are found shapes obviously the originals of the Japanese choji-buro (clove-censer) and the graceful rice-bowl, while community of conception with Chinese potters would seem to be suggested by some of the forms of these ancient vases. Particularly interesting are earthenware images obtained from these neolithic sites. Many of them have been conventionalized into mere anthropomorphs and are rudely moulded. But they afford valuable indications of the clothing and personal adornments of the aborigines.
*Cooking-pots and pans, jars and vases, bowls and dishes, cups, bottles, nipple pots, lamps, braziers, ewers, strainers, spindles or drill weights, stamps, ornaments, images, and plaques (Munro's Prehistoric Japan).
What end these effigies were intended to serve remains an unsettled question. Some suggest that they were used as substitutes for human sacrifices, and that they point to a time when wives and slaves were required to follow their husbands and masters to the grave. They may also have been suggested by the example of the Yamato, who, at a very remote time, began to substitute clay images for human followers of the dead; or they may have been designed to serve as mere mementoes. This last theory derives some force from the fact that the images are found, not in graves or tombs, but at residential sites. No data have been obtained, however, for identifying burying-places: sepulture may have been carried out in the house of the deceased. Whichever explanation be correct, the fact confronts us that these clay effigies have no place in the cult of the modern Ainu. History teaches, however, that degeneration may become so complete as to deprive a nation of all traces of its original civilization. Such seems to have been the case with the Ainu.
INTERMEDIATE CULTURE
Traces of a culture occupying a place intermediate between the primitive culture and that of the Yamato are not conclusive. They are seen in pottery which, like the ware of the neolithic sites, is not turned on the wheel, and, like the Yamato ware, is decorated in a very subdued and sober fashion. It is found from end to end of the main island and even in Yezo, and in pits, shell-heaps, and independent sites as well as in tombs, burial caves, and cairns of the Yamato. Thus, there does not seem to be sufficient warrant for associating it with a special race. It was possibly supplied to order of the Yamato by the aboriginal craftsmen, who naturally sought to copy the salient features of the conquering immigrants' ware.
BRONZE VESTIGES
There are also some bronze vestiges to which considerable interest attaches, for evidently people using bronze weapons could not have stood against men carrying iron arms, and therefore the people to whom the bronze implements belonged must have obtained a footing in Japan prior to the Yamato, unless they came at the latter's invitation or as their allies. Moreover, these bronze relics—with the exception of arrow-heads—though found in the soil of western and southern Japan, do not occur in the Yamato sepulchres, which feature constitutes another means of differentiation. Daggers, swords, halberds, and possibly spear-heads constitute the hand-weapons. The daggers have a certain resemblance to the Malay kris, and the swords and halberds are generally leaf-shaped. But some features, as overshort tangs and unpierced loops, suggest that they were manufactured, not for service in battle but for ceremonial purposes, being thus mere survivals from an era when their originals were in actual use, and possibly those originals may have been of iron. Some straight-edged specimens have been classed as spear-heads, but they closely resemble certain ancient bronze swords of China. As for bronze arrow-heads, they occur alike in Yamato sepulchres and in the soil, so that no special inference is warranted in their case. The bronze hand-weapons have been found in twelve provinces of southern and western Japan: namely, five provinces of northwest Kyushu; three on the Inland Sea; one facing Korea and China, and the rest on the islands of Iki and Tsushima.
These localities and the fact that similar swords have been met with in Shantung, suggest that the bronze culture came from central and eastern Asia, which hypothesis receives confirmation from the complete absence of bronze vestiges in the southern provinces of Kyushu, namely, Osumi and Satsuma. Bronze bells, of which there are many, belong to a separate page of archaeology. Though they have been found in no less than twenty-four provinces, there is no instance of their presence in the same sites with hand-weapons of bronze. In Kyushu, Higo is the only province where they have been seen, whereas in the main island they extend as far east as Totomi, and are conspicuously numerous in that province and its neighbour, Mikawa, while in Omi they are most abundant of all. They vary in height from about one foot four inches to four and a half feet, and are of highly specialized shape, the only cognate type being bells used in China during the Chou dynasty (1122–225 B.C.) for the purpose of giving military signals. A Chinese origin is still more clearly indicated by the decorative designs, which show a combination of the circle, the triangle, and the spiral, obviously identical with the decorative motive* on Chinese drums of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220). The circle and the triangle occur also in the sepulchral pottery of the Yamato sites, and considering the fact together with the abundance of the bells in districts where the Yamato were most strongly established, there seems to be warrant for attributing these curious relics to the Yamato culture.
*This resemblance has been pointed out by a Japanese archaeologist, Mr. Teraishi. Dr. Munro states that the same elements are combined in an Egyptian decorative design.
To this inference it has been objected that no bells have been found in the tombs of the Yamato. The same is true, however, of several other objects known to have belonged to that people. If, then, the bells be classed as adjuncts of the Yamato culture, shall we be justified in assigning the bronze weapon to a different race? On the whole, the most reasonable conclusion seems to be that all the bronze relics, weapons, and bells alike, are "vestiges of the Yamato procession at a time anterior to the formation of the great dolmens and other tombs" [Munro]. A corollary would be that the Yamato migrated from China in the days of the Chou dynasty (1122–225 B.C.), and that, having landed in the province of Higo, they conquered the greater part of Tsukushi (Kyushu), and subsequently passed up the Inland Sea to Yamato; which hypothesis would invest with some accuracy the date assigned by the Chronicles to Jimmu's expedition and would constitute a general confirmation of the Japanese account of his line of advance.
YAMATO CULTURE
The ancient Yamato are known chiefly through the medium of relics found in their sepulchres. Residential sites exist in comparatively small numbers, so far as research ha hitherto shown, and such sites yield nothing except more or less scattered potsherds and low walls enclosing spaces of considerable area. Occasionally Yamato pottery and other relics are discovered in pits, and these evidences, combined with historical references, go to show that the Yamato themselves sometimes used pit-dwellings.
The tombs yield much more suggestive relics of metal, stone, and pottery. Some four thousand of such sepulchres have been officially catalogued, but it is believed that fully ten times that number exist. The most characteristic is a tomb of larger dimensions enclosing a dolmen which contains a coffin hollowed out from the trunk of a tree, or a sarcophagus of stone,* the latter being much more commonly found, as might be expected from its greater durability. Burial-jars were occasionally used, as were also sarcophagi of clay or terracotta,** the latter chiefly in the provinces of Bizen and Mimasaka, probably because suitable materials existed there in special abundance. Moreover, not a few tombs belonged to the category of cists; that is to say, excavations in rock, with a