# Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 2

Chapter II
The Early Japanese
Although the Japanese, like all other modern peoples, are the result of racial mixtures, they are essentially a Mongoloid people, closely related to their neighbors on the continent in Korea and China. According to popular theories the early Japanese came to their islands from the south by way of Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands, but archaeological evidence indicates clearly that most of the early Japanese came to Japan by way of Korea. Some originally may have come from more distant regions in northeastern Asia, and others may have come originally from the coastal areas of South China. There they may have been in contact with the peoples of Southeast Asia and the adjacent islands, which might explain the many close parallels between primitive Japanese institutions and those of the southern areas of the Far East.
Migrations to Japan in early times
The Ainu contributed little to Japanese culture, but they may have contributed considerably to Japanese physical characteristics, one of which is the relative hairiness of the Japanese when compared to other Mongoloid peoples. The bristling moustaches of the Japanese officers and business men may well be their Ainu legacy.
Bronze and iron probably first reached Japan about the first century of the Christian era, brought by a wave of Mongoloid invaders from Korea. These invaders clearly had close contacts with the semi-nomadic culture of the steppe lands of northeastern Asia. They were fighting men on horseback, carrying the long straight iron sword of northern Asia, and like the nomads of this region they buried their dead leaders in great mounds. One of their most common symbols was a semi-precious stone curved in the shape of a huge comma, and another was a round bronze mirror, usually considered to be the symbol of the sun. Similar curved jewels are common archaeological finds throughout Korea, and the bronze mirrors obviously were borrowed from the Chinese, showing that these people had ​already had some contact with the higher civilization of China before coming to Japan.
These invaders, with their superior bronze and iron civilization, soon became the dominant group among the varied peoples of early Japan. They were the founders of the historical Japanese state. Three of their most important possessions, the sword, the curved jewel, and the mirror, in time became the “Three Imperial Regalia,” which even today are the symbols of imperial authority.
The invaders from Korea were organized into petty clans. Chinese traders who visited western Japan around the year A.D. 200 found the country divided into scores of small clan states, each ruled by a high priestess or a high priest. At about that time feminine rule, strongly implied in Japanese mythology, seems to have been giving way to masculine rule.
A feeling of clan solidarity and a belief in the importance of hereditary rights and authority were undoubtedly strong among these people, for these forces have been dominant throughout Japanese history and are still much alive in modern Japan. Probably the figure of the aristocrat soldier, the man on horseback, was already important in Japanese society, for this shadowy figure of early Japan survived the deluge of borrowed Chinese civilization, to emerge at a later day as the backbone of a feudal Japan.
The religion of the early Japanese was primarily a naïve nature worship which, probably under Chinese influence, later came to include a certain amount of ancestor worship. Nameless at first, it was later given the Chinese-sounding name of Shinto, “the way of the ​gods,” to distinguish it from the continental religion of Buddhism. Shinto was based on a simple feeling of awe in the presence of any surprising or awesome phenomenon pf nature—a waterfall, a mountain crag, a large tree, a peculiarly shaped stone, or even some lowly thing awesome only in its capacity for irritation, such as an insect. Anything awe inspiring was called kami, a word usually translated as “god” but basically meaning “above,” and by extension “superior.” This simple Shinto concept of deity should be borne in mind in trying to understand the deification in modern Japan of living emperors and of all Japanese soldiers who have died for their country.
Places where people often felt a sense of awe became cult places and eventually shrines. Today tens of thousands of such shrines dot the landscape of Japan. Some are now great institutions dating back to shadowy antiquity, others merely miniature edifices of stone or wood recently erected in front of an old oak tree or in a deep recess of a cave.
The underlying stream of Shinto today remains little changed since prehistoric times. Much has been done during the past 1,500 years to make an organized religion of this simple nature worship, and, more recently, by emphasizing the early mythology connected with Shinto, to employ it as a force for national solidarity and an inspiration for fanatical patriotism. But despite these imposed superstructures, the true basis of Shinto remains unchanged, a simple and naïve nature worship.
The possessors of the iron and bronze culture first crossed from Korea to northern Kyushu and western Honshu about the first century of the Christian era, ​but these migrations from Korea to Japan continued for several centuries longer. As their numbers in Japan increased, they pushed their way up the broad highway of the Inland Sea to the central portion of Japan, conquering and absorbing the earlier inhabitants as they went.
One of the clans which, according to its own misty traditions, moved up the Inland Sea from an earlier home in Kyushu, finally settled in the small Yamato Plain not far from the eastern end of the Inland Sea. There it grew and prospered, establishing offshoots in new areas and absorbing other clans, until it had won a vague suzerainty over all of central and western Japan and even over parts of southern Korea.
Japanese control over southern Korea is represented in traditional Japanese history as the result of a semi-miraculous conquest by a warrior empress. A more plausible explanation would be that clans in southern Korea, feeling themselves more akin to related clans which had earlier crossed to Japan, sought aid from the peoples of western Japan against new invaders from northern Korea. In any case, Japanese power in southern Korea was apparently at its height in the second half of the fourth century and gradually waned thereafter, coming to an end in the year 562.
The suzerainty of the Yamato clan within Japan did not extinguish the autonomous rights of the other clans, but the priest-chief of the Yamato group became the chief among clan chiefs, and the special cults of this clan became the principal cults of the whole land. In this way worship of the Sun Goddess, the ​mythological progenitress of the chiefs of the Yamato clan, became the supreme cult of Japanese Shinto.
From the priest-chiefs of the Yamato clan, who gained supremacy over their fellow priest-chiefs during the third or fourth century, stemmed the Japanese imperial family. This was not so spectacular an origin as the direct descent from a Sun Goddess claimed in Japanese tradition. Nevertheless it was an origin of great antiquity when compared with the origins of other ruling families of the world. And the suzerainty of the Yamato clan was the start of the Japanese state itself, a loose association of clans under one supreme clan—scarcely the empire described in traditional Japanese history, but unmistakably the beginning of a new nation.