# Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 1/Chapter 2

Chapter II
PRIMÆVAL JAPANESE
There are three written records of Japan's early history. The oldest of them dates from the beginning of the eighth century of the Christian era, and deals with events extending back for fourteen hundred years. The compilation of this work was one of the most extraordinary feats ever undertaken. The compiler had to construct the sounds of his own tongue by means of ideographs devised for transcribing a foreign language. He had to render Japanese phonetically by using Chinese ideographs. It was as though a man should set himself to commit Shakespeare's plays to writing by the aid of the cuneiform characters of Babylon. A book composed in the face of such difficulties could not convey a very clear idea of contemporary speech or thought. The same is true, though in a less degree, of the other two volumes on which it is necessary to rely for knowledge of ancient Japan.
It might reasonably be anticipated, arguing from the analogy of other nations, that some ​plain practical theory would exist among the Japanese as to their own origin; that tradition would have supplied for them a proud creed identifying their forefathers with some of the renowned peoples of the earth, and that if the progenitors of the nimble-witted, active-bodied, refined, and high-spirited people now bidding so earnestly for a place in the comity of great nations, had migrated originally from a land peopled by men possessing qualities such as they themselves have for centuries displayed, many annals descriptive of their primæval home would have been handed down through the ages. There are no such theories, no such annals, no such traditions.
When the Japanese first undertook to explain their own origin in the three books spoken of above, so unfettered were they by genuine reminiscences that they immediately had recourse to the supernatural and derived themselves from heaven. Reduced to its fundamental outlines, the legend they set down was that, in the earliest times, a group of the divine dwellers in the plains of high heaven descended to a place with a now unidentifiable name, and thence gradually pushing eastward, established themselves in the "land of sunrise," giving to it a race of monarchs, direct scions of the goddess of light (Amaterasu). Many things are related about these heaven-sent folk who peopled Japan hundreds of years before the Christian era. They are things that must be ​studied by any one desiring to make himself acquainted with the essence of her indigenous religion or her pictorial and decorative arts, for they there play a picturesque and prominent part. But they have nothing to do with sober history. Possibly it may be urged that nations whose traditions deal with a Mount Sinai, a pillar of cloud and fire, and an immaculate conception, have no right to reject everything supernatural in Oriental annals. That superficial retort has, indeed, been made too often. But behind it there undoubtedly lurks in the inner consciousness of the educated and intelligent Japanese a resolve not to scrutinise these things too closely. Whether or not the "age of the gods"—kami no yo—of which, as a child, he reads with implicit credence, and of which, as a man, he recognises the political uses, should be openly relegated to the limbo of absurdities; whether the deities had to take part in an immodest dance in order to lure the offended Sun Goddess from a cave to which her brother's rudeness had driven her, thus plunging the universe in darkness; whether the god of impulse fought with the god of fire on the shores of the Island of Nine Provinces; whether the procreative divinities were inspired by a bird; whether the germs of a new civilisation were carried across the sea by a prince begotten of the sunshine and born in the shape of a crimson jewel,—these are not problems that receive very serious consideration in Japan, though neither a Colenso nor a ​Huxley has yet arisen to attack them publicly. They are rather allegories from which emerges the serviceable political doctrine that the emperors of Japan, being of divine origin, rule by divine right. It is the Japanese historian's method, or the Japanese mythologist's manner, of describing an attribute claimed until very recently by all Occidental sovereigns, and still asserted on behalf of some. As for the foreign student of Japan's ancient history, these weird myths and romantic allegories have induced him to dismiss it as a purely imaginary product of later-day imagination. The transcendental elements woven into parts of the narrative discredit the whole in his eyes. And his scepticism is fortified by a generally accepted hypothesis that the events of the thirteen opening centuries of the story were preserved solely by oral tradition. The three volumes which profess to tell about the primæval creators of Japan, about Jimmu, the first mortal ruler, and about his human successors during a dozen centuries, are supposed to be a collection of previously unwritten recollections, and it seems only logical to doubt whether the outlines of figures standing at the end of such a long avenue of hearsay can be anything but imaginary. Possibly that disbelief is too wholesale. Possibly it is too much to conclude that the Japanese had no kind of writing prior to their acquisition of Chinese ideographs in the fifth century of the Christian era. But there is little apparent hope ​that the student will ever be in a position to decide these questions conclusively. He must be content for the present to regard the annals of primæval Japan as an assemblage of heterogeneous fragments from the traditions of South Sea islanders, of central Asian tribes, of Manchurian Tartars and of Siberian savages, who reached her shores at various epochs, sometimes drifted by ocean currents, sometimes crossing by ice-built bridges, sometimes migrating by less fortuitous routes.
What these records, stripped of all their fabulous features, have to tell is this:—
At a remote date, a certain race of highly civilised men—highly civilised by comparison—arrived at the islands of Japan. Migrating from the south, the adventurers landed on the Southern island, Kiushiu, and found a fair country, covered with luxurious vegetation and sparsely populated by savages living like beasts of the field, having no organised system of administration and incapable of offering permanent resistance to the superior weapons and discipline of the invaders, who established themselves with little difficulty in the newly found land. But on the main island two races of men very different from these savages had already gained a footing. One had its headquarters in the province of Izumo, and claimed sovereignty over the whole country. The other was concentrated in Yamato. Neither of these races knew of the other's existence, Izumo and ​Yamato being far apart. At the outset, the immigrants who had newly arrived in Kiushiu, imagined that they had to deal with the Izumo folk only. They began by sending envoys. The first of these, bribed by the Izumo rulers, made his home in the land he had been sent to spy out. The second forgot his duty in the arms of an Izumo beauty whose hair fell to her ankles. The third discharged his mission faithfully, but was put to death in Izumo. The sequel of this somewhat commonplace series of events was war. Putting forth their full strength, the southern invaders shattered the power of the Izumo court and received its submission. But they did not transfer their own court to the conquered province. Ignorant that Izumo was a mere fraction of the main island, they imagined that no more regions remained to be subjugated. By and by they discovered their mistake. Intelligence reached them that, far away in the northeast, a race of highly civilised men, who had originally come from beyond the sea in ships, were settled in the province of Yamato, holding undisputed sway. To the conquest of these colonists Jimmu, who then ruled the southern immigrants, set out on a campaign which lasted fifteen years, and ended, after some fierce fighting, in the Yamato rulers' acknowledging their consanguinity with the invader and abdicating in his favour.
A GROUP OF AINU.
How much of all this was transmitted by tradition, written or oral, to the compilers of ​Jimmu's history in the eighth century; how much was a mere reflection of national customs which had then become sacred, and on which the political scholars of the time desired to set the seal of antique sanction, who shall determine? If Sanu and his warriors brought with them the worship of the sun, that would offer an interesting inference as to their origin. If the aid that they received from his light was suggested solely by the grateful homage that rice-cultivators, thirteen centuries later, had learned to pay to his beneficence, then the oldest written records of Japan must be read as mere transcripts of the faiths and fashions of the era when they were compiled, not as genuine traditions transmitted from previous ages. But such distinctions have never been recognised by the Japanese. With them these annals of their race's beginnings have always commanded as inviolable credence as the Testaments of Christianity used to command in the Occident. From the lithographs that embellish modern bank-notes the sun looks down on the semi-divine conqueror, Jimmu, and receives his homage. From the grand cordon of an order instituted by his hundred and twenty-seventh successor, depends the kite that guided him through mountain fastnesses, and on a thousand works of art the genius of the tortoise shows him the path across the ocean. If these picturesque elements were added by subsequent writers to the outlines of an ordinary armed invasion by foreign ​adventurers, the nation has received them and cherishes them to this day as articles of a sacred faith.
The annals here briefly summarised reveal three tides of more or less civilised immigrants and a race of semi-barbarous autochthons. All the learned researches of modern archæologists and ethnologists do not teach us much more. It is now known with tolerable certainty that the so-called autochthons were composed of two swarms of colonists, both coming from Siberia, though their advents were separated by a long interval.
The first, archæologically indicated by pit-dwellings and shell-mounds still extant, were the Koro-pok-guru, or "cave-men." They are believed to be represented to-day by the inhabitants of Saghalien, the Kuriles and Southern Kamschatka.
The second were the Ainu, a flat-faced, heavy-jawed, hirsute people, who completely drove out their predecessors and took possession of the land. The Ainu of that period had much in common with animals. They burrowed in the ground for shelter; they recognised no distinctions of sex in apparel or of consanguinity in intercourse; they clad themselves in skins; they drank blood; they practised cannibalism; they were insensible to benefits and perpetually resentful of injuries; they resorted to savagely cruel forms of punishment,—severing the tendons of the leg, boiling the arms, slicing off the nose, etc.; they used stone im-​plements, and, unceasingly resisting the civilised immigrants who subsequently reached the islands, they were driven northward by degrees, and finally pushed across the Tsugaru Strait into the island of Yezo. That long struggle, and the disasters and sufferings it entailed, radically changed the nature of the Ainu. They became timid, gentle, submissive folk; lost most of the faculties essential to survival in a racial contest, and dwindled to a mere remnant of semi-savages, incapable of progress, indifferent to improvement, and presenting a more and more vivid contrast to the energetic, intelligent, and ambitious Japanese.
But these Japanese—who were they originally? Whence did the three or more tides of immigration set which ultimately coalesced to form the race now standing at the head of Oriental peoples? Strangely varying answers to this question have been furnished. Kampfer persuaded himself that the primæval Japanese were a section of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Hyde-Clarke identified them with Turano-Africans who travelled eastward through Egypt, China, and Japan. Macleod recognised in them one of the lost tribes of Israel. Several writers have regarded them as Malayan colonists. Griffin was content to think that they are modern Ainu, and recent scholars incline to the belief that they belonged to the Tartar-Mongolian stock of Central Asia. Something of this diversity of view is due to the fact that the Japanese are not a pure race. They pre-​sent several easily distinguishable types, notably the patrician and the plebeian. This is not a question of mere coarseness in contrast with refinement; of the degeneration due to toil and exposure as compared with the improvement produced by gentle living and mental culture. The representative of the Japanese plebs has a conspicuously dark skin, prominent cheek bones, a large mouth, a robust and heavily boned physique, a flat nose, full straight eyes, and a receding forehead. The aristocratic type is symmetrically and delicately built; his complexion varies from yellow to almost pure white; his eyes are narrow, set obliquely to the nose; the eyelids heavy; the eyebrows lofty; the mouth small; the face oval; the nose aquiline; the hand remarkably slender and supple.
Here are two radically distinct types. What is more, they have been distinguished by the Japanese themselves ever since any method of recording such distinctions existed. For from the time when he first began to paint pictures, the Japanese artist recognised and represented only one type of male and female beauty, namely, that distinguished in a marked, often an exaggerated, degree by the features enumerated above as belonging to the patrician class. There has been no evolution in this matter. The painter had as clear a conception of his type ten centuries ago as he has to-day. Nothing seems more natural than the supposition that this higher type represents the ​finally dominant race of immigrants; the lower, their less civilised opponents.
The theory which seems to fit the facts best is that the Japanese are compounded of elements from Central and Southern Asia, and that they received their patrician type from the former, their plebeian from the latter. The Asiatic colonists arrived viâ Korea. But they were neither Koreans nor Chinese. That seems certain, though the evidence which proves it cannot be detailed here. Chinese and Koreans came from time to time in later ages; came occasionally in great numbers, and were absorbed into the Japanese race, leaving on it some faint traces of the amalgamation. But the original colonists did not set out from either China or Korea. Their birthplace was somewhere in the north of Central Asia. As for the South-Asian immigrants, they were drifted to Japan by a strange current called the "Black Tide" (Kuro-shiwo), which sweeps northward from the Philippines, and bending thence towards the east, touches the promontory of Kii and Yamato before shaping its course permanently away from the main island of Japan. It is true that in the chronological order suggested by early history the southern colonists succeeded the northern and are supposed to have gained the mastery; whereas among the Japanese, as we now see them, the supremacy of the northern type appears to have been established for ages. That may be ex-​plained, however, by an easy hypothesis, namely, that although the onset of the impetuous southerns proved at first irresistible, they ultimately coalesced with the tribes they had conquered, and in the end the principle of natural selection replaced the vanquished on their proper plane of eminence. But this distinction, it must be observed, is one of outward form rather than of moral attributes. Neither history nor observation furnishes any reason for asserting that the so-called "aristocratic," or Mongoloid, cast of features accompanies a fuller endowment of either physical or mental qualities than the vulgar, or Malayan, cast. Numerically the patrician type constitutes only a small fraction of the nation, and seems to have been lacking in a majority of the country's past leaders, as it is certainly lacking in a majority of her present publicists, and even in the very crême de la creme of society. The male of the upper classes is not generally an attractive product of nature. He has neither commanding stature, refinement of features, nor weight of muscle. On the other hand, among the labouring populations, and especially among the seaside folk, numbers of men are found who, though below the average Anglo-Saxon or Teuton in bulk, are cast in a perfectly symmetrical mould and suggest great possibilities of muscular effort and endurance. In short, though the aristocratic type has survived, and though its superior beauty is universally recognised, it has not impressed ​itself completely on the nation, and there is no difficulty in conceiving that its representatives went down before the first rush of the southern invaders, but subsequently, by tenacity of resistance and by fortitude under suffering, recovered from a shock which would have crushed a lower grade of humanity.
Histories that describe the manners and customs of a people have been rare in all ages. The compilers of Japan's first annals, in the eighth century, paid little attention to this part of their task. Were it necessary to rely on their narrative solely for a knowledge of the primæval Japanese, the student would be meagrely informed. But archæology comes to his assistance. It raises these men of old from their graves, and reveals many particulars of their civilisation which could never have been divined from the written records alone.
The ancient Japanese—not the Koro-pok-guru or the Ainu, but the ancestors of the Japanese proper—buried their dead, first in barrows and afterwards in dolmens. The barrow was merely a mound of earth heaped over the remains, after the manner of the Chinese. The dolmen was a stone chamber. It had walls constructed with blocks of stone, generally unhewn and rudely laid but sometimes hewn and carefully fitted; its roof consisted of huge and ponderous slabs; it varied in form, sometimes taking the shape of a long gallery only; sometimes of a gallery and a ​chamber, and sometimes of a gallery and two chambers; over it was built a mound of earth which occasionally assumed enormous dimensions, covering a space of seventy or eighty acres, rising to a height of as many feet, and requiring the labour of thousands of workmen. The builders of the barrows were in the bronze age of civilisation; the constructors of the dolmens, in the iron age. In the barrows are found weapons and implements of bronze and vessels of hand-made pottery; in the dolmens, weapons and implements of iron and vessels of wheel-turned pottery. There is an absolute line of division. No iron weapon nor any machine-made pottery occurs in a barrow; no bronze weapon nor any hand-made pottery in a dolmen. Are the barrow-builders and the dolmen-constructors to be regarded as distinct races, or as men of the same race at different stages of its civilisation? Barrow and dolmen bear common testimony to the fact that before the ancestors of the Japanese nation crossed the sea to their inland home, they had already emerged from the stone age, for neither in barrow nor in dolmen have stone-weapons or implements been found, though these abound in the shell-heaps and kitchen-middens that constitute the relics of the Koro-pok-guru and the Ainu. But, on the other hand, barrow and dolmen introduce their explorer to peoples who stood on different planes of industrial development.
​The progress of civilisation is always gradual. A nation does not pass, in one stride, from burial in rude tumuli to sepulture in highly specialised forms of stone vaults, nor yet from a bronze age to an iron. It is therefore evident that the evolution of dolmen from barrow did not take place within Japan. The dolmen-constructor must have completely emerged from the bronze age and abandoned the fashion of barrow-burial before he reached Japan. Otherwise search would certainly disclose some transitional form between the barrow and the dolmen, and some iron implements would occur in the barrows, or bronze weapons in the dolmens. If, then, the barrow-builder and the dolmen-constructor were racially identical, it would seem to follow that the latter succeeded the former by a long interval in the order of immigration, and brought with him a greatly improved type of civilisation evolved in the country of his origin.
The reader will be naturally disposed to anticipate that the geographical distribution of the dolmens and the barrows furnishes some aid in solving this problem. But though the exceptional number found on the coasts opposite to Korea tends to support the theory that the stream of Mongoloid immigration came chiefly from the Korean peninsula viâ the island of Tsushima, there is not any local differentiation of one kind of sepulture from the other, and, for the rest, the grouping of the dolmens supplies no information ​except that their builders occupied the tract of country from the shores opposite Korea on the west to Musashi and the south of Shimotsuke on the east, and did not penetrate to the extreme northeast, or to the regions of mountain and forest in the interior.
Here another point suggests itself. If the fashion of the Japanese dolmen was introduced from abroad, evidences of its prototype should survive on the adjacent continent of Asia. If the numerous dolmens found on the coasts of Kiushiu and Izumo facing Korea are to be taken as indications that their constructors emigrated originally from the Korean peninsula, then Korea also should contain similar dolmens, and if an ethnological connection existed between Japan and China in prehistoric days, China, too, should have dolmens. But no dolmens have hitherto been found in China, and the dolmens of Korea differ radically from those of Japan, being "merely cists with megalithic cap-stones" (Gowland). It has been shown, further, that dolmens similar to those of Japan are not to be found in any part of Continental Asia eastward of the shores of the Caspian Sea, and that Western Europe alone offers exactly analogous types. In short, from an ethnological point of view, the dolmens of Japan are as perplexing as the dolmens of Europe, and the prospect of solving the riddle seems to be equally remote in both cases. All that can be affirmed is that the dolmens offer strong corroborative ​testimony to the truth of the Japanese historical narrative which represents Jimmu as the leader of the last and most highly civilised among the bands of colonists constituting the ancestors of the present Japanese race. Thus the "divine warrior," after having been temporarily erased from the tablets of history by the modern sceptic of the West, is projected upon them once more from the newly opened graves of the primæval Japanese. It is true that there is an arithmetical difficulty: it has been supposed that the dolmens do not date from a period more remote than the third century before Christ, whereas Jimmu's invasion is assigned to the seventh. But no great effort of imagination is required to effect a compromise between the uncertain chronology of the Japanese annals and the tentative estimates of modern archæologists.
Some of the burial customs revealed by these ancient tombs resemble the habits of the Scythians as described by Herodotus. The Japanese did not, it is true, lay the corpse of a chieftain between sheets of gold, nor did they inter his favourite wife with similar pomp in an adjoining chamber; but they did deposit with him his weapons, his ornaments, and the trappings of his war-horse, and in remote times they followed the barbarous rule of burying alive, in the immediate vicinity of his sepulchre, his personal attendants, male and female, and probably also his steed. To the abrogation of that cruel rule is due much ​information about the garments worn in early epochs, for in the century immediately preceding the Christian era a kind-hearted emperor decided that clay figures should be substituted for human victims, and these figures, being modelled, however roughly, in the guise of the men and women of the time, tell what kind of costumes were worn and what was the manner of wearing them. Collecting all the available evidence, the story shapes itself into this:—
Prior to the third, or perhaps the fourth, century before the Christian era, when the dead were interred in barrows, not dolmens, the Japanese, though they stood on a plane considerably above the general level of Asiatic civilisation, did not yet understand the forging of iron or the use of the potter's wheel. They were still in the bronze age, and their weapons—swords, halberds, and arrow-heads—were made of that metal. Concerning the fashion of their garments not much is known, but they used, for purpose of personal adornment, quaintly shaped objects of jasper, rock-crystal, steatite, and other stones. Then, owing probably to the advent of a second wave of immigration from the continent, the civilisation of the nation was suddenly raised, and the country passed at once from the bronze to the iron age, with a corresponding development of industrial capacity in other directions, and with a novel method of sepulture having no exact prototype except in Western Europe. The new-comers seem to have ​been, not a race distinct from their predecessors, but a second outgrowth of colonists from the same parent stem. Where that stem had its roots there is no clear indication, but it is evident that, during the interval between the first and the second migrations, the mother country had far excelled its colony in material civilisation, so that, with the advent of the second band of wanderers, the condition of the Japanese underwent marked change. They laid aside their bronze weapons and began to use iron swords and spears, and iron-tipped arrows. A warrior carried one sword and, perhaps, a dagger. The sword had a blade which varied from two and a half feet to over three feet in length. These were not the curved weapons with curiously modelled faces and wonderful trenchancy which became so celebrated in later times. Straight, one-edged swords, formidable enough, but considerably inferior to the admirable katana of mediæval and modern eras, they were sheathed in wooden scabbards, having bands and hoops of copper, silver, or iron, by means of which the weapon was suspended from the girdle. The guards were of iron, copper, or bronze, often coated with gold, and always having holes cut in them to render them lighter. Wood was the material used for hilt as well as for scabbard, but generally in the former case and sometimes in the latter a thin sheet of copper with gold plating enveloped the wood. Double barbs characterised the arrow-head, and as these projected about four ​inches beyond the shaft, a bow of great strength must have been used, though of only medium length. Armour does not seem to have been generally worn, or to have served for covering any part of the body except the head and the breast. It was of iron, and it took the shape of thin bands of metal, riveted together for casque and cuirass. Neither brassart, visor, nor greaves have been found in any dolmen, and though solerets of copper are among the objects exhumed, they appear to have been rather ornamental than defensive. As to shields, nothing is known. No trace of them has been found, and it seems a reasonable inference that they were not used. Horses evidently played an important part in the lives of the second batch of immigrants, for horse-furniture constantly appears among the objects found in dolmens. The bit is almost identical with the common "snaffle" of the Occident. Made of iron, it has side-rings or cheek-pieces of the same metal, elaborately shaped and often sheeted with gilded copper. The saddle was of wood, peaked before and behind and braced with metal bands, and numerous ornaments of repoussé iron covered with sheets of gilt or silvered copper were attached to the trappings. Among these ornaments a peculiar form of bell is present: an oblate hollow-sphere, having a long slit in its shell and containing a loose metal pellet. Stirrups are seldom found in the dolmens, and the rare specimens hitherto exhumed bear no resemblance to the large, heavy, ​shoe-shaped affairs of later ages, but are rather of the Occidental type.
DOLMEN AT DŌMYŌJI-YAMA. (KAWACHI.)
As to the food of these early people, it seems to have consisted of fish, flesh, and cereals. They used wine of some kind, though of its nature there is no knowledge, and their household utensils were of pottery, graceful in outline but unglazed and archaically decorated. Whether or not they possessed cattle there is no evidence, nor yet is it known what means they employed to produce fire, though the fire-drill appears to be the most probable.
That they believed in a future state is evident, since they buried with the dead whatever implements and weapons might be necessary in the life beyond the grave; that ancestral worship constituted an important part of their religious cult is proved by the offerings periodically made at the tombs of the deceased; and that idolatry was not practised or superstition largely prevalent may be deduced from the complete absence of charms or amulets among the remains found in their sepulchres.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 2.
* ↑ See Appendix, note 3.
* ↑ ​Note 2.—The Koji-ki, or annals of ancient matters.
* ↑ ​Note 3.—The Nihon-gi (history of Japan) and the Koga-shu (ancient records).
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