| Summary: | Page 32 32 JAPAN. alleged date of Jimmu's adventures, there are internal evidences that impair the credibility of this early history. But the main facts, namely, that an invader arrived over sea, that he established the Japanese dynasty, and that he was accompanied by the forefathers of the thenceforth dominant race, may be accepted as true. Western ethnologists are tolerably agreed that Jimmu and his followers were Mongolians. There have been attempts to identify them with the lost tribes of Israel; with the Aztecs and with other peoples of the Occident. In Japan there is a belief that they were Manchurians; that is to say, a race which originally emigrated from a remote part of India, a race distinct from the Chinese, of which some settled in Manchuria, spread thence to the northeast of China, and finally passed to Japan. It must be agreed, for the moment, to leave the problem partially unsolved; noting, however, that though the Japanese shizoku cannot be absolutely identified with the Mongolian race of to-day, the differences are not so great as to be incapable of reference to the modifying influences of environment acting throughout long centuries. At all events, we may conclude that the final immigrants, Jimmu and his followers, or the so-called Takama- no-hara folk, found, on their arrival, a Malayan people inhabiting the southern and central parts of Japan, and an Arctic tribe, the Ainu, living in the north, and that, while they amalgamated with the former after conquest, they drove out the latter, treating them as a wholly inferior race, the result being that whereas the Japanese proper show plainly enough the blending of the Mongolian and Malayan types, they show no affinity whatever with the Ainu. These conclusions do not embrace all the suggestions furnished by tradition and physiography. We have accepted the probability that Arctic tribes found their way to Japan along the chain of islands lying between the mouth of the Amur and the Tsugaru Strait; that a tropical tribe migrated northward via the ...
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