Half -Light over Warm Seas 103 



and driving the remnants of the original inhabitants and the previ- 

 ous invaders into the northern islands. The original race has now 

 completely vanished, while the remnants of the first invaders have 

 been almost eclipsed by absorption in the northern islands. 



Nippon is the name given by the Japanese and sundry other peo- 

 ples to an archipelago which they collectively inhabit off the east- 

 ern edge of Asia. Today, the political unit we call Japan is con- 

 fined to only three of the six intrinsic parts of this archipelago. These 

 are known respectively as Kyushu in the south, Honshu, with the 

 island of Shikoku, in the middle, and Hokkaido in the north. The 

 other three portions of the archipelago are the Ryukyu Islands, 

 which stretch south from Kyushu to the great island of Taiwan, or 

 Formosa, which lies close to the mainland of China and is inhabited 

 by people basically allied to the Chinese; the large island of Sakhalin, 

 lying against the coast of Amuria to the northwest; and the diadem 

 of islands known as the Kuriles, which stretch northeast to the 

 southern tip of the peninsula of Kamchatka. 



The accompanying map displays all the essential features of the 

 area as seen by the Japanese. If you want to recognize it, you should 

 turn the page exactly ninety degrees clockwise and then you will 

 see it as it appears in our school atlases. Seen either way, but thus 

 lopped off from the rest of the vast continent of Eurasia, it will 

 probably look rather startling to all but geographers because we have 

 always thought of Asia as ending with China to the east, off the 

 coast of which lies only Japan. Almost invariably, all that lies 

 "above," or north, of China — according to our silly way of looking 

 at the world — is either simply ignored, or entirely left out of our 

 maps. Nevertheless, the triangular piece of land that juts out east 

 over the Pacific, and which lies north of China, is actually sHghtly 

 larger than the United States, while one of its rivers, the Lena, is 

 longer than, and a second, the Amur, almost as long as, the much- 

 vaunted Mississippi complex. This is a gigantic land of mighty moun- 

 tains, vast plains, and endless forests, inhabited today, as it has been 

 since the fifth millennium B.C. at least, by a large number of tribes 

 which are grouped into several related units or nationahties. The 

 area of which we speak is roughly triangular and stretches from 

 120° E. to 170° E. and from 75° N. to some 40° N. about Pekin. 

 It is nearly two thousand miles wide from west to east across the 



