The West 'Pacific, as Seen by the Nipponese 



The Japanese, or the people we call by that name today, although 

 originally a seafaring race of migrants, were not true mariners until com- 

 paratively recently. They did not employ sail until this millennium, and 

 there were periods in their history when the building of ships, as op- 

 posed to little boats, was prohibited by law in order to prevent the people 

 from leaving the country. Nevertheless, they have since become a great 

 sea power and expanded widely over the northern Pacific. 



The people who inhabited their islands before they came were great 

 seamen though still living in the Stone Age. They appear to have been 

 related to the eastern Siberian Mongoloid peoples, the Eskimos, and 

 possibly some of the Amerindians. All these people went whaHng in 

 small skin kayaks, like the present-day Eskimos and the neolithic peoples 

 of Scandinavia in Europe. They obtained many whale products and 

 exported some of them to China, to the south, by the overland routes 

 shown on this map. 



The essential features of the world looked at from the viewpoint of 

 the Japanese have always been, first, their position upon a continuous 

 barrier of islands off the main Asiatic coast and completely fencing it in 

 and, second, the vast, hot, ocean river known as the Kuro Siwo which 

 flows out of the South China Sea via the straits north of the Phihppines. 

 This creates the cUmate of their isles, cuts them oif from the open 

 Pacific Ocean beyond, and diverts almost all their attention to the left — 

 that is, to the northeast — which leads to western North America. To 

 what extent this may have carried the Japanese, or those who dwelt in 

 their islands before them, to the coasts of America is not known, but 

 many cultural features are held in common by all the early peoples of 

 these coasts, notably their whaling practices. 



