no FOLLOW THE WHALE 



northeast. They were a maritime lot and they apparently ricocheted 

 up the Chinese coast, seizing all the offshore islands and finally jump- 

 ing from north China to what is today called Japan. 



The inhabitants of those islands have a venerable tradition about 

 this final hop, which they date as of 660 b.c. precisely for purely 

 political reasons but which was actually achieved over a thousand 

 years later. In that year, they now contend, one Jimmo Tenno 

 sailed east from the mainland and finally landed, three years later, 

 in Nippon and established a beachhead. The alleged meanderings and 

 conquests of this personage are not part of our story but, despite 

 their patent lack of authenticity, may well constitute a fair shadow 

 of the first chapter of Japanese history. Jimmo Tenno's real name 

 was apparently Kami Yamato Ihare-Biko, and he set out from the 

 island of Kyushu, but he may well have existed as a leader because 

 somebody had to lead the first invasion of the archipelago by the 

 Japanese, just as William the Conqueror led the GalHc Norse from 

 Normandy to the shores of Britain sixteen hundred years later. What 

 these first Japanese — and they apparently continued to come in 

 waves — found in the islands of Nippon we cannot say, but there 

 were certainly still a lot of Tsuchi-Gumo on Honshu and the south- 

 ern islands and of Ainus on both of these and on Hokkaido. The 

 Japanese exterminated all they could of both, and either assimilated 

 the rest or drove them north to Hokkaido. Somewhere along the 

 line, however, they acquired from these primitives a knowledge of 

 whaling. 



The primary interests of Japanese historians are, naturally, cen- 

 tered in fields other than that of whaling. Therefore, they have not 

 paid any particular attention to this abstruse but essential industrial 

 enterprise. Nonetheless, there is a continuous thread of whaling dis- 

 cernible throughout the history of thi^ country from Stone Age 

 times until the present day, and now that we know the earliest 

 aborigines followed this practice, it becomes easier to understand 

 how and why the people we know as the Japanese, even if they 

 were not already a maritime race, came to adopt the custom and the 

 tradition. Whaling, indeed, proceeded apparently uninterrupted for 

 centuries all around the archipelago, even during a long period when 

 the Japanese did not, or were not even allowed to, build any ships 

 of any consequence. 



