Il8 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



mense harpoon shaft, and the comparatively short lines attached to 

 the floats. These are exactly as depicted on the bird-bone tube 

 found in Sakhalin and they point directly not only to that early 

 Asiatic whaling but also to its later development by the Japanese. 



Apart from some tradition, many myths, and the findings of ar- 

 chaeologists, there is no Japanese history prior to 700 a.d. At this 

 point the story becomes clearer in a written record called the Kojiki, 

 or The Record of Ancient Matters^ which was written, under impe- 

 rial decree, by a remarkable woman who had been trained to memo- 

 rize all the ancient accounts that had till then been passed down by 

 word of mouth. This was composed in 712 a.d. Then in 720 a.d. 

 the Nihongiy or Nihon Shoki, the Chronicles of Japan, were com- 

 pleted. These works give us much information but, being composed 

 in the then current frame of reference, are sorely lacking in the 

 more intimate details of life in Nippon that we would so much 

 like to know; also, they are not historically reliable up till the im- 

 mediately preceding centuries. 



From that time until the arrival of the Portuguese and Hollanders 

 in the sixteenth century, there are contemporary records of ever- 

 increasing reliability which provide historians with a wealth of 

 general information, but which are unfortunately almost useless in 

 regard to our speciality. Direct references to whahng are all but 

 nonexistent, yet there are numerous indications that it was prose- 

 cuted continuously as a regular part of the fishing industry, which 

 has always been of primary importance to this now almost wholly 

 maritime people. What is more, when we do finally get actual spe- 

 cific accounts of the business, which are of almost modern date, like 

 the Yugyotoru Eshi, or Pictures of Whaling, by Yamada Yosei, 

 published in 1829, they invariably describe a procedure which, it is 

 clearly given to be understood, is most ancient. That this must have 

 been so is even more clearly indicated by the degree of specializa- 

 tion and formality with which whaling was conducted and the 

 intricate procedures it employed. 



Relying on these latter-day descriptions with their wonderfully 

 busy illustrations of positively furious activities on both sea and 

 land, we find that the Japanese were whaling with considerable suc- 

 cess at the same time as, and in a very like manner to, the Basques 

 of the Bay of Biscay, but that they developed some most novel ideas 



