EARLY JAPAN BISHOP 555 



This region, we are told, lay to the south of Korea — somewhere, that 

 is to say, in the island of Kyushu — and contained a hundred petty 

 kingdoms, all subject to the Ta Wo Wang, or great king of the Wo. 

 It is further described as a maritime region with a late Stone Age 

 culture, lying nearly due east of what is now the Chinese province 

 of Chekiang and enjoying so mild a climate that vegetables were 

 grown both winter and summer.^^ 



Now the winters of the Japanese Pacific seaboard are mild, it is 

 true, thanks to the Japan Current. But nowhere are they mild 

 enough to admit of the winter ripening of crops, save in certain 

 favored localities of Shikoku and Kyushu; and of Sliikoku in this 

 connection there is no question. Yet several modern writers, in- 

 fluenced by the similarity in sound, have insisted upon identifying 

 Ye-ma-t'ai with the Japanese Province of Yamato, far away to the 

 eastward, in the heart of the mountainous peninsula forming the 

 boundary of the Inland Sea in that direction. It is hard to believe, 

 however, that when the careful and evidently well-informed Cliinese 

 historians s]3eak of a maritime region with an extremely mild winter 

 climate, lying far to the south, they really mean an inland Province 

 with a decidedly cold winter, situated in the distant east. 



Nevertheless there may exist a connection between Ye-ma-t'ai and 

 Yamato after all. Both the Chinese historians and their own legends 

 represent the primitive Japanese as located first of all in Kyushu, 

 where in fact the word " Yamato " does actually occur, as a place 

 name in both Higo and Chikugo Provinces.^^ We know further 

 that this name has been applied by the Japanese people to them- 

 selves in a very definite Avay ; Yamato damashii, for example, means 

 the si^irit of the Japanese people, not that of the Province of Ya- 

 mato. Hence, it seems possible at least that " Yamato " was the name 

 applied to themselves, while still in Kyushu, by the people whom the 

 Chinese usually referred to as the Wo and that when, as we shall 

 see, they transferred their seat of government to central Japan they 

 carried their name with them. 



CULTURE AREAS IN THE KOREAN PENINSULA 



The Korean peninsula during these times, just prior to and about 

 the beginning of the Christian era, was divided into two quite dis- 



" H. Maspero : Bull. Ecole Prar.gaise d'Eitreme Orient, vol. 9, 1909, pp. 593 ct seq. ; 

 N. Peri, ibid., vol. 10, 1910, p. 715, note 1 ; C. E. Maitro : La litt(5rature tiistorique du 

 Japon 6es origines aux Asliikaga, ibid., vol. 10, 1910, pp. 504-596 ; reference on p. 

 580, note 1. 



18 Prank Brinkley and Baron Kikuchi : A History of the .Japanese People from the 

 Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era, New York and London, 1912, p. 84 ; W. G. 

 Aston (transl.) : Nihongi, Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A. D. G97, 

 Trans, and Proc. of the Japan Soc, Supplement 1, 2 vols., London, 1896, reference in vol. 

 1, p. 226 and note 8. 



