558 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1925 



ferent material culture complex, partly Chinese and partl}^ Central 

 Asiatic in origin,-* which had taken form somewhere in Korea and 

 which was far higher than anything that the Japanese islands had 

 yet known. That this cultural invasion was the result of actual 

 conquest of any part of the country in a military sense can not be 

 categorically stated; but the presumption seems on the whole in 

 favor of something of the kind. 



OTHER EVIDENCES OP INVASION FROM KOREA 



The evidence of language, for one thing, appears to point in this 

 direction. Japanese belongs to an independent family, whose only 

 other members are Korean and Loochooan, and such indications 

 as there are point to central rather than to southern Asia as the 

 region of its origin.^® The most plausible conjecture — in the pres- 

 ent state of our knowledge it can be nothing more — would seem 

 to be that it reached Japan as the tongue of a relatively highly 

 civilized body of invaders, not necessarily large, penetrating south- 

 ward from the Korean peninsula and imposing their authority and 

 their language upon the less civilized tribes, presumably of mixed 

 Ainu and southern Mongoloid origin, whom they found in posses- 

 sion of the western portion of the islands. That such movements 

 were constantly recurring within Korea itself, we know from the 

 Chinese records. About 200 B. C, for example, when refugees 

 from China conquered the state of Chao-hsien, in southern Man- 

 churia, the king of the latter country escaped southward by sea 

 with several thousand of his followers and secured a footing for a 

 season in ]\Ia-Han in the southwest of the peninsula, only eventually 

 to be beaten out again.-*^ That a similar raid, or series of raids, 

 during the latter half of the second century of our era or there- 

 abouts, should have been the means of introducing an Early Iron 

 Age culture among the Wo, seems both possible and plausible. 



The most conspicuous feature of this period in Japan, next to 

 the use of iron itself, was the practice of dolmen burial. A careful 



^ Among tbe traces of central Asiatic influence upon the Early Iron Ajie civilization of 

 Japan are the reliance upon horse archers as the principal flgting arm ; the use of the 

 nari-kabura or " sounding arrow " ; the sacredness attached to certain horses, usually 

 piebald or albino ; sword worship ; divination by moans of a deer's shoulder blade ; and 

 the custom of burying living retainers about the tumuli of kings and nobles. 



Bashford Dean, in his " Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Japanese Armor," Metro 

 politan Museum of Art, New York, Handbook No. 14, 1903, p. 2S, points out that the 

 earliest metal armor of Japan, about 800 A. D., shows a relation.ship in many ways to 

 that of central and eastern Russia. 



"Legge ("Chinese Classics," vol. 5, p. 74) makes the interesting suggestion that a 

 polysyllabic language may have been spoken among the pre-Chinese natives of Shantung. 

 As is well known, Chinese is monosyllabic and tonal. 



""E. II. I'arker : On Race Struggles in Corea, Trans. Asiatic Soc. of Japan, vol. 18. 

 1890, pp. 157-228 ; reference on pp. 210 et seq. 



