566 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1925 



battle was Ava^jed on both sides says a vast deal for the fighting quali- 

 ties of Ainu and Yamato alike. 



For some reason progress was much more rapid on the west than 

 on the east coast, so that about the close of the seventh century the 

 Yamato had after a fashion occupied the territory along the Sea of 

 Japan nearly up to the thirty -ninth parallel. On the Pacific side the 

 Ainu were then holding out along a line roughly corresponding to 

 latitude 37° N. The next few campaigns pushed the frontier back, 

 on the west, as far as a spot a trifle south of latitude 40° N., where 

 the Akita fort Avas built. From this point the boundary extended in 

 a general southeasterly direction across the central mountain ranges 

 to the Pacific, reaching the coast about in latitude 38° 40' N., some 

 50 miles or so north of the Taga fort, whose overgrown earthworks 

 still stand, not far from the present city of Sendai.^^ 



At this point, in the latter half of the eighth century, the still 

 unconquered Ainu made a desperate effort to regain their lost ground. 

 They took the Taga fort, massacred its commander and garrison, and 

 pushed far down the eastern coastal plain toward that Tokyo Bay 

 region from which their ancestors had been driven something like 

 300 years before. 



But the Yamato government, albeit with difficulty, kept large 

 forces in the field 3^ear after year, while the aborigines, barbarians 

 as they were, aided in their own subjugation by indulging in suicidal 

 wars among themselves. It was fortunate for them that the Yamato, 

 before the loss of their continental possessions left them free to at- 

 tend to their internal problems, had adopted the peaceful and humane 

 creed of Buddhism with its aversion to bloodshed. For, in obedi- 

 ence to the behests of their faith, they carried on no mere war of 

 extermination but made a genuine effort to civilize and assimilate the 

 conquered natives and to place them on the same footing with the 

 other subjects of the Mikado. At first prisoners of war were dis- 

 tributed in the western part of the islands in small bodies and were 

 given rations until they should learn to become self-supporting; while 

 later on the policy was adopted of organizing them into villages on 

 the same basis as the rural population elsewhere. Thousands of them, 

 first-class fighting men as they were, accepted enrollment in the 

 Japanese armies for service against their still unsubdued kinsmen. 

 Offices and gifts were bestowed on surrendered chieftains, while 

 missionaries, in some cases themselves converted Ainu who had taken 

 holy orders, made every effort to win the aborigines to the Buddhist 

 faith. 



"On the successive old Yamato-Ainu frontiers, soe ITara, op. cit., pp. 67 et seq., 86 

 ct set).. 104, 119, 147 ct seq.: N. (S. Munro, rriraitive Culture in Japan, Trans. Asiatic 

 Soc. of Japan, vol. 34, Part II, 1906, pp. 1-198 ; rc<forcncc on p. 106 ; idem, Prehistoric 

 Japan, p. .■)97. 



