PRIMEVAL JAPANESE. 797 



deity, who dwelt in the crystal depths of the ocean, his palace peopled 

 by lovely maidens. The goddess of the sun shone on Jimmn's enter- 

 prise at times when tempest or fog- threatened serious peril, and a kite, 

 circling overhead, indicated the direction of inhabited districts when 

 he and his warriors had lost their way among mountains and forests. 



How much of all this was transmitted b}- tradition, written or oral, 

 to the compilers of Jimmu's history in the eighth century; how much 

 was a mere reflection of national customs which had then become 

 sacred, and on which the political scholars of the time desired to set 

 the seal of anticiue sanction, who shall determined If Sanu and his 

 warriors brought with them the worship of the sun, that would ofl'er 

 an interesting inference as to their origin. If the aid that they 

 received from his light was suggested solely b}^ the grateful homage 

 that rice cultivators, thirteen centuries later, had learned to pay to his 

 beneficence, then the oldest written records of Japan nuist be read as 

 mere transcripts of the faiths and fashions of the era when they were 

 compiled, not as genuine traditions transmitted from previous ages. 

 But such distinctions have never been recognized by the Japanese. 

 With them these annals of their race's beginnings have always com- 

 manded as inviolable credence as the Testaments of Christianit}" used 

 to command in the Occident. From the lithographs that embellish 

 modern bank notes the sun looks down on the semidivine conqueror, 

 Jiunnu, and receives his homage. From the grand cordon of an order 

 instituted by his hundred and twenty- seventh successor depends the 

 kite that guided him through mountain fastnesses, and on a thousand 

 works of art the genius of the tortoise shows him the path across the 

 ocean. If these, picturesque elements were added by subsequent 

 writers to the outlines of an ordinary armed invasion by foreign 

 adventurers, the nation has received them and cherishes them to this 

 day as articles of a sacred faith. 



The annals here briefl}' summarized reveal three tides of more or 

 less civilized immigrants and a race of semibarbarous autochthons. 

 All the learned researches of modern archaeologists and ethnologists 

 do !iot teach us nnich more. It is now known with tolerable certainty 

 that the so-called autochthons were composed of two swarms of 

 colonists, l)otli coming from Siberia, though their advents were 

 separated by a long inter\al. 



The tirst, archteologicallv indicated by pit dwellings and shell mounds 

 still extant, were the Koro-pok-gui'u, or ''cave men." They are 

 believed to ))e represented to-day l)v the inhabitants of Saghalien. the 

 Kuriles, and southern Kamschatka. 



The second were the Aiiui, a flat-faced, heavy-jawed, hirsute people, 

 who completely drove out their predecessors and took possession of 

 the land. Th(> Ainu of that period had much in common with animals. 

 They burrowed in the ground for shelter; thev recognized no distinc- 



