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points out, the castle gate and the (cassia) tree before it, as 

 well as the well which serves as a mirror, form a combination 

 not unknown to European folklore. Europe probably also got 

 them from India, the cradle of Western and Eastern legends. 



After having written this I got acquainted with the interesting 

 fact, pointed out by F. W. K. Muller \ that a similar myth is 

 to be found as well on the Kei islands as in the Minahassa. 

 The resemblance of several features of this myth with the 

 Japanese one is so striking, that we may be sure that the latter 

 is of Indonesian origin. Probably the foreign invaders, who in 

 prehistoric times conquered Japan, came from Indonesia and 

 brought this myth with them. In the Kei version the man who 

 had lost the hook, lent to him by his brother, enters the clouds 

 in a boat and at last finds the hook in the throat of a fish. In 

 the Minahassa legend, however, he dives into the sea and arrives 

 at a village at the bottom of the water. There he discovers the 

 hook in the throat of a girl, and is brought home on the bach 

 of a big fish. And like Hohodemi punished his brother by nearly 

 drowning him by means of the jewel of flood-tide, so the hero 

 of the Minahassa legend by his prayers caused the rain to come 

 down in torrents upon his evil friend. In Japan Buddhist influence 

 evidently has changed the village ia the sea into the palace of 

 a Dragon king, but in the older version the sea-god and his 

 daughter have kept their original shapes of wani, probably a 

 kind of crocodiles, as the Chinese character indicates. An old 

 painting of Sensai Eitaku, reproduced by Muller, shows Hoho- 

 demi returning home on the back of a crocodile, [t is quite 

 possible that the form of this Indonesian myth introduced into 

 Japan spoke about crocodiles, and that the vague conception of 

 these animals was retained under the old name of wani, which 

 may be an Indonesian word. 



On p. 149 of the same work Aston says: "There can be little 

 doubt that the loani is really the Chinese dragon. It is frequently 

 so represented in Japanese pictures. I have before me a print 

 which shows Toyotama-hiko and his daughter with dragons'' heads 

 appe'aring over their human ones. This shows that he was conceived 

 of not only as a Lord of Dragons, but as a dragon himself ...» 

 In Japanese myth the serpent or dragon is almost always asso- 



4 Mylhe der Kei-lnsulaner und Verwandtes, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, Vol. XXV 

 (1893), pp. 533 sqq. Dr H. H. Juvnboll kindlj' pointed out to me the existence of these. 

 Kei- and Minahassa myths and Dr MOller's interesting article. Cf. Kern, in the periodi- 

 cal entitled "Bijdragen tot de taal-, land en volkenkunde van Ned. Indie", -ISgS, p. 501 ; 

 JUYNBOLL, ibidem, 1894, p. 712, note 1. 



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