255. Japan
Japan is the one country of eastern Asia from which considerable prehistoric data are available. There are indeed no indubitable evidences of any Palæolithic culture or race, but shellheaps and burial mounds abound and have been explored. The shell deposits, of which 4,000 have been found, are probably the accumulation of refuse of occupation by the Ainu, the first known inhabitants of Japan, now surviving only in the extreme north of the island chain and in Sakhalien, and still a primitive people. This race is different from the Japanese, and has often been classified as Caucasian (§ [27]). The shell deposits show the aborigines to have been fishers and hunters, without agriculture or edible domestic animals. They had the bow, dog, incised hand-made pottery, and ground stone axes, and were thus approximately in an early Neolithic stage.
A somewhat dubious bronze age is sparsely represented in southern Japan. It has been ascribed to an invasion about the seventh century B.C., but is perhaps only an early phase of the iron age. Iron was brought in at a time not precisely determined, but likely to have been about the fourth century B.C., by the so-called Yamato people—evidently the ancestors of the Japanese of to-day—who seem to have come from Korea and at any rate occupied the southern islands first. Thence they fought their way northward, gaining territory at the expense of the natives but slowly. Fifteen centuries ago the northern third of the main island was still in Ainu possession. These early Japanese erected megalithic chambers or corridors as tombs for their princes, covering them with mounds of earth. More than 3,000 of these structures are known. The early emperors were buried in double mounds, some of them of great area. From the fifth to the seventh century Korean influence was strong; the Chinese writing and classics were imported from that country. Later relations between the two nations were more intermittent, perhaps because of the growing consolidation and strength of Japan from the eighth century on.
The cultural debt of Japan to China is great, but less than that of Korea. The Japanese added 47 purely phonetic syllabic characters to the Chinese writing, in order to represent their own proper names, grammatical forms, and the like. These characters would have sufficed for a simple, efficient, and purely native script, but have remained a mere supplement to the ideographic Chinese system (§ [105]). The mandarin and examination system of China were never taken over by the Japanese, who clung to their feudal customs more than two thousand years later than China. The ancestor worship of the Chinese and the official Confucian religion also did not become established in Japan, the state cult being Shinto, the crystallization of a primitive set of rites and of a mythology which has parallels in the Occident, in the East Indies and Oceania, and even in North America, rather than in China.
An early Malaysian strain in both Japanese race and culture has been alleged, but this is a subject on which more evidence is needed. Japanese speech does not elucidate the origins of the nation, the language—like that of Korea—not being determined as related to any other. The physical type, on the other hand, and this applies also to Korea, is allied to that of China.