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.
256. Central and Northern Asia
It has become a habit to regard central and northern Asia as a hive for humanity, as the area from which nations and races have chronically swarmed. Whenever the origin of a people remains obscure, be they Neandertals, Alpines, Sumerians, Chinese, Japanese, Aryans, or what not, some one propounds the convenient hypothesis of deriving them from this vast interior land, which in many cases amounts to an explanation of the half-known by the unknown. Of late there has been added the fashion of attributing the expansions to climatic drying-up of central Asia, which forced the population out. There appears to be considerable evidence of such progressive desiccation; but its degree, and still more the extent of its influence upon culture and emigration, remain to be ascertained.
A more balanced view would concede the recurrence and occasional destructiveness of the invasions out of central Asia, but would view them rather as transient and relatively superficial phenomena from the point of view of civilization; and on the other hand would recognize that under all the boiling of tribes and peoples, the growth and spread of culture went steadily on, even in the tracts which one is wont to associate only with the perpetual breeding of elusive and devastating nomads. In short, it is wise to guard against a natural overestimation of the sensational, cataclysmic aspects of the history of the interior Asiatic peoples. It is their spasmodic irruptions which the self-centered nations of the West, of India, and of China, have been chiefly concerned with. Their attempts at achieving stability, their increments to the world’s culture, their rôle as peaceful transmitters, have lain at home, largely out of vision of the peoples clustered about the foci of civilization.
It may be added that the temptation to the outsider to burst by force into the seats of wealth and splendor as soon as firmness of guard slackens, is not confined to Ural-Altaians, but is ever present in history. Amorites, Hebrews, Arabs, Æthiopians, Lybians, Greeks, Kelts, Germans, Hindus, and Malays have all played this part at one time or another. Semite, Hamite, and Aryan are no different in such regard from Ural-Altaian, except that in the short span conventionally known as history the former have happened more often to be the ins and haves, the central Asiatics the outs and have-nots. Further, the destructive effect of nomad migrations, even where accompanied by mass settlement of population, is everywhere transient so far as civilization is concerned. Hebrew and Hellenic, Arab and Germanic tribes did crash cities and empires before them, but they tore down only what was already moribund, and brought in new systems of thought, new methods of feeling and organization, which, however crude at first, soon added new qualities to culture. The chief distinction of the north Asiatics is that, excepting some terror-striking massacres, they were both less subversive and less constructive culturally than Semites and Indo-Europeans. They barely dented the civilization of the West as they barely dented that of India and China. If Russia is backward as compared with western Europe, it is not from having been Tatar-ruled a few centuries, but because Russia has long been peripheral to the Mediterranean focus of civilization and therefore chronically belated. It was the very thinness of her culture that made mediæval Russia succumb to the Mongol wave which pounded vainly against the more consolidated civilization of central Europe and quickly drew off.
To define the exact contribution of the North Asiatics to civilization is difficult: partly because of the comparative paucity of available archæological and historical records; partly because their habitat did not contain one of the greater hearths of civilization at which its most distinctive forms were sweated out. The area has always been relatively though not extremely peripheral. The horse, indeed, can be set down as one important gift of the Ural-Altaic peoples or their predecessors to general civilization. It is only in central Asia that a wild horse—not a tame breed that has run wild—is to be found; and it seems to have been from the north that soon after 2000 B.C. the animal was introduced into Mesopotamia and India. Biological considerations also point to interior Asia as the most likely area of first domestication of several of the earlier fundamental animals of culture, especially the sheep and goat. The comparatively advanced culture of Anau in Turkistan in the Neolithic and early Bronze periods is also significant, even though this site lies only just within the great steppe and plateau country. Some of the jade and jade-like stone used for tools and ornaments in the Swiss lake-dwellings appears to have come from inner Turkistan. The probability of the central Asiatic peoples having been the transmitters of metals, cattle, grains and other important groups of culture elements from the Near to the Far East has already been mentioned, as has the established trade between China and the Mediterranean world in Roman times (§ [251]). Indeed the very character of the country and cultural conditions which favored a considerable degree, though not an absolute prevalence, of nomadism in interior Asia, seem also to have fostered, in many periods, a longer range of trade than flourished elsewhere. Finally, it appears that the Turks and Mongols had at least a hand in the early use of gunpowder for firearms; and, as already mentioned, the first state paper money, that of China, was issued by a Mongol dynasty. It is scarcely rash to predict that the intensive study of the interior Asiatic peoples from both prehistoric and historic sources, without speculative bias or plunging of opinion, will prove one of the most illuminating contributions to the history of general civilization.
The original unity of the Ural-Altaians—with the Turks, Mongols, and Tungus-Manchu as the Altaic or definitely Asiatic group, Finno-Ugrians as Uralic or Eurasian, and Samoyeds as specifically Arctic representatives—is accepted on linguistic grounds by almost all authorities in the field. Yet the career of the several divisions has been diverse. The Finno-Ugrians have mainly been peaceful: the Finns definitely so for two thousand years: the Hungarian Magyars were exceptional when they terrorized central Europe a thousand years ago. Both these nations have long since become integrally absorbed into European culture. They are the only Ural-Altaic peoples with this experience. The remainder of the Finno-Ugrians have for some centuries become increasingly submerged under Russian civilization; much as in the Far East the Manchu-Tungus have gradually fallen more and more under either Chinese or, of late, Russian cultural influence. As between the Turks and Mongols, the greatest single conquest, that of Djengis Khan and his successors, falls to the record of the latter; but the Turks have been the more numerous, stable, and advanced people. They have frequently settled as well as invaded; and are the only known stock, as previously mentioned (§ [245]), that has ever seriously and permanently encroached on territory once held by Indo-Europeans—in Asia Minor and the Caspian region. The later so-called Mongol conquests, those of Tamerlane and the Indian Moguls, were made by armies mainly of Turks under dynasties tracing back to former Mongol leaders. The Turks in general have inclined to Mohammedanism on coming into contact with the world religions, the Mongols to Buddhism, although Christianity in its Nestorian form once made considerable numbers of converts among both.