THE

POPULAR SCIENCE

MONTHLY.

JANUARY, 1879.

T

TRACES OF AN EARLY RACE IN JAPAN.

BY EDWARD S. MORSE.

HERE is no race of people in whose origin we are more interested than in that of the Japanese. Their history going so completely back for nearly two thousand years, their civilization, which in so many respects parallels our own-the various epochs in our history being typified again and again by similar ages in Japan-all excite our deepest interest. The difficulty of tracing out ethnical affinities. either through their personal peculiarities or their language presents a problem yet unsolved. That they are a composite race we cannot doubt. All their traditions point to their coming from the south, and equally sure are we that when they landed they found a hairy race of men to contest their occupation. Later history shows that a number of Chinese invasions took place, and these unwelcome visits were returned by the Japanese. Corea was invaded by the Japanese long ago. With these facts in mind, we are no longer surprised at the great variety of faces to be met with in Japan-faces purely Chinese; others with the coarser features of the northern tribes; and again the delicate and pleasant features of what is supposed to represent the typical Japanese.

The conjectures and opinions that have been advanced regarding the origin of the Japanese would form a curious and bulky collection. It is worth noting that both pagan and Christian writers have held almost equally preposterous notions regarding the origin of the Japanese. The people themselves have a tradition that they owe their origin to the sun. Kämpfer holds the absurd idea that "they are descended. from the first inhabitants of Babylon." From these vagaries we pass in turn to other ideas based on some foundation of fact. In a paper read before the Asiatic Society of Japan by Mr. Aston, an affinity is

VOL. XIV.-17

shown to exist between certain words in the Japanese and Aryan; while Mr. Brooks, in the proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, takes ground for believing that the Japanese and Chinese may have been derived from the west coast of South America. Mr. Isawa, an intelligent Japanese student, at the last meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called attention to the simi

Fig. 8.

Fig. 7. Figs. 1 to 9 show some of the various forms of vessels. Fig. 1, diameter, 130 mm. Fig. 2, diameter, 280 mm. Fig. 3, diameter, 130 mm. Fig. 4, height, 220 mm. Fig. 5, diameter, 105 mm. Fig. 6, diameter, 160 mm. Fig. 7, diameter, 150 mm. Fig. 8, diameter, 150 mm.

larity existing between many Japanese words and Hindostanee. With these and many other conflicting views, authorities seem to agree upon one thing, and that is, that the present inhabitants of Japan are not autochthonous, neither the Japanese nor the Ainos in Yesso.

So far as the ancient records of Japan are to be relied upon (and they certainly go back before the Christian era with considerable accuracy), Jimmu Tenno in the first century of our era came from a province in Kinshin for the conquest of Niphon or Japan. The invaders met with so courageous a resistance that they were obliged to go back to their own shores. The people who repulsed Jimmu Tenno and his followers are believed by the Japanese to have been the hairy men of Yesso, the ancestors of the present inhabitants of the northern islands.

The study of the language, traditions, and folk-lore of the Ainos, furnishes good reasons for believing that the ancestors of the Ainos came from Kamtchatka, drifting down through the Kuriles, and gradually becoming proprietors of the soil before the Japanese came from the south to displace them.

Fig. 9.

Fig. 9-the rims of this vessel are quite common in the heaps, but only one, the fragments of which could be matched, was found. Its height was about 300 mm.

With every reason for believing that the Japanese came from the south, displacing the Ainos, who came from the north, the question next arises as to the original occupants of the island. Did the northern people encounter resistance from a primitive race of savages, or were they greeted only by the chattering of relatives still more remote, whose descendants yet clamber about the forest-trees to-day? The records are silent on these points. A discovery that I made in the vicinity of Tokio last year leads me to believe that possibly the traces of a race of men previous to the Aino occupation have been found. I say possibly, because a study of the Aino people, their manners, and traces of their early remains, is necessary before a definite opinion can be formed.

On my first visit to Tokio I discovered from the car-window a genuine "Kjoekkenmoedding," or shell-heap, as we call them. The deposit is in Omori, about six miles from Tokio; and one may well wonder why it had not been recognized before. It had probably often

been seen, but, like many similar deposits in Europe and America, had been looked upon as natural beds of sea-shells deposited in past times, and after their formation elevated by upheaval. It was not until Steenstrup, of Copenhagen, first took up the critical study of similar deposits along the shores of the Baltic, and showed that the deposits were really the work of man, and of ancient man, that attention was attracted to these beds in other parts of the world.

Thanks to several years' study of these deposits along the coast of New England, in company with Prof. Jeffries Wyman, I was enabled to recognize the character of the Omori deposit at once. The railway passes directly through it, and most of it has been removed for ballasting the road. The bed evidently covered the field beyond the track for a considerable distance, judging from the quantity of shells and fragments of pottery which were strewed in the adjacent rice-field. The deposit varied from a few inches to two feet and a half in thickness, and the layer of earth above varied from two feet to nearly five feet in thickness. This great depth of soil above the shells might have been brought in by man, as the Japanese are famous for the manner in which they level the ground and fill in depressions. The thickness of soil above a deposit is always an untrustworthy guide in estimating the age of such a deposit: as, for example, the deposits about Salem, Massachusetts, containing precisely the same kinds of pottery and bone-implements, and presumably of the same age, will have in one place a thickness of two feet of soil above, and in the sterile pastures a thin layer of a few inches. The Omori deposit is made up of shells which still live in the bay of Yeddo, though I have not yet been able to study the living forms sufficiently to ascertain whether any changes have taken place in the fauna since the heaps were made. A number of genera are found, representing, among others, Eburna, Turbo, Ceritheum Arca, Pecten cardium, two species of Ostrea, and, curiously enough, large valves of the common clam, Mya arenaria, hardly to be distinguished from the same species so common along the New England coast. The position of the Omori heap is striking. The shell-heaps of New England, Florida, and nearly all places where they have been observed, are always in immediate proximity to the shore or river. In some places, as at Goose Island, Maine, the ocean encroaches upon the deposits and is gradually removing them. Rev. James Fowler, in commenting upon the absence of shell-heaps along the New Brunswick coast, offers this as one of the evidences that the sea is encroaching upon the land, and calls attention to the fact that buildings, which stood at some distance from the shore fifty years ago, have since been washed away.' Along the shores of the Baltic, the shell-heaps, on the contrary, are a mile or more from the shore, and this fact, with evidences of a geological character, shows a practical encroachment of the land upon the sea by upheaval since the deposits were made.

The Omori deposits, like those of the Baltic, are some distance from 166 "Smithsonian Annual Report" for 1870, p. 389.