Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/60

 finally dominant race of immigrants; the lower, their less civilised opponents.

The theory which seems to fit the facts best is that the Japanese are compounded of elements from Central and Southern Asia, and that they received their patrician type from the former, their plebeian from the latter. The Asiatic colonists arrived viâ Korea. But they were neither Koreans nor Chinese. That seems certain, though the evidence which proves it cannot be detailed here. Chinese and Koreans came from time to time in later ages; came occasionally in great numbers, and were absorbed into the Japanese race, leaving on it some faint traces of the amalgamation. But the original colonists did not set out from either China or Korea. Their birthplace was somewhere in the north of Central Asia. As for the South-Asian immigrants, they were drifted to Japan by a strange current called the "Black Tide" (Kuro-shiwo), which sweeps northward from the Philippines, and bending thence towards the east, touches the promontory of Kii and Yamato before shaping its course permanently away from the main island of Japan. It is true that in the chronological order suggested by early history the southern colonists succeeded the northern and are supposed to have gained the mastery; whereas among the Japanese, as we now see them, the supremacy of the northern type appears to have been established for ages. That may be ex