Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/67

 information about the garments worn in early epochs, for in the century immediately preceding the Christian era a kind-hearted emperor decided that clay figures should be substituted for human victims, and these figures, being modelled, however roughly, in the guise of the men and women of the time, tell what kind of costumes were worn and what was the manner of wearing them. Collecting all the available evidence, the story shapes itself into this:—

Prior to the third, or perhaps the fourth, century before the Christian era, when the dead were interred in barrows, not dolmens, the Japanese, though they stood on a plane considerably above the general level of Asiatic civilisation, did not yet understand the forging of iron or the use of the potter's wheel. They were still in the bronze age, and their weapons—swords, halberds, and arrow-heads—were made of that metal. Concerning the fashion of their garments not much is known, but they used, for purpose of personal adornment, quaintly shaped objects of jasper, rock-crystal, steatite, and other stones. Then, owing probably to the advent of a second wave of immigration from the continent, the civilisation of the nation was suddenly raised, and the country passed at once from the bronze to the iron age, with a corresponding development of industrial capacity in other directions, and with a novel method of sepulture having no exact prototype except in Western Europe. The new-comers seem to have