Page:Nihongi by Aston.djvu/103

72 entering, dwelt therein. Then she made a solemn declaration, saying:—"If that which is in my bosom is not the offspring of the Heavenly Grandchild, it will assuredly be destroyed by fire, but if it is really the offspring of the Heavenly Grandchild, fire thatched with reeds. The muro had a door opening inwards, and contained a raised platform for sleeping on. A dwelling closely answering this description was actually unearthed near Akita in Dewa in 1807.

Muro were used in ancient times by the higher as well as by the poorest classes. Sosa no wo no Mikoto is said by the Idzumo Fudoki to have made himself a muro, and Jimmu Tennō's son is represented as sleeping in a great muro. In modern times muro sometimes means simply chamber.

Some writers confound the muro with the ihaya. So far as I am aware, the latter is used only of caverns in the rock, or of the artificial megalithic chambers contained in sepulchral mounds.

Mr. J. Milne, in an extremely interesting paper on the pit-dwellers of Yezo, read before the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1882, argues that certain pits discovered by him in large numbers in the islands of Yezo and Itorup were the dwellings of a pre-Aino race, whose modern representatives are to be found amongst the Kurilsky or their neighbours in Kamschatka and Saghalin. To these he gives the name of Koro-pok-guru, following an Aino tradition communicated to him by Mr. Batchelor.

On the other hand, I am informed by Baron A. von Siebold, who visited several of these groups of pits in Kusiro and the Kurile Islands, that,—

1. Their appearance is, in his opinion, not consonant with the great antiquity assigned to them by Mr. Milne's theory. It was especially noticeable that no large trees or even deep-rooted brushwood were found growing in or between the square pits.

2. They are arranged in a regular order more suggestive of a military encampment than of the abodes of a tribe of savages. They are all of the same size, except a few larger ones, which may have been occupied by officers. An earthwork near one of them was also suggestive of a military occupation.

3. The pits were carefully dug and found to contain fragments of burned wood, unglazed pottery, and what is more remarkable, a small Japanese sword (tantō) of comparatively modern manufacture.

4. The most important evidence, however, is the fact that the sites of these pits correspond in all the cases which Baron von Siebold was able to examine with those of the military encampments established in Yezo and the Kuriles by the Japanese Government about the beginning of the present century as a defence against the Russians. These encampments are marked on a Japanese map presented to Ph. Fr. von Siebold (the father) by a Court astronomer named Mogami Toknai, and published in Siebold's Atlas. The inference is obvious. In fact pit-dwelling in northern climates affords no indication of race. It has been seen that Chinese, Japanese, and Coreans may all be pit-dwellers on occasion, and the practice is by no means confined to this part of the world.