Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/273

Rh 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 folklore 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.



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