Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/262

250 employed by the Japanese government in A.D. 670. Before that time, the usual native designation of the country was Yamato, properly the name of one of the central provinces. Yamato and Ō-mi-kuni, that is, "the Great August Country," are the names still preferred in poetry and belles-lettres. Japan has other ancient names, some of which are of learned length and thundering sound, for instance, Toyo-ashi-wara-no-chi-aki-no-naga-i-ho-aki-no-mizu-ho-no-kuni, that is, "the-Luxuriant-Reed-Plains-the-Land-of-Fresh-Rice-Ears-of-a-Thousand-Autumns-of-Long-Five-Hundred-Autumns." But we shall not detain the reader with an enumeration of them. Any further curiosity on this head may be satisfied by consulting the pages of the "Kojiki" (see "Asiatic Transactions," Vol. X., Supplement).

 Japanese People (Characteristics of the). Any account of the characteristics of a people must deal with two main points, namely, physical characteristics and mental characteristics. We will first say a few words about the physical characteristics, referring those who desire exhaustive information to Dr. Baelz's admirable monograph entitled Die Körperlichen Eigenschaften der Japaner, printed in Parts 28 and 32 of the "German Asiatic Transactions.

I. As stated in the Article entitled Things Japanese/Race, the Japanese are Mongols, that is, they are distinguished by a yellowish skin, straight black hair, scanty beard, almost total absence of hair on the arms, legs, and chest, broadish prominent cheek-bones, and more or less obliquely set eyes. These, with the other characteristics to be mentioned presently, are common both to the more slenderly built, oval-faced aristocracy, and to pudding-faced Gombei, the "Hodge" of Japanese Arcadia. Compared with people of European race, the average Japanese has a long body and short legs, a large skull with a tendency to prognathism (projecting jaws), a flat nose, coarse hair, scanty eye-lashes, puffy eyelids, a sallow complexion, and a low stature. The average stature of Japanese men is about the same as the