The Japanese environment is one not bountifully provided with those natural complements of soils, plant resources, animal life, and other features which made for easy productivity of material goods for early man. The aquatic resources around these island shores are rich, but they were less available to early man than to modern man. By dint of hard work through a long span of time the Japanese have made their environment a productive one, but many of these advances had to await the introduction of techniques developed in other parts of the world, and then carefully fitted to the local scene.
The historic pattern of the introduction of developed techniques into Japan has led to the false conclusion that the Japanese have been only an imitative people, whereas in the perfection and fitting of techniques to their environment the Japanese have displayed almost as much originality as did the Chinese, who also copied and adapted many alien features of culture.
Earliest man may well have been able to walk overland from the mainland to the lowland fringes of southwestern Japan, and it is notable that the Japanese archaeologists have turned up almost no record of the Old Stone Age in Japan. The inference is that occupance areas then lay on the lower coastal plains and lowlands now covered by the Inland Sea, the China Sea, and the immediate shore waters around the Japanese islands.
The Ainu aboriginal population, protoCaucasoid in origin, established themselves in such numbers that they have steadily contributed to the racial composition of the modern Japanese. Man moved upward onto the present alluvial lands and the lower upland fringes as the post-glacial patterns of islands and coastal outlines developed. Neolithic man came into the islands by sea both from the north and the west, bringing different elements of culture and probably representing different and mixed racial strains. The northerners brought useful elements of fishing economies, but they did not add greatly to the population as such. The main line of immigration lay through Korea, and the chief elements were protoMongoloid and Mongoloid in origin, to set the racial basis for modern Japan.
Out of the south, probably South China, moving along the coastal fringes came some southern peoples after the present lines of land and sea had developed. In popular thinking this stream of peoples bulks high in contributing to the Japanese population, but it is doubtful that this is so. These southern peoples undoubtedly did bring many culture traits into Japan related to the use of the sea and the subtropical elements of the environment.
Since most of these migrants came into southwestern Japan, bringing higher culture traits, it is natural that this was the early center of Japan. In a rigorous environment not bountifully providing for early man, the coastal lowlands of the southwestern portion were both the most livable and the most productive. Here the mixing of the early racial stocks and patterns of culture took place, and here also began that conversion of alien traits into traits distinctively Japanese.
Visits: 203
