THE EARLY JAPANESE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1587, 29 April 1887, Page 4

THE EARLY JAPANESE.

The early history of the present dominant race in Japan is involved in the greatest obscurity. Neither ethnological nor philological research has m yet done more than link the people with the great Turanian family, and we are in profound ignorance both as to when they entered Japan to drive their Aino predecessors northward, or whence they came. Native literature and legends, do little more than make confusion worse confounded. The accepted chronology which affects precision, at least so far back as the accession of the Emperor Jimmn, in 660 (the year of the Japanese calendar), is self-contradictory down to the beginning of the fifth century of our era; and from the commencement of written records both language and tradition are so intermingled with imported elements borrowed from China, that investigators bave not yet succeeded in passing the negative stage of advance of knowing that they know nothing. It is almost certain that, before the period of intercourse with Korea and China, Japan was in a state of almost complete barbarity, and whatever arts they then preserved were not in advance of those practised by barbaric races in general. To explain our lack of positive information, it is only necessary to learn that the oldest Japanese writings date no farther back than the eighth century, that they refer to no manuscript earlier than the sixth century, and that the materials of these chronicles and relations are, for the most part, so absurd a mixture of extravagant fable and loosely preserved tradition, that we may safely reject as historical matter everything related as anterior to the fifth century. It is necessary to understand this because with the collapse of the first thousand years of the dynastical register, nearly the whole of the dates assigned by Jai anese antiauarians to the origin of the various ai ta fall to the ground. The history of pictorial art is divided into four periods, the first extending from tbe latter part of the fifth century to the middle of the ninth century ; the second to the second half of the fourteenth century ; the third nearly to tbe last quarter of the eighteenth century; and the fourth to the present time,—From the Art Journal.