unts were very common. There was no art, unless the
making of clay images, to take the place of the living human victims
buried up to their necks in earth and left to starve on the death of
their masters,[11] may be designated as such.

The Magatama, or curved jewels, being made of ground and polished stone
may be called jewelry; but since some of these prehistoric ornaments dug
up from the ground are found to be of jade, a mineral which does not
occur in Japan, it is evident that some of these tokens of culture came
from the continent. Many other things produced by more or less skilled
mechanics, the origin of which is poetically recounted in the story of
the dancing of Uzume before the cave in which the Sun-goddess had hid
herself,[12] were of continental origin. Evidently these men of the
god-way had passed the "stone age," and, probably without going through
the intermediate bronze age, were artificers of iron and skilled in its
use. Most of the names of metals and of many other substances, and the
terms used in the arts and sciences, betray by their tell-tale etymology
their Chinese origin. Indeed, it is evident that some of the leading
kami were born in Korea or Tartary.

Then as now the people in Japan loved nature, and were quickly sensitive
to her beauty and profoundly in sympathy with her varied phenomena. In
the mediaeval ages, Japanese Wordsworths are not unknown.[13] Sincerely
they loved nature, and in some respects they seemed to understand the
character of their country far better than the alien does or can. Though
a land of wonderful beauty, the Country of Peaceful Shores is enfolded
in powers of awful destructiveness. With the earthquake and volcano, the
typhoon and the tidal wave, beauty and horror alternate with a swiftness
that is amazing.

Probably in no portion of the earth are the people and the land more
like each other or apparently better acquainted with each other. Nowhere
are thought and speech more reflective of the features of the landscape.
Even after ten centuries, the Japanese are, in temperament, what the
Kojiki reveals them to have been in their early simplicity. Indeed, just
as the modern Frenchman, down beneath his outward environments and his
habiliments cut and fitted yesterday, is intrinsically the same Gaul
whom Julius Caesar described eighteen hundred years ago, so the gentleman
of T[=o]ki[=o] or Ki[=o]to is, in his mental make-up, wonderfully like
his ancestors described by t