sea.

[Sidenote: Red Sea basin.]

On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert shores,
has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked
the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia. Identity of climatic
conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic
exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the "Red Sea
group of peoples," related in race and culture.[566] The great ethnic
solvent here has been Semitic. Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by
1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea. They had their
towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of
Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Massowa, Suakin,
and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.[567]

[Sidenote: Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship.]

Vicinal location about an enclosed basin produces more rapidly a
unification of race and culture, when some ethnic relationship and
affinity already exists among the peoples inhabiting its shores. As in
the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, so in the Yellow Sea of Asia,
the working of this principle is apparent. The presence along its coasts
of divergent but kindred peoples like the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese,
allowed these to be easily assimilated to a Yellow Sea race and to
absorb quickly any later infusion, like that of the Tatars and Manchus.
China, by reason of its larger area, long-drawn coast, massive
population, and early civilization, was the dominant factor in this
basin; Korea and Japan were its culture colonies-a fact that justifies
the phrase calling "China the Rome of the Far East." Historical Japan
began on the island of Kiu-sui, facing the Yellow Sea. Like Korea, it
derived its writing, its fantastic medical notions, its industrial
methods, some features of its government administration, its Buddhism
and its religion of Confucius from the people about the lower
Hoangho.[568] Three centuries ago Japan had its colony on Korean soil at
Fusan, the Calais of the East.[569] For purposes of piracy and smuggling
Japanese penetrated far up the rivers of China. Korea has kept in touch
with China by an active trade and diplomatic relations through the
centuries.

But to-day China is going to school to Japan. Since Japan renounced
her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of
government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermi