are.

BRONZE VESTIGES

There are also some bronze vestiges to which considerable interest
attaches, for evidently people using bronze weapons could not have
stood against men carrying iron arms, and therefore the people to
whom the bronze implements belonged must have obtained a footing in
Japan prior to the Yamato, unless they came at the latter's
invitation or as their allies. Moreover, these bronze relics--with
the exception of arrow-heads--though found in the soil of western and
southern Japan, do not occur in the Yamato sepulchres, which feature
constitutes another means of differentiation. Daggers, swords,
halberds, and possibly spear-heads constitute the hand-weapons. The
daggers have a certain resemblance to the Malay kris, and the swords
and halberds are generally leaf-shaped. But some features, as
overshort tangs and unpierced loops, suggest that they were
manufactured, not for service in battle but for ceremonial purposes,
being thus mere survivals from an era when their originals were in
actual use, and possibly those originals may have been of iron. Some
straight-edged specimens have been classed as spear-heads, but they
closely resemble certain ancient bronze swords of China. As for
bronze arrow-heads, they occur alike in Yamato sepulchres and in the
soil, so that no special inference is warranted in their case. The
bronze hand-weapons have been found in twelve provinces of southern
and western Japan: namely, five provinces of northwest Kyushu; three
on the Inland Sea; one facing Korea and China, and the rest on the
islands of Iki and Tsushima.

These localities and the fact that similar swords have been met with
in Shantung, suggest that the bronze culture came from central and
eastern Asia, which hypothesis receives confirmation from the
complete absence of bronze vestiges in the southern provinces of
Kyushu, namely, Osumi and Satsuma. Bronze bells, of which there are
many, belong to a separate page of archaeology. Though they have been
found in no less than twenty-four provinces, there is no instance of
their presence in the same sites with hand-weapons of bronze. In
Kyushu, Higo is the only province where they have been seen, whereas
in the main island they extend as far east as Totomi, and are
conspicuously numerous in that province and its neighbour, Mikawa,
while in Omi they are most abundant of all. They vary in height from
about one foot four inches to four and a half feet, and are of highly