Children of the same father, but not
of the same mother, could intermarry. The instances of men marrying
their sisters or aunts 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.
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