These
were made up of the various migrations from the main land and the drift
of humanity brought by the ocean currents from the south; Ainos,
Koreans, Tartars and Chinese, with probably some Malay and Nigrito
stock. In the central part of Hondo, the main island, the Yamato tribe
dominated, its chief being styled Sumeru-mikoto, or Mikado. To the south
and southwest, the Mikado's power was only more or less felt, for the
Yamato men had a long struggle in securing supremacy. Northward and
eastward lay great stretches of land, inhabited by unsubdued and
uncivilized native tribes of continental and most probably of Korean
origin, and thus more or less closely akin to the Yamato men. Still
northward roamed the Ainos, a race whose ancestral seats may have been
in far-off Dravidian India. Despite the constant conflicts between the
Yamato people who had agriculture and the beginnings of government, law
and literature, and their less civilized neighbors, the tendency to
amalgamation was already strong. The problem of the statesman, was to
extend the sway of the Mikado over the whole Archipelago.
Shint[=o] was, in its formation, made use of as an engine to conquer,
unify and civilize all the tribes. In one sense, this conquest of men
having lower forms of faith, by believers in the Kami no Michi, or Way
of the Gods, was analogous to the Aryan conquest of India and the
Dravidians.
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