They used iron for manufacturing spears, swords, and knives of various shapes, and likewise for the more peaceful purpose of making hooks wherewith to angle, or to fasten the doors of their huts. Their other warlike and hunting implements (besides traps and gins, which appear to have been used equally for catching beasts and birds and for destroying human enemies) were bows and arrows, spears and elbow-pads,—the latter seemingly of skin, while special allusion is made to the fact that the arrows were feathered. Perhaps clubs should be added to the list. Of the bows and arrows, swords and knives, there is perpetual mention; but nowhere do we hear of the tools with which they were manufactured, and there is the same remarkable silence regarding such widely spread domestic implements as the saw and the axe. We hear, however, of the pestle and mortar, of the fire-drill, of the wedge, of the sickle, and of the shuttle used in weaving.
Navigation seems to have been in a very elementary stage. Indeed the art of sailing was, as we know from the classical literature of the country, but little practised in Japan even so late as the middle of the tenth century of our era subsequent to the general diffusion of Chinese civilization, though rowing and punting are often mentioned by the early poets. In one passage of the “Records” and in another of the “Chronicles,” mention is made of a “two-forked boat” used on inland pools or lakes; but, as a rule, in the earlier portions of those works, we read only of people going to sea or being sent down from heaven in water-proof baskets without oars, and reaching their destination not through any efforts of their own, but through supernatural interposition.[1]
To what we should call towns or villages very little reference is
- ↑ A curious scrap of the history of Japanese civilization is preserved in the word kaji, whose exclusive acceptation in the modern tongue is “rudder.” In archaic Japanese it meant “oar,” a signification which is now expressed by the term ro, which has been borrowed from the Chinese. It is a matter of debate whether the ancient Japanese boats possessed such an appliance as a rudder, and the word tagishi or taishi has been credited with that meaning. The more likely opinion seems to be that both the thing and the word were specialized in later times, the early Japanese boatmen having made any oar do duty for a rudder when circumstances necessitated the use of one.
