THE MIKADO'S EMPIRE.

I.

THE BACKGROUND.

It is manifest that to understand a people and their national life, the physical conditions under which they live must be known. To enjoy the picture, we must study the background.

Dai Nippon, as the natives call their beautiful land, occupies a significant position on the globe. Lying in the Pacific Ocean, in the temperate zone, it bends like a crescent off the continent of Asia. In the extreme north, at the island of Saghalin, the distance from the main-land of Asia is so slight that the straits may be crossed easily in a canoe. From Kiushiu, with the island of Tsushima lying between, the distance from Corea is but one day's sail in a junk. For 4000 miles eastward from the main island stretches the Pacific, shored in by the continent of America. From Yezo to Kamtchatka, the Kuriles stretch like the ruins of a causeway, prolonged by the Aleutian Islands, to Alaska. The configuration of the land is that resulting from the combined effects of volcanic action and the incessant mo

tion of the corroding waves. The area of the empire is nearly equal to that of our Middle and New England States. Of the 150,000 square miles of surface, two-thirds consist of mountain land. The island of Saghalin (ceded to Russia in May, 1875) is one mountain chain; that of Yezo one mountain mass. On the main island,* a solid backbone of mountainous elevations runs continuously from

* Dai Nippon, or Nihon, means Great Japan, and is the name of the entire empire, not of the main island. The foreign writers on Japan have almost unanimously blundered in calling the largest island "Niphon." Hondo is the name given to the main island in the Military Geography of Japan (Heiyo Nippon Chiri Yoshi, Tōkiō, 1872) published by the War Department, and which is used in this work throughout.

Rikuoku to Shinano, whence it branches off into subordinate chains that are prolonged irregularly to Nagato and into Kiushiu and Shikoků. Speaking generally, the heights of the mountains gradually increase from the extremities to the centre. In Saghalin, they are low; in Yezo, they are higher: increasing gradually on the north of the main island, they culminate in the centre in the lofty ranges of Shinano, and the peaks of Nantaizan, Yatsugadaké, Hakuzan (nine thousand feet high), and Fuji, whose summit is over twelve thousand feet above the sea. Thence toward the south they gradually decrease in height. There are few high mountains along the sea-coast. The land slopes up gradually into hills, thence into lesser peaks, and finally into lofty ranges.

As Fuji, with his tall satellites, sweeps up from the land, so Japan itself rises up, peak-like, from the sea. From the shores the land

Japan is but an emerged

plunges abruptly down into deep water. crest of a submarine mountain-perhaps the edge of hard rock left by the submergence of the earth-crust which now floors the Sea of Japan and the Gulf of Tartary. There seems little reason to doubt that Saghalin, Yezo, Hondo, and Kiushiu were in geologic ages united together, forming one island. Surrounded on all sides by swift and variable currents, the islands everywhere on the sea-borders exhibit the effect of their action. At most points the continual detritus is such as to seriously encroach on the land area, and the belief holds among certain native sea-coast dwellers, strengthened by the traditional tales of past ravages, that in process of time the entire country, devoured by successive gnawings of the ocean, will finally sink into its insatiable maw.

The geological formations of the country-the natural foundations. are not as yet accurately determined. Enough, however, is known to give us a fair outline of fact, which future research and a thorough survey must fill up.* Of the soil, more is known.

Baron Richthofen, in a paper read before the Geological Society of Berlin, June 4th, 1873, thus generalizes the geology of Japan: The west and east portion of the aggregate body of the Japanese islands is in every way the direct continuation of the mountain system which occupies the south-eastern portion of China, the axial chain of which extends from the frontier of Annam to the island of Chusan, in the direction of W. 30° S., E. 30° N. It is accompanied on either side by a number of parallel chains. The prolongation of this group of linear chains passes through the island of Kiushiu to the great bend of Japan (Suruga and Shinano). Through Kiushiu and the southern part of the main island, the structure of the hills and the rocks of which they are made up (chiefly Silurian

Even in a natural state, without artificial fertilization, most of the tillable land produces good crops of grain or vegetables. On myriads

and Devonian strata, accompanied by granite) and the lines of strike are the same as those observed in South-eastern China. This system is intersected at either end by another, which runs S.S. W., N.N.E. On the west it commences in Kiushiu, and extends southward in the direction of the Liu Kiu Islands, while on the east it constitutes the northern branch of the main island, and, with a slight deviation in its course, continues through the islands of Yezo and Saghalin. A third system, which properly does not belong to Japan, is indicated by the S. W. and N.E. line of the Kuriles.

The above outline throws light on the distribution of volcanoes. The first system, where it occupies the breadth of the country for itself alone, is as free from volcanoes, or any accumulation of volcanic rocks, as it is in South-eastern China. The second system is accompanied by volcanoes. But the greatest accumulation of volcanic rocks, as well as of the extinct volcanoes, is found in the places of interference, or those regions where the lines of the two systems cross each other, and, besides, in that region where the third system branches off from the second. To the same three regions the volcanoes which have been active in historic times have been confined.

In the geological structure of Kiushiu, the longer axis is from N. to S., but intersected by several solid bars made up of very ancient rocks, and following the strike of W. 30° S., E. 30° N. They form high mountain barriers, the most central of which, south of the provinces of Higo and Bungo, rises to over seven thousand feet, and is extremely wild and rugged. In Satsuma, the various families of volcanic rocks have arrived at the surface in exactly the same order of succession as in the case of Hungary, Mexico, and many other volcanic regions, viz., first, propylite, or trachytic greenstone; second, andesite; third, trachyte and rhyolite; fourth, the basaltic rocks. The third group was not visited by him. Thomas Antisell, M.D., and Professor Benjamin J. Lyman, M. E., and Henry S. Munroe, M. E., American geologists in Yezo, have also elucidated this interesting problem. From the first I quote. The mountain systems of Yezo and farther north are similar to those in the northern part of the main island. There are in Yezo two distinct systems of mountains. One, coming down directly from the north, is a continuation of the chain in Karafto (Saghalin), which, after passing down south along the west shore of Yezo, is found in Rihuoku, Ugo, Uzen, and farther south. The second enters Yezo from the Kuriles Islands and Kamtchatka, running N. 20-25° E. and S. 20-25° W., and crossing in places the first system. It is from the existence and crossing of these chains that Yezo derives its triangular form. The two systems possess very different mineral contents for their axes. The first has an essentially granitic and feldspathic axis, produced, perhaps, by shrinkage, and is slow of decomposition of its minerals forming the soils. The second has an axis, plutonic or volcanic, yielding basalts, traps, and diorites, decomposing readily, producing deep and rich soils. Hence the different kinds of vegetation on the two chains. Where the two chains cross, also, there is found a form of country closed up in the north and east by hills, the valleys opening to the south and west. This volcanic chain is secondary in the main island of Japan; but in Yezo and in Kiushiu it attains great prominence. Professor Benjamin S. Lyman, an American geologist, has also made valuable surveys and explorations in Yezo, the results of which are given in the "Reports of Horace Capron and his Foreign Assistants," Tōkiō, 1875.

of rice-fields, which have yielded richly for ages, the fertility is easily maintained by irrigation and the ordinary application of manure, the natives being proficient in both these branches of practical husbandry.

The rivers on such narrow islands, where steep mountains and sharply excavated valleys predominate, are of necessity mainly useless for navigation. Ordinarily they are little more than brooks that flow lazily in narrow and shallow channels to the sea. After a storm, in rainy weather, or in winter, they become swollen torrents, often miles wide, sweeping resistlessly over large tracts of land which they keep perpetually desolate-wildernesses of stones and gravel, where fruitful fields ought to be. The area of land kept permanently waste in Japan on this account is enormous. The traveler, who to-day crosses a clear brook on a plank, may to-morrow be terrified at a roaring flood of muddy water in which neither man, beast, nor boat can live a moment. There are, however, some large plains, and in those we must look to find the navigable rivers. In the mountains of Shinano and Kōdzŭké are found the sources of most of the streams useful for navigation on the main island. On the plains of the Kuantō (from Suruga to Iwaki), Ōshiu (Rikuchiu and Rikuzen), Mino, and Echigo, are a few rivers on which one may travel in boats hundreds of miles. One may go by water from Tokio to Niigata by making a few portages, and from Ōzaka to the end of Lake Biwa by natural water. In the northern part of Hondo are several long rivers, notably the Kitagami and Sakata. In Yezo is the Ishikari. In Shikokŭ are several fine streams, which are large for the size of the islands. Kiushiu has but one or two of any importance. Almost every one of these rivers abounds in fish, affording, with the surrounding ocean, an inexhaustible and easily attainable supply of food of the best quality. Before their history began, the aboriginal islanders made this brain-nourishing food their chief diet, and through the recorded centuries to the quick-witted Japanese proper it has been the daily meat.

In the geologic ages volcanic action must have been extremely violent, as in historic time it has been almost continual. Hundreds, at least, of mountains, now quiet, were once blazing furnaces. The evergreenery that decks them to-day reminds one of the ivy that mantles the ruins, or the flowers that overgrow the neglected cannon on the battle-field. Even within the memory of men now living have the most awful and deadly exhibitions of volcanic desolation been witnessed. The annals of Japan are replete with the records of these flame-andlava-vomiting mountains, and the most harrowing tales of human life

destroyed and human industry overwhelmed are truthfully portrayed by the pencil of the artist and the pen of the historian in the native literature. Even now the Japanese count over twenty active and hundreds of dormant volcanoes. As late as 1874, the volcano of Taromai, in Yezo, whose crater had long since congealed, leaving only a few puffing solfataras, exploded, blowing its rocky cap far up into the air, and scattering a rain of ashes as far as the sea-shore, many miles distant. Even the nearly perfect cone of Shiribéshi, in Yezo, is but one of many of nature's colossal ruins. Asama yama, never quiet, puffs off continual jets of steam, and at this moment of writing is groaning and quaking, to the terror of the people around it. Even the superb Fuji, that sits in lordly repose and looks down over the lesser peaks in thirteen provinces, owes its matchless form to volcanic action, being clothed by a garment of lava on a throne of granite. Hakuzan, on the west coast, which uprears its form above the clouds, nine thousand feet from the sea-level, and holds a lakelet of purest water in its bosom, once in fire and smoke belched out rocks and ulcered its crater jaws with floods of white and black lava. Not a few of these smoking furnaces by day are burning lamps by night to the mariner. Besides the masses and fields of scoria one everywhere meets, other evidences of the fierce unrest of the past are noticed. Beds of sulphur abound. Satsuma, Liu Kiu, and Yezo are noted for the large amount they easily produce. From the sides of Hakuzan huge crystals of sulphur are dug. Solfataras exist in active operation in many places. Sulphur-springs may be found in almost every province. Hot-springs abound, many of them highly impregnated with mineral salts, and famous for their geyser-like rhythm of ebb and flow. In Shinano and Echigo the people cook their food, and the farmer may work in his fields by night, lighted by the inflammable gas which issues from the ground, and is led through bamboo tubes.

Connected with volcanic are the seismic phenomena. The records of Japan from the earliest time make frequent mention of these devastating and terrifying visitations of subterranean disorder. Not only have villages, towns, and cities been shaken down or ingulfed, but in many neighborhoods tradition tells of mountains that have disappeared utterly, or been leveled to earth. The local histories, so numerous in Japan, relate many such instances, and numerous gullies and depressions produced by the opening and partial closure of the earth-lips are pointed out. One, in the province of Echizen, is over a mile long, and resembles a great trench.