NORTH AND EAST ASIA This region includes China proper, Manchuria—now included within the borders of China—and Japan, and is most conveniently divided on a geographical basis into two parts, the mainland and the island portion. The remoteness of the latter from other parts of the world and its geographical isolation divided it from the main currents of human migration in the past, and have given it a very different ethnological history, as far as we know at present, from its western neighbour.
Although it seems probable that man existed in China before or at the beginning of the deposition of the loess (see preceding sec tion, CENTRAL AsIA), at present there is no certain evidence of palaeolithic man in Central China. Fossil remains found in Honan by Matsumoto, and at Chou Kou Tien, south-west of Peking, by Black, have been claimed to possess a high antiquity (see CHINA, Ethnology). It is more than possible however that the remains, if not of early man, at least of his handiwork, may lie buried under the loess. In the island region no claim has been made about dis coveries of palaeolithic man.
In the neolithic period the two regions also present a great con trast. The earliest Chinese culture so far discovered is clearly of chalcolithic date, that is to say that elaborate pottery has been found but no actual trace of metal, whereas in Japan, and to a lesser extent in the coastal region opposite, in Korea and Man churia there are remains of a different culture which can only be described as Neolithic, without any reference to actual date.
The actual human remains found with this earliest culture in China are similar, with certain differences, to the present in habitants of modern China, whereas in Japan the earliest remains resemble those of the modern Ainu (q.v.), although in the middle stone age of the Japanese archaeologists there first appear in Japan racial types akin to the modern Japanese.
The racial history of the whole region then appears to have been a series of migrations eastwards. As far back as we can trace it at present the Chinese racial type, but not Chinese cul ture, has existed in China, whereas in the Japanese islands we find first a primitive type, whose kinsmen still survive in the northern island, and secondly a type akin to the mainlanders, who probably crossed over the sea at a comparatively recent date. It also seems probable that at various times there have been racial movements in a north-easterly direction from the plain of China to the regions north of the Amur river.
The aboriginal tribes are found in the more inaccessible moun tain districts of the south and west. In the north and west there are considerable numbers of Muslims, who form, as they have always formed, a turbulent element separated from the Chinese by the almost impassable boundary of the pig, an animal so essen tial to Chinese culture, and so utterly repugnant to the Muslim.
Korea forms a transition region between the racial groups of the Chinese and the Manchus on the one hand and the Japanese on the other. The term Korean is rather a national than an ethnological term, and intermarriages both between the royal families and the commoners of China and Korea have taken place since an early period. The Japanese form to-day an important element along the railway line in Manchuria and more widely in Korea. The third group of people in the Japanese empire are the Ainu, to-day confined to Hokkaido, but with kinsfolk in the southern islands of Ryukyu.
Apart from the more highly organized religions Buddhism—(the Zen sect is most popular in Japan), Taoism, Shintoism, Con fucianism, and to-day, Christianity, the religion of the greatest interest ethnographically is ancestor-worship, which is practised both in China and Japan, although in the latter country Christianity appears gradually to be driving out ancestor-worship. In China, however, it still forms one of the most important bulwarks of the social structure, and preserves both the structure of the family and that regard for home which is so important a character of the Chinese. Ancestor worship is a definitely localized re ligion ; all Chinese, therefore, are bound by strong ties to their ancestral home, and if possible endeavour to arrange when they die for their bodies to be carried back to the fields already sorely diminished by the graves of the previous ancestors.
The general characteristics of the culture of this area are the presence of a method of life and religion bound up with agriculture on ancestral acres. Among the Ainu this culture is only in an embryonic state, the men being still largely hunters and fisher men, and agriculture being in the hands of the women.
In China agriculture has for a long time been highly developed, and Japan has inherited much of the culture of China which she has subsequently developed along her own lines, in some cases retaining features which have died out in China. The shape of the "chop-stick" in Japan is similar to the shape of those used in China in the Han Dynasty, and quite unlike the modern Chinese. On the other hand the Chinese have retained the primitive form of the abacus, while the Japanese have developed it. But in spite of differences the two cultures are in essentials similar, and all depend ultimately on an ancient and efficient method of agri culture to support a population which, owing to social customs, always threatens to exceed the means of subsistence.