A very large proportion of the Japanese popu lation is engaged in fishing, mostly, however, as an adjunct to other occupations, and mainly for personal supplies, and not as a trade. In 1881 the number of fishermen was 848,288, and women 753,118, the number of boats being 190,045.
The nobles, when sentenced to death, have the right to die by stabbing themselves, and being beheaded by a selected friend. The rite, known as the Hari Kiri, was instituted in the 14th century.
The mass of the Japanese people are Buddhists; and in 1882 there were 76,275 Buddhist priests, besides 21,011 student priests ; Shintooism had 17,851 priests and 1302 students.
Japan and China received with Buddhism many of the essential doctrines of Hinduism. On entering a Japanese temple, one is struck by the analogies to the Christian ritual on the one hand, and to Hinduism on the other. The chantings of the priests, their bowing as they pass the altar, their vestments, rosaries, bells, incense, and the re sponses of the worshippers, are similar to those in the churches of some Christian sects.
The Shin-shiu sect claims more than 10 millions of the 32 millions of Buddhists inhabiting Japan. It traces its origin back to a Chinese pnest, Ilwui - yuen, who in A.D. 381 founded a new monastery, in which the Buddha Amiatabha (In finite Light) and his two great apostles were worshipped. This new school was then called the White Lotus school, and has since spread far and wide. Some of the friars belonging to it were sent to India to collect Sanskrit MSS., and several of these containing sacred texts of Buddh ism, particularly descriptions of Sukhavati, or the Land of Bliss, in which the believers in the Buddha Amiatabha hope to be born again, were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese. They form to the present day the sacred books of the White Lotus sect in China, Tibet, and Japan. After the doctrine of the White Lotus school reached Japan in the 7th century, it branched off into different sects. The Shin-shin sect dates from A.D. 1174.
The sacred books of the Buddhists in Japan are nearly all Chinese translations of Sanskrit originals. Many of these translations, however, are known to be very imperfect, and of one of the principal sacred texts used in Japan, the Sukhavati-vyilha, the Description of the Land of Bliss, there are no less than 12 Chinese transla tions, which all differ from each other.
Of late the study of Sanskrit had become com pletely extinct in that country as well as in China, and two young priests, Bunyiu Nanjio and Kenjiu Kasawara, were sent to Great Britain.
Bunyiu Nanjio, among other useful works which he did during his stay at Oxford, compiled a complete catalogue of the gigantic canon, called the Tripitaka or the Three Baskets. It contains 1662 separate works,—some small, some immense. In each case the original Sanskrit title has been restored ; the dates of the translations, and in directly the minimum dates of the originals also, have been fixed. This has led to a discovery which,
according to Professor Muller, has revolutionized nearly the whole of the history of Sanskrit literature, by showing that between the Vedic literature and the later renaissance literature there lies a period of Buddhist literature, both sacred and profane, extending from about the let century before to the 5th century after Christ. The catalogue prepared by Mr. Bunyiu Nanjio at the request of the Secretary of State for India, and printed at the Oxford University Press, is a work of per manent utility, a magnum opus, and has been wel comed in every country where Sanskrit is studied.
Nowhere are the foundations of the earth more frequently and dangerously shaken than in Japan. Few months pass without the occurrence of shocks of greater or less intensity ; and so persist ent are they, that it has been even found necessary to construct the lighthouses which have been recently erected on the coast on a special system, by which, whatever may be the oscillation of the buildings, the lights should always remain stationary. In the towns and villages also the people have been driven to practise a regular earthquake drill. At the first agitation they rush out of doors, if their houses are open, as in summer; but if it is the cold season, or the houses are closed for the night, each man, woman, or child of sufficient size to act independently, seizes one leaf of the shutters that slide in grooves on the edges of the verandah, lifts it tray-wise on to the head, as a protection from falling tiles or debris, and so, gaining the nearest open space, lays it down on the ground and sits on the middle of it, to minimize 'the liability to fall into cracks or rents in the earth's surface.
Japan is known to have 40 species of mammahi, of which 26 are peculiar to the islands. Of its 165 land birds, 40 are common to Great Britain and Japan, 18 are peculiar to the Japan islands.
The Japanese flora is characterized by an un usually large proportion of woody plants, many of which belong to families which are rare elsewhere so far to the north, and by the abundance of maples, laurels, hollies, hydrangeas, , figs, ever green oaks, and remarkable forms of coniferm. Taken altogether, it presents much affinity with the flora of the Southern United States of Eastern America. Sciadopitys verticillata, one of the most remarkable, and at the gape time one of the rarest, conifers of Japan, is usually seen cultivated in gardens and around temples. Specimens met with in the vicinity of Kanagawa and Yedo were in many instances fully 100 feet in height, —Fortune, Japan and China ; A, R. Wallace, p. 368.