Note 894 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

The early history of the Singhalese monarchy in Ceylon from 250 B. C. to 416 A. D., when even the narrow moat of Palk Strait discouraged Tamil invasions from the mainland, shows the brilliant development possible under even a slight degree of protection.894 However, in the case of these Ceylon Aryans, as in that of the Icelandic Norse, we must keep in mind the fact that the bearers of this culture were picked men, as are early maritime colonists the world over. The sea selects and then protects its island folk. But the seclusion of Ceylon was more favorable to progress than the mainland of India, with its incessant political and religious upheavals. Japan, in contrast to China's long list of invasions, shows the peace of an insular location. She never suffered any overwhelming influx of alien races or any foreign conquest. The armada sent by Kublai Khan in 1281 to subdue the islands paralleled the experience of the famous Spanish fleet three centuries later in English waters. This is the only attempt to invade Japan that recorded history shows.895 In the original peopling of the island by Mongolian stock at the cost of the Aino aborigines, there is evidence of two distinct and perhaps widely separated immigrations from the mainland, one from Korea and another from more northern Asia. Thus Japan's population contained two continental elements, which seem to have held themselves in the relation of governing and governed class, much as Norman and Saxon did in England, while the Ainos lingered in the geographical background of mountain fastness and outlying islands, as the primitive Celts did in the British Isles.896 In the case both of England and Japan, the island location made the occupation by continental races a fitful, piecemeal process, not an inundation, because only small parties could land from time to time. The result was gradual or partial amalgamation of the various stocks, but nowhere annihilation.