Note 22 — Chapter XVII · Culture Mixing in Japan

What attracted the Koro-pok-guru and the Ainu to Japan? As we have seen (Chapter III), the primary incentive for sea-trafficking and prospecting by sea and land was the desire to obtain wealth in the form of pearls, precious stones, and metals. Now, pearls are found round the Japanese coasts. Marco Polo has recorded that in his day the people of Japan practised the mortuary custom (obtaining also in China) of placing pearls in the mouths of the dead. “In the Island of Zipangu22 (Japan),” he says, “rose-coloured pearls were abundant, and quite as valuable as white ones.” Kaempfer, writing in the eighteenth century, stated that the Japanese pearls were found in small varieties of oysters (akoja) resembling the Persian pearl oyster, and also in “the yellow snail-shell”, the taira gai (Placuna), and the awabi or abalone (Haliotis). A pearl fishery formerly existed in the neighbourhood of Saghalin Island. As pearls have from the earliest times been fished from southern Manchurian rivers, in Kamschatka, and on the south coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, it may be that the earliest settlers in Japan were prehistoric pearl-fishers. It is of special interest to note here that, according to G. A. Cooke, pearls and ginseng (mandrake) were formerly Manchurian articles of commerce.23 The herbs and pearls were, as we have seen, regarded as “avatars” of the mother-goddess.