ON THE VERGE OF HISTORY
excite the world's wonder and must have appeared almost miraculous in the eyes of people such as the Japanese were in that era. It is therefore surprising, that the interval between the civilisation of the two empires remained so long unbridged, and the explanation suggested by the above retrospect is that Korea proved a bad medium of transmission, and that China was almost inaccessible by direct means. Some special factor was needed to bring the real China within easier reach of Japanese observation, and that factor was furnished in the fourth century by a wave of Chinese colonists who came to Japan in search of profitable enterprises. Nothing is known about the prime cause of their migration, but the Chinese seem to have been as ardent fortune-questers fifteen centuries ago as they are to-day, and seeing that they had already exploited the northwest, the east and the southwest of Korea, the fact that they pushed on to Japan excites no surprise. A large ingress of Koreans occurred at nearly the same time. They were not voluntary emigrants, but fugitives from the effects of defeat in civil war. Their advent, however, compared with that of the Chinese, had no special importance except as illustrating Japan's freedom from international exclusiveness at that epoch.
The Chinese brought with them a compilation destined to serve as a primer to Japanese students in all ages, "The Thousand Characters," that
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