Korea and Japan were by no means strangers to one another. As early as B.C. 32 (if there is any confidence to be put in the early records of Japan) the little province of Mimana or Kara, oppressed by Shiragi, had appealed to Japan for aid. The reigning emperor, Sujin Tenno, became its protector, and the prestige of the Japanese name was so great that Japan was able not only to turn Mimana into a Japanese dependency, but to keep it as such for several centuries. Korean influence upon Japan may have begun even then, for in the reign of the next emperor, Suinin, about the dawn of the Christian era, we find the beginnings of rice culture in Japan, and an attempt to elevate and ennoble the native worship of the Kami, which may have been due to the influence

of a foreign religion. In A.D. 2 Suinin is said to have abolished the custom of burying alive the wives, concubines, and retainers of deceased rulers and nobles, and to have substituted the burial of clay figures, a practice which led to the Japanese pottery industry.

In the year A.D. 202 the great Japanese heroine, Jingu Kogo, made her famous expedition to Korea, and established the Japanese ascendency not only over Shiragi, but likewise over the sister kingdoms of Koma and Kudara, an ascendency which it would probably have been impossible to establish had it not been for the fact that the great dynasty of the Han was at that period tottering to its fall. In the confusions which followed that catastrophe (A.D. 220), none of the transient Chinese kingdoms was powerful enough to be able to pay much attention to Korea.

Jingu Kogo's son and successor, Ojin Tenno, subsequently deified by his countrymen as Hachiman, the God of War, and at a still later period adopted into the Buddhist Pantheon as an incarnation of one of the great Buddhas, made great use of his suzerainty over Korea by importing from that country horses and arms, tailors and sempstresses, smiths and artisans. His successor, Nintoku (311-399), who was obliged to fit out an expedition to Shiragi in order to maintain his rights, followed in the footsteps of his father. He had been instructed in the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius by the Chinese sage Wani, whom his father had engaged as a tutor to the Imperial family, and Japanese historians always speak

of Nintoku with deep respect as a man of singular virtue and nobility. Nintoku introduced silkworm breeding into Japan, and it is a significant fact as showing a possibly earlier existence of Buddhism in this country that in the silk districts the patron deity of sericulture is the Buddhist saint As'vaghosha.