Marco Polo’s references to “Jipangu,” as we have seen, were not based on his personal observations but on information derived from the Chinese, and though he travelled widely in China, accompanied by his brother, he never set foot on Japanese soil. That an island empire existed to the east of them, however, had been known to the Chinese for centuries, and Kublai Khan had unsuccessfully sought to bring it into subjection only a short time prior to the Polos’ arrival at his Court in 1275. It is probable that Christopher Columbus, when setting sail from Palos in 1492, hoped to reach “Jipangu,” of which he had doubtless heard through the publicity given to Marco Polo’s travels, by sailing westward, and it is possible that Columbus imagined that he had found his way to some part of an Eastern continent when he discovered America. The first traveller to actually land in Japan was Fernao Mendes Pinto, in 1542, seven years before the Jesuit Missionary Francisco Xavier arrived there. Pinto was favourably received in Bungo, a province of Kiushiu, the large island in the south-west of Japan, and arrangements were made for a vessel to visit Bungo with foreign produce, every other year. Pinto belonged to Coimbra, in Portugal, and thus it is to that power that is due the honour of its subjects having been the first to visit Japanese shores. Pinto’s ship was the only survivor of three which started from Lisbon on a voyage of adventure, and it was from her crew that the Japanese first acquired a knowledge of the use of firearms. The Bungo province gives its name to the narrow channel that here divides the islands of Kiushiu and Shikoku, which is exceptionally rich in historical associations, for if tradition be in this instance correct it was in one of its many little bays that the vessel conveying the ancestor of the Ten-shi, the first Emperor Jimmu Tenno, dropped anchor over 2500 years ago. Where Jimmu Tenno came from remains an absolute mystery, but it seems to be fairly established that he brought with him a mighty host, armed for conquest, and that he had early encounters with the tribes then inhabiting the south and west of Hondo, the main island. One of these was the Yamato tribe, which probably at that remote period dwelt in what is now Iwami, and its occupancy of the coast facing the peninsula of Korea, might be taken to imply that its people originally crossed the water from that kingdom, though it would not of necessity follow that the men of Yamato were identical in race with the dwellers in Korea at the present day. Fighting his way along the borders of the Inland Sea, the invading chieftain Jimmu Tenno ultimately reached the neighbourhood of what is now Kioto, and set up his capital in that region. It is not improbable that he brought with him many members of the Yamato tribe that he had subjugated, and this may account for the presence to this day in that part of Japan of numberless families