[1] Professor T. Inouye's little pamphlet, published first in French, entitled _Sur le Développement des Idées Philosophiques au Japon avant l'Introduction de la Civilisation Européenne_, will give you some idea of our philosophic systems. For a serious perusal, its German translation, annotated and amplified, by Dr. A. Gramatzky (_Kurze Übersicht über die Entwicklung der philosophischen Ideen in Japan_, Berlin, 1897), is to be preferred. What I myself propose to do in this essay is to give to the best of my ability, and so far as is possible with the scanty knowledge and the limited space at my disposal, a simple statement in plain language of what I think to be the fundamental truths necessary for the proper understanding of my fatherland. I am not vain enough to attempt any original solution of the old difficulty; knowing as I do my own deficiencies, I should be well satisfied if I could manage to give you some kind of general introduction to the Japanese views of life. So much for the preliminary remarks. Let us now take a step further and see what factors are to be considered as the bases of modern Japan. 'To which race do the Japanese belong?' is the first question asked by any one who wants to approach our subject from the historical point of view. Unfortunately not much is known as yet about our place in racial science. If we do not take into account the inhabitants of the newly annexed island of Formosa, we have, roughly speaking, two very different races in our whole archipelago--the hairy Aino and the ruling Yamato race, the former being the supposed aborigines, physically sturdy and well developed, with their characteristic abundant growth of hair, who are at present to be found only in the Yezo island in the northern extremity of Japan, and whose number, notwithstanding all the care of our government, is fast dwindling, the sum total being not much more than 15,000. The Aino have a tradition that the land had been occupied before them by another race of dwarfish stature called Koropokguru, who are identified by some scholars with those primitive pit-dwellers known in our history as Tuchigumo,[2] whose traces, although scanty, are still to be met with in various parts of Yezo. Anyhow, we see at the first dawn of history the aborigines gradually receding before the conquering Yamato race, who are found steadily pushing on towards the northeast, and who finally established themselves as a ruling body under the divine banner of the first emperor Jimmu, from whose accession we reckon our era, the present year being the 2565th, according to our recognised way of counting dates. [2] Professor Milne, _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_, vol. viii. p. 82.