The sturdy races inhabiting the Central Luzon highlands, decidedly superior in physique and mental capacity to the _Aetas,_ may be of Japanese origin, for shortly after the conquest by Legaspi a Spanish galley cruising off the north coast of Luzon fell in with Japanese, who probably penetrated to the interior of that island up the Rio Grande de Cagayan. Tradition tells us how the Japanese used to sail down the east coast of Luzon as far as the neighbourhood of Lamon Bay, where they landed and, descending the little rivers which flowed into the Lake of Bay, settled in that region which was called by the first Spanish conquerors Pagsanjan Province, and which included the Laguna Province of to-day, with a portion of the modern Tayabas Province. Either the Japanese extended their sphere from the Lake of Bay shore, or, as some assert (probably erroneously), shipwrecked Japanese went up the Pansipit River to the Bombon Lake: the fact remains that Taal, with the Bombon Lake shore, was a Japanese settlement, and even up to now the Taalenos have characteristics differing from those of the pure Malay immigrant descendants. The Philippine patriot, Dr. Jose Rizal, was a good Japanese-Malay type. The Tagalogs, who occupy a small portion of Luzon Island, chiefly the provinces of Batangas, Laguna, Rizal, and Bulacan, are believed to be the cross-breed descendants of these Japanese immigrants. At the period of the Spanish conquest the _Tao ilog_, that is to say, "the man who came by the river," afterwards corrupted into the more euphonious name of _Tagalog_, occupied only the lands from the south shore of Laguna de Bay southwards. Some traded with the Malay settlers at Maynila (as the city on the Pasig River was then called) and, little by little, radicated themselves in the Manila suburbs of Quiapo, Sampaloc, and Santa Cruz. [73]