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THE
LEGEND OF “ZIPPANGU”, THE LAND OF GOLD Miyazaki Masakatsu,
retired professor, Hokkaido University of Education |
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“People on the Island of Zipangu (Japan) have tremendous quantities of gold. The
King’s palace is roofed with pure gold, and his floors are paved in gold two
fingers thick.” So wrote the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (1254-1324).
Because of his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, Europeans believed that “Zipangu” was a land of gold, and Columbus later sailed
across the Atlantic in search of it. The legend of Wāqwaq,
the land of gold: It started with gold panned in rivers in Japan Gold was first discovered in Japan in 749,
in river deposits. In that year, about 38 kg of gold from the Oshu region in northeastern Honshu was presented to the
capital city of Nara, to help gild a statue of the Buddha being built there.
When the Great Buddha was completed in 752, about 439 kg of the gold covering
it had come from Oshu. The glittering Buddha,
measuring 15.8 meters in height, was viewed as an impressive display of
Japan’s wealth by official delegations from the Kingdom of Silla (Korea) and Buddhist monks from Tang China and
India. After work on the Great Buddha was
finished, Oshu continued to send gold to the
capital, although in lesser quantities (about 22 kg each year). Before long,
gold panned from Oshu rivers was being used also to
pay for a program organized by the government—sending envoys, students, and
student monks to Tang China on a regular basis. China was perhaps the most
advanced country in the world in those days, and the purpose of those visits
was to introduce Chinese civilization into Japan. There is a record showing,
for example, that when a Japanese delegation of about 500 people left for
China in 804, the ambassador and his deputy were given about 7.5 kg and 5.6
kg of gold, respectively, to use for their living expenses in China. Students
and student monks were also members of the delegation, and they needed large
amounts of gold for their long stays learning about the Tang civilization. So
it was natural that, over time, legends about the enormous riches of the
country of Wakoku (Japan) would spring up in the
capital of Tang China. The legends were picked up by Muslim merchants in the
Chinese port of Khānfū (Guangzhou), and
then spread as far as western Asia. The merchants were naturally keen to
learn more. In those days, many Muslim traders were doing business with
China, using sailboats called dhows, and about 120,000 of them lived in Khānfū. In the second half of the 9th century,
the Muslim geographer Ibun Khurdādhbeh
repeated reports from China saying that, in the golden land of Wāqwaq (Wakoku = Japan),
dog chains and pet monkey collars were made of gold. Stories about Wāqwaq later evolved into the legend of Zipangu, the land of gold. How did Marco Polo learn about Japan’s
gold? As during the 1905 revolution, the Georgian
revolutionary organizations behaved during the trying circumstances of 1917
with moderation and public spirit. They lent their influence to keeping the
peace, preventing inter-communal strife, and bringing about social and
economic reforms in the midst of the war conditions and general upheaval. The
leading Georgian SocialDemocrats renounced for the time being the extremist
slogans of Bolshevik class war and came out on the side of national unity. 'The present revolution,' Zhordania
declared on 18 March 1917, 'is not the affair of some one class; the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie are together directing the affairs of the
revolution. . . . We must walk together with those forces which participate
in the movement of the revolution and organize the Republic with our forces
in common.' 93
The March revolution brought again into the
forefront all the old social and economic problems which the Tsarist
government had failed to tackle. First and foremost was the agrarian problem.
This, obviously, could not be settled overnight. Accordingly, peasants and
landowners in many parts of Georgia adopted an interim solution, whereby
share-cropping peasants settled on a landowner's estates simply ceased
handing over the master's share of the crop, the so-called gala,
amounting to between one-quarter and one-half of the total. Having no one to
cultivate them on their behalf, the nobility found their domains slipping
from their grasp, while the peasants were now endowed with both their own
former small-holdings and those portions of their former lord's estates which
they had formerly cultivated as share-croppers. Access to communal woodlands
and pastures, monopolized by the landed proprietors under the terms of the
liberation decrees of 1864 onwards, reverted to the peasantry. Plantations,
forests and vineyards owned by members of the former Russian imperial family
were confiscated and nationalized. Small farms belonging to the lesser
squirearchy, a numerous category in Georgian rural society,
were relatively little affected. |
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