FOR MY LAST Presidential Address I present you with an enigma, a puzzle in Japanese folklore for which so far no satisfactory solution has been found. The most that I can give is a clue or two.

The problem is this. All over Japan, with the exception of the northern island Hokkaido, villages and communities have been discovered whose inhabitants claim to be descended from a fugitive warrior, fleeing for his life after the defeat of his family in a sea battle in the late twelfth century. Most of these villages have been found in isolated and inaccessible spots; on islands, for example, or on the ends of capes, or tucked into inlets of the sea. But the majority lie deep in mountains, in valleys so remote that they appear to have been cut off from the world until their discovery sometime during the last couple of centunes.

The villages are known in general as Heike-dani, or ‘valleys of the Heike,’ after the surname of the vanquished clan.

A map giving the distribution of these communities shows them to be scattered in a wide double curve from the far north of the main island down to the semi-tropical Ryūkyū islands. Their greatest concentration seems to be to the west and south. In Kyūshū, for example, there are thirty-six, in Shikoku twelve, while the mountainous Kinki district has revealed to date at least nineteen. There is an odd cluster of fourteen more in the Ryūkyū islands. Further north but still west, along the coast of the Japan Sea, at least a dozen more have come to light, while still further north another two dozen are to be found. It is only in the eastern district known as the Kantō, much of which is flat plain, and the urban sprawl of Tokyo, that the numbers fall to a mere seven.

In all, more than a hundred of these strange enclaves have been discovered, many of them hundreds of miles from the scene of the battle from which the wamors are believed to have fled. This took place in the year 1185 in a bay at the western end of the Inland Sea known as Dannoura.