794 PRIMEVAL JAPANESE, 



When the Japanese tii'st undertook to explain their own origin 

 in the three books spoken of above, so unfettered were they by genuine 

 reminiscences that they immediately had recourse to the supernatural 

 and derived themselves from heaven. Reduced to its fundamental 

 outlines, the legend they set down was that, in the earliest times, a 

 group of the divine dwellers in the plains of high heaven descended to a 

 place with a now unidentifiable name, and thence gradually pushing- 

 eastward, established themselves in the " land of sunrise," giving to 

 it a race of monarchs, direct scions of the goddess of light (Amate- 

 rasu). Man}^ things are related al:)out these heaven-sent folk who 

 peopled Japan hundreds of years before the Christian era. They are 

 things that uuist be studied by any one desiring to make himself 

 ac(|uainted with the essence of her indigenous religion or her pictorial 

 and decorative arts, for they there play a picturesque and prominent 

 part. But they have nothing to do with sober history. Possibly it may 

 be urged that nations whose traditions deal with a Mount Sinai, a pil- 

 lar of cloud and tire, and an immaculate conception, have no right to 

 reject everj^thing supernatural in oriental annals. That superficial 

 retort has, indeed, been made too. often. But l)ehind it there undoubt- 

 edly lurks in the inner consciousness of the educated and intelligent 

 Japanese a resolve not to scrutinize these things too closely. Whether 

 or not the ''age of the gods" — kaminoyo — of which, as a child, he 

 reads with implicit credence, and of which, as a man, he recognizes 

 the political uses, should be openly relegated to the limbo of absurd- 

 ities; whether the deities had to take part in an immodest dance in 

 order to lure the offended sun goddess from a cave to which her 

 brother's rudeness had driven her, thus plunging the universe in dark- 

 ness; whether the god of impulse fought with the god of fire on the 

 shores of the Island of Nine Provinces; whether the procreative divini- 

 ties were inspired by a bird; whether the germs of a new civilization 

 were carried across the sea by a prince begotten of the sunshine and 

 born in the shape of a crimson jewel — these are not problems that 

 receive very serious consideration in Japan, though neither a Colenso 

 nor a Huxley has 3^et arisen to attack them publicly. They are 

 rather allegories from which emerges the serviceable political doc- 

 trine that the Emperors of Japan, being of divine origin, rule by 

 divine right. It is the Japanese historian's method, or the Japanese 

 mythologisfs manner, of descril)ing an attribute claimed until very 

 recentl}" by all occidental sovereigns, and still asserted on behalf of 

 some. As for the foreign student of Japan's ancient history, these 

 weird myths and romantic allegories have induced him to dismiss it as 

 a purelv imaginary product of later-day imagination. The transcen- 

 dental elements woven into parts of the narrative discredit the whole 

 in his eyes. And his scepticism is fortified by a generally-accepted 

 hypothesis that the events of the thirteen opening centuries of the 



