As a result of this position, scholarship and credulity are curiously combined in modern historical production.  Implicit confidence seems to be placed in the myths of the primitive era.  Tales of the gods are cited as historical events whose date, even, can be fixed with some degree of accuracy.  Although writing was unknown in Japan until early in the Christian era, the chronology of the previous six or eight hundred years is accepted on the authority of a single statement in the Kojiki, written 712 years A.D.  This statement was reproduced from the memory of a single man, who remembered miraculously the contents of a book written shortly before, but accidentally destroyed by fire.  In the authoritative history of Japan, prepared and translated into English at the command of the government for the Columbian Exposition, we find such statements as these: 

“From the time that Amaterasu-Omikami made Ninigi-no-mikoto to descend from the heavens and subject to his administrative sway Okini-nushi-no-mikoto and other offspring of the deities in the land, descendants of the divine beings have sat upon the throne, generation after generation in succession."[AH] “Descended in a direct line from the heavenly deities, the Emperor has stood unshaken in his high place through all generations, his prestige and dignity immutable from time immemorial and independent of all the vicissitudes of the world about him."[AI] “Never has there been found a single subject of the realm who sought to impair the Imperial prestige."[AJ] It is true that in a single passage the traditions of the “age of the Deities” are described as “strange and incredible legends,” but it is added that, however singular they are, in order to understand the history of the Empire’s beginnings, they must be studied.  Then follows, without a word of criticism or dissent, the account of the doings of the heavenly deities, in creating Japan and its people, as well as the myriads of gods.  There is no break between the age of the gods and the history of men.  The first inventions and discoveries, such as those of fire, of mining, and of weaving are ascribed to Amate rasu-Omikami (the Sun Goddess).  According to these traditions and the modern histories built upon them, the Japanese race came into existence wholly independently of all other races of men.  Such is the authoritative teaching in the schools to-day.

Occidental scholars do not accept these statements or dates.  That the Japanese will evince historical and critical ability in the study of their own early history, as soon as the social order will allow it, can hardly be doubted.  Those few who even now entertain advanced ideas do not dare to avow them.  And this fact throws an interesting light on the way in which the social order, or a despotic government, may thwart for a time the natural course of development.  The present apparent credulity of Japanese historical scholarship is due neither to race character nor to superstitions lodged in the inherited race brain, but simply to the social system, which, as yet, demands the inviolability of the Imperial line.