The Ancient Documents.

The first book, the “Kojiki,” gives us the theology, cosmogony, mythology, and very probably, in its later portions, some outlines of history of the ancient Japanese.  The “Kojiki” is the real, the dogmatic exponent, or, if we may so say, the Bible, of Shint[=o].  The “Many[=o]shu,” or Book of Myriad Poems, expresses the thoughts and feelings; reflects the manners and customs of the primitive generations, and, in the same sense as do the Sagas of the Scandinavians, furnishes us unchronological but interesting and more or less real narratives of events which have been glorified by the poets and artists.  The ancient codes of law and of ceremonial procedure are of great value, while the “Norito” are excellent mirrors in which to see reflected the religion called Shint[=o] on the more active side of worship.

In a critical study, either of the general body of national tradition or of the ancient documents, we must continually be on our guard against the usual assumption that Chinese civilization came in earlier than it really did.  This assumption colors all modern Japanese popular ideas, art and literature.  The vice of the pupil nations surrounding the Middle Kingdom is their desire to have it believed that Chinese letters and culture among them is an nearly coeval with those of China as can be made truly or falsely to appear.  The Koreans, for example, would have us believe that their civilization, based on letters and introduced by Kishi, is “four thousand years old” and contemporaneous with China’s own, and that “the Koreans are among the oldest people of the world."[5] The average modern Japanese wishes the date of authentic or official history projected as far back as possible.  Yet he is a modest man compared with his mediaeval ancestor, who constructed chronology out of ink-stones.  Over a thousand years ago a deliberate forgery was officially put on paper.  A whole line of emperors who never lived was canonized, and clever penmen set down in ink long chapters which describe what never happened.[6] Furthermore, even after, and only eight years after the fairly honest “Kojiki” had been compiled, the book called “Nihongi,” or Chronicles of Japan, was written.  All the internal and not a little external evidence shows that the object of this book is to give the impression that Chinese ideas, culture and learning had long been domesticated in Japan.  The “Nihongi” gives dates of events supposed to have happened fifteen hundred years before, with an accuracy which may be called villainous; while the “Kojiki” states that Wani, a Korean teacher, brought the “Thousand Character Classic” to Japan in A.D. 285, though that famous Chinese book was not composed until the sixth century, or A.D. 550.[7]