Even to this day it is nearly impossible for an American to get a Korean “frog in the well"[8] to understand why the genuine native life and history, language and learning of his own peninsular country is of greater value to the student than the pedantry borrowed from China.  Why these possess any interest to a “scholar” is a mystery to the head in the horsehair net.  Anything of value, he thinks, must be on the Chinese model.  What is not Chinese is foolish and fit for women and children only.  Furthermore, Korea “always had” Chinese learning.  This is the sum of the arguments of the Korean literati, even as it used to be of the old-time hatless Yedo scholar of shaven skull and topknot.

Despite Japanese independence and even arrogance in certain other lines, the thought of the demolition of cherished notions of vast antiquity is very painful.  Critical study of ancient traditions is still dangerous, even in parliamentary Nippon.  Hence the unbiassed student must depend on his own reading of and judgment upon the ancient records, assisted by the thorough work done by the English scholars Aston, Satow, Chamberlain, Bramsen and others.

It was the coming of Buddhism in the sixth century, and the implanting on the soil of Japan of a system of religion in which were temples with all that was attractive to the eye, gorgeous ritual, scriptures, priesthood, codes of morals, rigid discipline, a system of dogmatics in which all was made positive and clear, that made the variant myths and legends somewhat uniform.  The faith of Shaka, by winning adherents both at the court and among the leading men of intelligence, reacted upon the national traditions so as to compel their collection and arrangemeut into definite formulas.  In due time the mythology, poetry and ritual was, as we have seen, committed to writing and the whole system called Shint[=o], in distinction from Butsud[=o], the Way of the Gods from the Way of the Buddhas.  Thus we can see more clearly the outward and visible manifestations of Shint[=o].  In forming our judgment, however, we must put aside those descriptions which are found in the works of European writers, from Marco Polo and Mendez Pinto down to the year 1870.  Though these were good observers, they were often necessarily mistaken in their deductions.  For, as we shall see in our lecture on Riy[=o]bu or Mixed Buddhism, Shint[=o] was, from the ninth century until late into the nineteenth century, absorbed in Buddhism so as to be next to invisible.

Origins of the Japanese People.

Without detailing processes, but giving only results, our view of the origin of the Japanese people and of their religion is in the main as follows: 

The oldest seats of human habitation in the Japanese Archipelago lie between the thirtieth and thirty-eighth parallels of north latitude.  South of the thirty-fourth parallel, it seems, though without proof of writing or from tradition, that the Malay type and blood from the far south probably predominated, with, however, much infusion from the northern Asian mainland.