The very fact that there was no moral commandments, not even of loyalty or obedience such as Confucianism afterward promulgated and formulated, is proof to the modern Shint[=o]ist that the primeval Japanese were pure and holy; they did right, naturally, and hence he does not hesitate to call Japan, the Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits, the Region Between Heaven and Earth, the Island of the Congealed Drop, the Sun’s Nest, the Princess Country, the Land of Great Peace, the Land of Great Gentleness, the Mikado’s Empire, the Country ruled by a Theocratic Dynasty.  He considers that only with the vice brought over from the Continent of Asia were ethics both imported and made necessary.[18]

All this has been solemnly taught by famous Shint[=o] scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still practically promulgated in the polemic Shint[=o] literature of to-day, even after the Kojiki has been studied and translated into European languages.  The Kojiki shows that whatever the men may have been or done, the gods were abominably obscene, and both in word and deed were foul and revolting, utterly opposed in act to those reserves of modesty or standards of shame that exist even among the cultivated Japanese to-day.[19] Even among the Ainos, whom the Japanese look upon as savages, there is still much of the obscenity of speech which belongs to all society[20] in a state of barbarism; but it has been proved that genuine modesty is a characteristic of the Aino women.[21] A literal English translation of the Kojiki, however, requires an abundant use of Latin in order to protect it from the grasp of the law in English-speaking Christendom.  In Chamberlain’s version, the numerous cesspools are thus filled up with a dead language, and the road is constructed for the reader, who likes the language of Edmund Spencer, of William Tyndale and of John Ruskin kept unsoiled.

The cruelty which marks this early stage shows that though moral codes did not exist, the Buddhist and Confucian missionary were for Japan necessities of the first order.  Comparing the result to-day with the state of things in the early times, one must award high praise to Buddhism that it has made the Japanese gentle, and to Confucianism that it has taught the proprieties of life, so that the polished Japanese gentleman, as to courtesy, is in many respects the peer and at some external points the superior, of his European confrere.

Another fact, made repulsively clear, about life in ancient Japan, is that the high ideals of truth and honor, characteristic at least of the Samurai of modern times, were utterly unknown in the days of the kami.  Treachery was common.  Instances multiply on the pages of the Kojiki where friend betrayed friend.  The most sacred relations of life were violated.  Altogether these were the darkest ages of Japan, though, as among the red men of America, there were not wanting many noble examples of stoical endurance, of courage, and of power nobly exerted for the benefit of others.