These heaven-descended Yamato people were in the main agriculturists, though of a rude order, while the outlying tribes were mostly hunters and fishermen; and many of the rituals show the class of crimes which nomads, or men of unsettled life, would naturally commit against their neighbors living in comparatively settled order.  It is to be noted that in the god-way the origin of evil is to be ascribed to evil gods.  These kami pollute, and pollution is iniquity.  From this iniquity the people are to be purged by the gods of purification, to whom offerings are duly made.

He who would understand the passion for cleanliness which characterizes the Japanese must look for its source in their ancient religion.  The root idea of the word tsumi, which Mr. Satow translated as “offence,” is that of pollution.  On this basis, of things pure and things defiling, the ancient teachers of Shint[=o] made their classification of what was good and what was bad.  From the impression of what was repulsive arose the idea of guilt.

In rituals translated by Mr. Satow, the list of offences is given and the defilements are to be removed to the nether world, or, in common fact, the polluted objects and the expiatory sacrifices are to be thrown into the rivers and thence carried to the sea, where they fall to the bottom of the earth.  The following norito clearly shows this.  Furthermore, as Mr. Satow, the translator, points out, this ritual contains the germ of criminal law, a whole code of which might have been evolved and formulated under Shint[=o], had not Buddhism arrested its growth.

Amongst the various sorts of offences which may be committed in ignorance or out of negligence by heaven’s increasing people, who shall come into being in the country, which the Sovran GRANDCHILD’S augustness, hiding in the fresh RESIDENCE, built by stoutly planting the HOUSE-pillars on the bottom-most rocks, and exalting the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven, as his SHADE from the heavens and SHADE from the sun, shall tranquilly ruin as a peaceful country, namely, the country of great Yamato, where the sun is soon on high, which he fixed upon as a peaceful country, as the centre of the countries of the four quarters thus bestowed upon him—­breaking the ridges, filling up water-courses, opening sluices, double-sowing, planting stakes, flaying alive, flaying backwards, and dunging; many of such offences are distinguished as heavenly offences, and as earthly offences; cutting living flesh, cutting dead flesh, leprosy, proud-flesh, ... calamities of crawling worms, calamities of a god on high, calamities of birds on high, the offences of killing beasts and using incantations; many of such offences may be disclosed.

When he has thus repeated it, the heavenly gods will push open heaven’s eternal gates, and cleaving a path with might through the manifold clouds of heaven, will hear; and the country gods, ascending to the tops of the high mountains, and