Shinto

Of all the mass of Japanese literature, which lies before us as the result of nearly twelve centuries of book-making, the most important Monument is the work entitled " Ko-ji-ki " 1 or "Records of Ancient Matters," which was completed in A. D. 712. It is the most important because it has preserved for us more faithfully than any other book the mythology, the manners, the language,

[paragraph continues] [2] and the traditional history of Ancient Japan. Indeed it is the earliest authentic connected literary product of that large division of the human race which, has been variously denominated Turanian, Scythian and Altaic, and it even precedes by at least a century the most ancient extant literary compositions of non-Aryan India. Soon after the date of its compilation, most of the salient features of distinctive Japanese nationality were buried under a superincumbent mass of Chinese culture, and it is to these "Records" and to a very small number of other ancient works, such as the poems of the "Collection of a Myriad Leaves" and the Shintō Rituals, that the investigator must look, if he would not at every step be misled in attributing originality to modern customs and ideas, which have simply been borrowed wholesale from the neighbouring continent.

It is of course not pretended that even these "Records" are untouched by Chinese influence: that influence is patent in the very characters with which the text is written. But the influence is less, and of another kind. If in the traditions preserved and in the customs alluded to we detect the Early Japanese in the act of borrowing from China and perhaps even from India, there is at least on our author's part no ostentatious decking out in Chinese trappings of what he believed to be original matter, after the fashion of the writers who immediately succeeded him. It is true that this abstinence on his part makes his compilation less pleasant to the ordinary native taste than that of subsequent historians, who put fine Chinese phrases into the mouths of emperors and heroes supposed to have lived before the time when .intercourse with China began. But the European student,

who reads all such books, not as a pastime but in order to search for facts, will prefer the more genuine composition. It is also accorded the first place by the most learned of the native literati .

Of late years this paramount importance of the "Records of Ancient Matters" to investigators of Japanese subjects generally has become well-known to European scholars; and even versions of a few passages are to be found scattered through the pages of their writings. Thus Mr. Aston has given us, in the Chrestomathy appended to his "Grammar of the Japanese Written Language," a couple of interesting extracts; Mr. Satow has illustrated by occasional extracts his elaborate papers on the Shintō Rituals printed in these "Transactions," and a remarkable essay by Mr. Kempermann published in the Fourth [3] Number of the "Mittheilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur und Völkerkunde Ostasiens," though containing no actual translations, bases on the account given in the "Records" some conjectures regarding the origines of Japanese civilization which are fully substantiated by more minute research. All that has yet appeared in any European language does not, however, amount to one-twentieth part of the whole, and the most erroneous views of the style and scope of the book and its contents have found their way into popular works on Japan. It is hoped that the true nature of the book, and also the true nature of the traditions, customs, and ideas of the Early Japanese, will be made clearer by the present translation the object of which is to give the entire work in a continuous English version, and thus to furnish the European student with a text to quote from, or at least to use as a guide in consulting the original. The only object aimed

at has been a rigid and literal conformity with the Japanese text. Fortunately for this endeavour (though less fortunately for the student), one of the difficulties which often beset the translator of an Oriental classic is absent in the present case. There is no beauty of style, to preserve some trace of which he may be tempted to sacrifice a certain amount of accuracy. The "Records" sound queer and bald in Japanese, as will be noticed further on, and it is therefore right, even from a stylistic point of view, that they should sound bald and queer in English. The only portions of the text which, from obvious reasons, refuse to lend themselves to translation into English after this fashion are the indecent portions. But it has been thought that there could be no objection to rendering them into Latin,—Latin as rigidly literal as is the English of the greater part.

After these preliminary remarks, it will be most convenient to take the several points which a study of the "Records" and the turning of them into English suggest, and to consider the same one by one. These points are:

I.—Authenticity and Nature of the Text, together with Bibliographical Notes. II.—Details concerning the Method of Translation. III.—The " Nihon-Gi " or "Chronicles of Japan" IV.—Manners and Customs of the Early Japanese. [4] V.—Religious and Political Ideas of the Early Japanese. Beginnings of the Japanese Nation, and Credibility of the National Traditions.

i:1 Should the claim of Accadian to be considered an Altaic language be substantiated, then Archaic Japanese will have to be content with the second place in the Altaic family. Taking the word Altaic in its usual acceptation, viz., as the generic name of all the languages belonging to the Mantchu, Mongolia, Turkish and Finnish groups, not only the Archaic, but the Classical, literature of Japan carries us back several centuries beyond the earliest extant documents of any other Altaic tongue.—For a discussion of the age of the most ancient Tamil documents see the Introduction to Bishop Caldwell's "Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages," p. 91 et seq.

INTRODUCTION. Of all the mass of Japanese literature, which lies before us as the result of nearly twelve centuries of book-making, the most important Monument is the work entitled " Ko-ji-ki " 1 or "Records of Ancient Matters," which was completed in A. D. 712. It is the most important because it has preserved for us more faithfully than any other book the mythology, the manners, the language, p. ii [paragraph continues] [2] and the traditional history of Ancient Japan. Indeed it is the earliest authentic connected literary product of that large division of the human race which, has been variously denominated Turanian, Scythian and Altaic, and it even precedes by at least a century the most ancient extant literary compositions of non-Aryan India. Soon after the date of its compilation, most of the salient features of distinctive Japanese nationality were buried under a superincumbent mass of Chinese culture, and it is to these "Records" and to a very small number of other ancient works, such as the poems of the "Collection of a Myriad Leaves" and the Shintō Rituals, that the investigator must look, if he would not at every step be misled in attributing originality to modern customs and ideas, which have simply been borrowed wholesale from the neighbouring continent. It is of course not pretended that even these "Records" are untouched by Chinese influence: that influence is patent in the very characters with which the text is written. But the influence is less, and of another kind. If in the traditions preserved and in the customs alluded to we detect the Early Japanese in the act of borrowing from China and perhaps even from India, there is at least on our author's part no ostentatious decking out in Chinese trappings of what he believed to be original matter, after the fashion of the writers who immediately succeeded him. It is true that this abstinence on his part makes his compilation less pleasant to the ordinary native taste than that of subsequent historians, who put fine Chinese phrases into the mouths of emperors and heroes supposed to have lived before the time when .intercourse with China began. But the European student, p. iii who reads all such books, not as a pastime but in order to search for facts, will prefer the more genuine composition. It is also accorded the first place by the most learned of the native literati . Of late years this paramount importance of the "Records of Ancient Matters" to investigators of Japanese subjects generally has become well-known to European scholars; and even versions of a few passages are to be found scattered through the pages of their writings. Thus Mr. Aston has given us, in the Chrestomathy appended to his "Grammar of the Japanese Written Language," a couple of interesting extracts; Mr. Satow has illustrated by occasional extracts his elaborate papers on the Shintō Rituals printed in these "Transactions," and a remarkable essay by Mr. Kempermann published in the Fourth [3] Number of the "Mittheilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur und Völkerkunde Ostasiens," though containing no actual translations, bases on the account given in the "Records" some conjectures regarding the origines of Japanese civilization which are fully substantiated by more minute research. All that has yet appeared in any European language does not, however, amount to one-twentieth part of the whole, and the most erroneous views of the style and scope of the book and its contents have found their way into popular works on Japan. It is hoped that the true nature of the book, and also the true nature of the traditions, customs, and ideas of the Early Japanese, will be made clearer by the present translation the object of which is to give the entire work in a continuous English version, and thus to furnish the European student with a text to quote from, or at least to use as a guide in consulting the original. The only object aimed p. iv at has been a rigid and literal conformity with the Japanese text. Fortunately for this endeavour (though less fortunately for the student), one of the difficulties which often beset the translator of an Oriental classic is absent in the present case. There is no beauty of style, to preserve some trace of which he may be tempted to sacrifice a certain amount of accuracy. The "Records" sound queer and bald in Japanese, as will be noticed further on, and it is therefore right, even from a stylistic point of view, that they should sound bald and queer in English. The only portions of the text which, from obvious reasons, refuse to lend themselves to translation into English after this fashion are the indecent portions. But it has been thought that there could be no objection to rendering them into Latin,—Latin as rigidly literal as is the English of the greater part. After these preliminary remarks, it will be most convenient to take the several points which a study of the "Records" and the turning of them into English suggest, and to consider the same one by one. These points are: I.—Authenticity and Nature of the Text, together with Bibliographical Notes. II.—Details concerning the Method of Translation. III.—The " Nihon-Gi " or "Chronicles of Japan" IV.—Manners and Customs of the Early Japanese. [4] V.—Religious and Political Ideas of the Early Japanese. Beginnings of the Japanese Nation, and Credibility of the National Traditions.

Footnotes i:1 Should the claim of Accadian to be considered an Altaic language be substantiated, then Archaic Japanese will have to be content with the second place in the Altaic family. Taking the word Altaic in its usual acceptation, viz., as the generic name of all the languages belonging to the Mantchu, Mongolia, Turkish and Finnish groups, not only the Archaic, but the Classical, literature of Japan carries us back several centuries beyond the earliest extant documents of any other Altaic tongue.—For a discussion of the age of the most ancient Tamil documents see the Introduction to Bishop Caldwell's "Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages," p. 91 et seq.

The latter portion of the Preface to the "Records of Ancient Matters" is the only documentary authority for the origin of the work. It likewise explains its scope. But though in so doing the author descends to a more matter of fact style than the high-sounding Chinese phrases and elaborate allusions with which he had set forth, still his meaning may be found to lack somewhat of clearness, and it will be as well to have the facts put into language more intelligible to the European student. This having already been done by Mr. Satow in his paper on the "Revival of Pure Shintō," 2 it will be best simply to quote his words. They are as follows: "The Emperor Temmu, at what portion of his reign is not mentioned, lamenting that the records possessed by the chief families contained many errors, resolved to take steps to preserve the true traditions from oblivion. He therefore had the records carefully examined, compared, and weeded of their faults. There happened to be in his household a person of marvellous memory named Hiyeda no Are, who could repeat without mistake the contents of any document he had ever seen, and never forgot anything that he had heard. Temmu Tennō 3 took the pains to instruct this person in the genuine traditions and 'old language of former ages,' and to make him repeat them until he had the whole by heart. 'Before the undertaking was completed,' which probably means before it could be committed to writing,

the Emperor died, and for twenty-five years Are's memory was the sole depository of what afterwards received the title of Kojiki 4 or Furu-koto-bumi as it is read by Motoori. At the end of this interval the Empress Gemmiō ordered [5] Yasumaro to write it down from the mouth of Are, which accounts for the completion of the manuscript in so short a time as four months and a half. Are's age at this date is not stated, but as he was twenty-eight years of age some time in the reign of Temmu Tennō, it could not possibly have been more than sixty-eight, while taking into account the previous order of Temmu Tennō in 681 for the compilation of a history, and the statement that he was engaged on the composition of the Kojiki at the time of his death in 686, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that it belongs to about the last year of his reign, in which case Are was only fifty-three in 711."

The previous order of the Emperor Temmu mentioned in the above extract is usually supposed to have resulted in the compilation of a history which was early lost. But Hirata gives reasons for supposing that this and the project of the "Records of Ancient Matters" were identical. If this opinion be accepted, the "Records," while the oldest existing Japanese book, are, not the third, but the second historical work of which mention has been preserved, one such having been compiled in the year 620, but lost in a fire in the year 645. It will thus be seen that it is rather hard to say whom we should designate as the author of the work.

[paragraph continues] The Emperor Tem-mu, Hiyeda no Are, Yasumaro may all three lay claim to the title. The question, however, is of no importance to us, and the share taken by Are may well have been exaggerated in the telling. What seems to remain as the residue of fact is that the plan of a purely national history originated with the Emperor Temmu and was finally carried out under his successor by Yasumaro, one of the Court Nobles.

Fuller evidence and confirmatory evidence from other sources as to the origin of our "Records" would doubtless be very acceptable. But the very small number of readers and writers at that early date, and the almost simultaneous compilation of a history (the "Chronicles of Japan") which was better calculated to bit the taste of the age, make the absence of such evidence almost unavoidable. In any case, and only noticing in passing the fact that Japan was never till quite recent years noted for such wholesale literary forgeries (for Motowori's condemnation of the "Chronicles of Old Matters of Former Ages" has been considered rash by later scholars),—it cannot be too much emphasized that in this instance authenticity is sufficiently proved by internal evidence. It is hard to believe that any forger living later than the eighth century of our era should have been so well able to discard the Chinese "padding" to the old traditions, which after the acceptance by the Court of the "Chronicles of Japan," had come to be generally regarded as an integral portion of those very traditions; and it is more unlikely still that he should have invented a style so little calculated to bring his handiwork into repute. He would either have written in fair Chinese, like the mass of early Japanese prose writers (and his Preface

shows that he could do so if he were so minded); or, if the tradition of there having been a history written in the native tongue had reached him, he would have made his composition unmistakably Japanese in form by arranging consistent use of characters employed phonetically to denote particles and terminations, after the fashion followed in the Rituals, and developed (apparently before the close of the ninth century) into what is technically known as the "Mixed Phonetic Style" ( Kana-mazhiri ), which has remained ever since as the most convenient vehicle for writing the language. As it is, his quasi-Chinese construction, which breaks down every now and then to be helped up again by a few Japanese words written phonetically, is surely the first clumsy attempt at combining two divergent elements. What however is simply incredible is that, if the supposed forger lived even only a hundred years later than A.D. 712, he should so well have imitated or divined the archaisms of that early period. For the eighth century of our era was a great turning point in the Japanese language, the Archaic Dialect being then replaced by the Classical; and as the Chinese language and literature were alone thenceforward considered worthy the student's attention, there was no means of keeping up an acquaintance with the diction of earlier reigns, neither do we find the poets of the time ever attempting to adorn their verse with obsolete phraseology. That was an affectation reserved for a later epoch, when the diffusion of books rendered it possible. The poets of the seventh, eighth. and ninth centuries apparently wrote as they spoke; and the test of language alone would almost allow of our arranging their compositions half century by half century, even without the dates

which are given in many instances in the "Collection of a Myriad Leaves" and in the "Collection of Songs [7] Ancient and Modern,"—the first two collections of poems published by imperial decree in the middle of the eighth, and at the commencement of the tenth, century respectively.

The above remarks are meant to apply more especially to the occasional Japanese words,—all of them Archaic,—which, as mentioned above, are used from time to time in the prose text of the "Records," to help out the author's meaning and to preserve names whose exact pronunciation he wished handed down. That he should have invented the Songs would be too monstrous a supposition for any one to entertain, even if we had not many of the same and other similar ones preserved in the pages of the "Chronicles of Japan," a work which was undoubtedly completed in A.D. 720. The history of the Japanese language is too well known to us, we can trace its development and decay in too many documents reaching from the eighth century to the present time, for it to be possible to entertain the notion that the latest of these Songs, which have been handed down with minute care in a syllabic transcription, is posterior to the first half of the eighth century, while the majority must be ascribed to an earlier, though uncertain, date. If we refer the greater number of them in their present form to the sixth century, and allow a further antiquity of one or two centuries to others more ancient in sentiment and in grammatical usage, we shall probably be making a moderate estimate. It is an estimate, moreover, which obtains confirmation from the fact that the first notice we have of the use of writing in Japan dates from

early in the fifth century; for it is natural to suppose that the Songs believed to have been composed by the gods and heroes of antiquity should have been among the first things to be written down, while the reverence in which they were held would in some cases cause them to be transcribed exactly as tradition had bequeathed them, even if unintelligible or nearly so, while in others the same feeling would lead to the correction of what were supposed to be errors or inelegancies. Finally it may be well to observe that the authenticity of the "Records" has never been doubted, though, as has already been stated, some of the native commentators have not hesitated to charge with spuriousness another of their esteemed ancient histories. Now it is unlikely [8] that, in the war which has been waged between the partisans of the "Records" and those of the "Chronicles," some flaw in the former's title to genuineness and to priority should not have been discovered and pointed out if it existed.