The Coming of Chinese Civilization
[ 31
toriography of Japan is fundamental, but unfortunately that is not their only claim to fame. They were to be lifted from comparative obscurity many centuries later by narrow-minded patriots and ultra-nationalists seeking in the primitive pre-Chinese periods of Japanese history native virtues which would justify their own belief in the superiority of Japan. Despite the extraordinary naïveté and occasional indecency, according to Western standards, of the early mythology preserved in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the modern Japanese have in a sense made these two books into bibles of ultra-nationalism; and in recent years official policy has even forced upon the Japanese people the acceptance of their historical absurdities as sober facts.
