of legends and the Kyūshū cycle are brought into apparent unity. The Nihongi has even improved upon this by making Jingo's husband dwell in Yamato at the beginning of his reign and only remove to Kyūshū later, so that if the less skilfully elaborated Kojiki had not been preserved, the tangled skein of the tradition would have been still more difficult to unravel. The empress's army defeats the troops raised by the native kings or princes, who are represented as her step-sons, and from that time forward the story runs on in a single channel, with Yamato as its scene of action.
China likewise is now first mentioned, books are said to have been brought over from the mainland, and we hear of the gradual introduction of various useful arts by Chinese and Korean im migrants. Even the annals of the reign of Jingo's son, Ōjin Tennō, however, during which this civilising impulse from abroad is said to have commenced, are not free from details as miraculous as any in the earlier portions of the history. The monarch himself is said to have lived a hundred and thirty years, while his successor lived eighty-three (according to the Nihongi, Ojin lived a hundred and ten, and his successor Nintoku reigned eighty-seven years). It is not till the next reign that the miraculous ceases, a fact which significantly coincides with the time at which, says the Nihongi, "historiographers were first appointed to all the provinces to record words and events, and forward archives from all directions."
This brings us to the beginning of the fifth century of our era, just three centuries before the compilation of the annals that have come down to us, but only two centuries before the compilation of the first history of which mention has been preserved. From that time forward the story in the Kojiki, though not well told, gives us some very curious pictures, and reads as if it were trustworthy. It is tolerably full for a few reigns, after which it again dwindles into more genealogies, ending with the death of the Empress Suiko in A.D. 628. The Nihongi, on the contrary, supplies full details as far as A.D. 701, that is, to within nineteen years of the date of its compilation.
