The reader who has followed this summary, or who will take the trouble to study the original Japanese texts for himself, will perceive that there is no break in the story—at least no chrono logical break—and no break between the fabulous and the real, unless it be in the fifth century of our era, or more than a thousand years later than the date usually assumed as the starting-point of authentic Japanese history. The only breaks are topographical, not chronological.
This fact of the continuity of the Japanese mythology and history has been fully recognised by the leading native commentators, whose opinions are those considered orthodox by modern Shintōists, and they draw from it the conclusion that everything in the standard national histories must be accepted as literal truth, the supernatural equally with the natural. But the general habit of the more sceptical Japanese of the present day, that is to say, of ninety-nine out of every hundred of the educated, is to reject or rather to ignore the legends of the gods, while implicitly believing the legends of the emperors, from Jimmu Tennō, in B.C. 660, downwards. For so arbitrary a distinction there is not the shadow of justification.[1] The so-called history of Jimmu the first earthly Mikado, of Jingo the conqueror of Korea, of Yamato-take, and of the rest, stands or falls by exactly the same criterion as the legends of the creator and creatress Izanagi and Izanami. Both sets of tales are told in the same books, in the same style, and with an almost equal amount of supernatural detail. The so-called historical part is as devoid as
- ↑ Since this article was first published, the Japanese government, obscurantist in nothing but the teaching of history, has produced convincing proof of the advisability of orthodoxy in matters historical by dismissing Prof. Kume from his chair at the University of Tōkyō for no other offence than that of writing critically on the subject of the early Mikados. This step, taken in 1892, has duly served pour encourager les auires. Thus we find Mr. Haga, in his otherwise excellent little "Lectures on Japanese Literature" (國文學史十講), gravely informing his hearers that some of the odes preserved in the Kojiki and Nihongi were composed by the gods, some by Jimmu Tennō and other ancient Mikados, one by a monkey! The ridicule due to these absurdities must recoil on the government which imposes on highly educated men such humiliating restrictions.
