the other of all contemporary evidence. It is contradicted by the more trustworthy, because contemporary, Chinese and Korean records, and—to turn from negative to positive testimony can be proved in some particulars to rest on actual forgery. For instance, the fictitious nature of the calendars employed to calculate the early dates for about thirteen centuries (from B.C. 660 onward) has not altogether escaped the notice even of the Japanese themselves, and has been clearly exposed for European readers by that careful investigator, the late Mr. William Bramsen, who says, when discussing them in the Introduction to his Japanese Chronological Tables, "It is hardly too severe to style this one of the greatest literary frauds ever perpetrated."
But a truce to this discussion. We have only entered into it because the subject, though perhaps dry, is at least new, and because one's patience is worn out by seeing book after book glibly quote the traditional dates of early Japanese history as if they were solid truth, instead of being the merest haphazard guesses and baseless imaginings of a later age. Arrived at A.D. 600, we stand on terra firma, and can afford to push on more quickly.
About that time occurred the greatest event of Japanese history, the conversion of the nation to Buddhism (approximately A.D. 552—621). So far as can be gathered from the accounts of the early Chinese travellers, Chinese civilisation had slowly—very slowly—been gaining ground in the archipelago ever since the third century after Christ. But when the Buddhist missionaries crossed the water, all Chinese institutions followed them and came in with a rush. Mathematical instruments and calendars were introduced; books began to be written (the earliest that has survived, and indeed nearly the earliest of all, is the already mentioned Kojiki, dating from A.D. 712); the custom of abdicating the throne in order to spend old age in prayer was adopted,—a custom which, more than anything else, led to the effacement of the Mikado's authority during the Middle Ages.
Sweeping changes in political arrangements began to be made in the year 645, and before the end of the eighth century, the
