Murray, etc., hold, it is true, a respectable position as embodying the usual traditional account of the subject. Brinkley, too, in his Japan and China, lets in welcome light on one highly important side of the subject, namely, manners and customs and the growth of various arts. But in the domain of history proper his loose method, his failure to (mote original authorities, and above all his lack of the critical faculty render him an unsafe guide, except for the events of the last forty years whose gradual unfolding he has personally watched. Thus, a trustworthy history of Japan remains to be written,—a work which should do for every century what Mr. Aston has done for the earliest centuries only,[1] and Mr. Murdoch for the single century from 1542 to 1651. Here more than anywhere else is it necessary to listen at backdoors, to peep through conventional fences, and to sift native evidence by the light of foreign testimony. We should know next to nothing of what may be termed the Catholic episode of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had we access to none but the official Japanese sources. How can we trust those same sources when they deal with times yet more remote? There seems little doubt that the ruling powers at an}given time manipulated both the more ancient records and the records of their own age, in order to suit their own private ends. Some times, indeed, the process may have been almost unconscious. The modern Japanese themselves are beginning to awake to these considerations, so far as the centuries immediately preceding their own are concerned. Dr. Shigeno An-eki, for instance, the greatest living authority on Japanese history, has undertaken to prove how certain historical episodes were "cooked" under the Tokugawa dynasty of Shōguns. But the process of "cooking"
- ↑ See his essay entitled Early Japanese History, printed in Vol. XVI. Part I. of the "Asiatic Transactions," and his elaborately annotated translation of the "Nihongi," published by the Japan Society in 1896. The former approaches the subject chiefly from the Chinese, the latter from the Japanese, side. Murdoch's work is entitled A History of Japan from A.D. 1542 down to the Present Time, but only Vol. I., bringing the story down to 1651, has yet appeared. Compare our notice of this excellent work on p. 67.
