Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/47

 plain practical theory would exist among the Japanese as to their own origin; that tradition would have supplied for them a proud creed identifying their forefathers with some of the renowned peoples of the earth, and that if the progenitors of the nimble-witted, active-bodied, refined, and high-spirited people now bidding so earnestly for a place in the comity of great nations, had migrated originally from a land peopled by men possessing qualities such as they themselves have for centuries displayed, many annals descriptive of their primæval home would have been handed down through the ages. There are no such theories, no such annals, no such traditions.

When the Japanese first undertook to explain their own origin in the three books spoken of above, so unfettered were they by genuine reminiscences that they immediately had recourse to the supernatural and derived themselves from heaven. Reduced to its fundamental outlines, the legend they set down was that, in the earliest times, a group of the divine dwellers in the plains of high heaven descended to a place with a now unidentifiable name, and thence gradually pushing eastward, established themselves in the "land of sunrise," giving to it a race of monarchs, direct scions of the goddess of light (Amaterasu). Many things are related about these heaven-sent folk who peopled Japan hundreds of years before the Christian era. They are things that must be