Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/49

 Huxley has yet arisen to attack them publicly. They are rather allegories from which emerges the serviceable political doctrine that the emperors of Japan, being of divine origin, rule by divine right. It is the Japanese historian's method, or the Japanese mythologist's manner, of describing an attribute claimed until very recently by all Occidental sovereigns, and still asserted on behalf of some. As for the foreign student of Japan's ancient history, these weird myths and romantic allegories have induced him to dismiss it as a purely imaginary product of later-day imagination. The transcendental elements woven into parts of the narrative discredit the whole in his eyes. And his scepticism is fortified by a generally accepted hypothesis that the events of the thirteen opening centuries of the story were preserved solely by oral tradition. The three volumes which profess to tell about the primæval creators of Japan, about Jimmu, the first mortal ruler, and about his human successors during a dozen centuries, are supposed to be a collection of previously unwritten recollections, and it seems only logical to doubt whether the outlines of figures standing at the end of such a long avenue of hearsay can be anything but imaginary. Possibly that disbelief is too wholesale. Possibly it is too much to conclude that the Japanese had no kind of writing prior to their acquisition of Chinese ideographs in the fifth century of the Christian era. But there is little apparent hope