Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/56

 Jimmu's history in the eighth century; how much was a mere reflection of national customs which had then become sacred, and on which the political scholars of the time desired to set the seal of antique sanction, who shall determine? If Sanu and his warriors brought with them the worship of the sun, that would offer an interesting inference as to their origin. If the aid that they received from his light was suggested solely by the grateful homage that rice-cultivators, thirteen centuries later, had learned to pay to his beneficence, then the oldest written records of Japan must be read as mere transcripts of the faiths and fashions of the era when they were compiled, not as genuine traditions transmitted from previous ages. But such distinctions have never been recognised by the Japanese. With them these annals of their race's beginnings have always commanded as inviolable credence as the Testaments of Christianity used to command in the Occident. From the lithographs that embellish modern bank-notes the sun looks down on the semi-divine conqueror, Jimmu, and receives his homage. From the grand cordon of an order instituted by his hundred and twenty-seventh successor, depends the kite that guided him through mountain fastnesses, and on a thousand works of art the genius of the tortoise shows him the path across the ocean. If these picturesque elements were added by subsequent writers to the outlines of an ordinary armed invasion by foreign