Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/198

 posed that there were no "classical principles." The student of European military history searches in vain for the "rules and maxims of war," so often invoked by glib critics, but the student of Japanese history is more successful. Here, as in virtually every field of things Japanese, retrospect discovers the ubiquitous Chinaman. Sung and 'Ng (called in Japan "Son" and "Go"), Chinese generals of the third century after Christ, were the Jomini and the Hamley of their eras, and their treatises continued to be the classics of Far-Eastern captains through all generations. Yoshitsune, in the twelfth century, deceived a loving girl in order to obtain a copy of Sung's work which her father had in his possession, and Yamaga, in the seventeenth century, when he set himself to compose a book on tactics, derived his materials almost entirely from the monographs of the two Chinese generals. There is proof that these treatises came into the hands of the Japanese in the eighth century, when the celebrated Kibi no Mabi went to study civilisation in the Middle Kingdom, just as his successors of the nineteenth century went to study Occidental civilisation in Europe and America. Thenceforth "Son" and "Go" became household words among Japanese soldiers. Their volumes were to the samurai what the Mâhâyana Sutra was to the Buddhist. They were believed to have collected whatever of good had preceded them, and to have forecast whatever of good the