Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/102

 that Japan never had any form of oath based on religious principles. When, for example, the Emperor visited Hideyoshi's castle at Fushimi in the eleventh century, the six principal officers of State made certain promises and pledged their faith in this formula: "That these engagements shall be observed we swear by Bonten Teishaku, by the Four Maharajahs, by all the other deities, great and small, of the sixty provinces of Nihon, defenders of castles, tutelary divinities, Kasuga Daimyōjin, Hachiman Daibosatsu, Temma Daijisai Tenjin, and other correlated deities, whose punishments are solemnly invoked on the head of any violaters of this oath." This written declaration was stamped with the blood of those pledging themselves, or was burned and the ashes drunk with water, a beverage supposed to prove fatally poisonous to any one violating the oath. It will be seen that the formula includes Buddhist and Shintō superstitions. But in modern Japan, there being no recognised State religion, to prescribe for witnesses in law courts a form of oath based on some special creed would be plainly contradictory. The result, it cannot be denied, is that perjury in the witness box is not regarded with the superstitious horror attaching to it among Occidental peoples in general, and the testimony given in courts of law seems to be correspondingly untrustworthy.

A question of the greatest interest is the prac-