Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/287

 year for new fragments, and the old were employed to light the fire under a bath for the virgin priestesses that danced at the festival of purification.  —A hare, desiring to cross from a mid-ocean island to the mainland, taunted the sea-sharks by alleging that its tribe numbered more than theirs. By way of practical test, it invited them to range themselves in line between shore and shore. That done, the hare, jumping from back to back and professing to count as it leaped, reached its desired destination. But ultimately conceit prompted it to jeer before its feet were fairly planted on dry land, and by the last shark in the line its skin was torn off. As it lay writhing and weeping, a band of deities approached. The elder brothers of O-kuni-nushi (the terrestrial ruler of Japan), they were journeying to pay court to Princess Yakimi of Inaba, whom they all loved. Observing the hare's misery, they bade it bathe in the brine of the sea and lie thereafter exposed to sun and wind, by which unkindly prescription the animnal'sanimal's [sic] sufferings were doubled. Presently O-kuni-nushi, who had been degraded by his brothers to the position of baggage-carrier, came along bearing his burden. He told the unhappy hare to wash in the fresh water of the river and roll its body in the pollen of the sedges; and being thus restored, it promised that he, not his brothers, should win the princess, which so fell out.  —This is a complete answer to the shallow critics who allege that love, in the Occidental sense of the term, is not known in Japan. Hope of finding beyond the grave the union which in life circumstances forbid, is responsible for suicides so numerous that the theory of these critics becomes mere silliness.  —Motoori Motonaga, the celebrated exponent of "Pure Shintō" in the eighteenth century endorses the above view which has here been arrived at by direct comparison of Chinese philosophy and Japanese history. He says that the ethics enumerated by the Sages of China may be reduced to two simple rules: "Take other people's territory and hold it fast when you've got it," and he distinctly attributes to the influence of Chinese learning the contumacy shown toward the Mikado in the middle ages by the Hōjō, the Ashikaga, and others. He 