Page:Nihongi by Aston.djvu/23

xvi history, while from the beginning of the 6th century until A.D. 697, when it is brought to a close, the Nihongi gives us what is to every appearance a trustworthy record of events. We must still, however, be on our guard against the Chinese diction and sentiments which are put into the mouths of the Mikados and their Ministers, and there are some strange stories of a kind not likely to impose on our credulity. This part of the Nihongi is of very great value, comprising as it does a period of the highest importance in the life of the Japanese nation. It was at this time that the Japanese adopted and assimilated the civilization of China, material, moral, and political, together with the Buddhist religion, thereby profoundly modifying the entire course of their future history.

The defects of the Nihongi are due partly to the uncritical spirit of the age when it was written, but mainly to the circumstance that the authors were accomplished scholars deeply imbued with ideas derived from the classical and historical literature of ancient China. With exceptions to be noticed presently, the work is composed in the Chinese language. This is in itself an obstacle to the faithful representation of things Japanese. But unfortunately it is not all. Chinese ideas and traits of Chinese manners and customs are frequently brought in where they have no business. In the very first paragraph we have an essay spiced with Chinese philosophical terms which reads strangely incongruous as a preface to the native cosmogonic myth. Battle axes are mentioned at a time when no such weapons were in use by the Japanese, stone mallets are converted into swords, and we hear continually of the Temples of the Earth and of Grain, a purely Chinese metaphor for the State. No inconsiderable part of the work consists of speeches and Imperial decrees interlarded with quotations from Chinese literature, and evidently composed for the occasion in imitation of Chinese models. In one case the authors have gone so far as to attribute to the Emperor Yūriaku a dying speech of several pages, which is taken with hardly any alteration from a history of the Chinese Sui dynasty, where it is assigned to an Emperor who died 125 years later.

But what is far more misleading than these naive inventions is the confirmed habit common to the writers both of the Kojiki and of the Nihongi, though the latter are the greater offenders, of