Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/358

298 swindle, and deceit, and occasionally of clan fight and neighborhood jealousy, and yet this Buddhistic jungle-growth of fancy and imagination must not be confounded with that national treasury of folk-lore which belongs to the nation at large.

In entering upon the enchanted fairyland of Japan, we do not meet with the same kind of creatures that inhabit the worlds of Teutonic or European imagination. The gentle fairies which we meet with on English soil are not here; nor, on the other hand, do the imps and demons in the Japanese world seem to have as much power as those under the shadow of the Scandinavian precipices or in the twilight of German forests. There are mighty dragons, there are imps and demons, to be sure; but the oni that lurks everywhere in Japan is rather a sly, mischievous fellow, than one armed with supernatural powers.

Of course, the Japanese, Buddhist and Indian elements, added to those which are indigenous, give us a range of forces which is as wonderful as anything in the "West. There are transformations and metempsychoses of almost every imaginable sort. The elemental forces of nature are often at the command of the creatures or personages; time and space are annihilated; the potent wands and drugs and invisible coats and earth-compassing wings are all here, and yet it cannot be said that beauty is the predominating idea. Mystery is everywhere present, and it may be said in general, that most of the ideas illustrated in mid-Asiatic and Occidental lore are set forth, though always in a way to suit the Japanese mind.

When we come to inquire in the light of, and with the analytical spectroscope, so to speak, of history, we are able to see that the folk-lore is often a distorted shadow of real history, while also it is true that the events of prehistoric times are brought before us by means of the folk-tales handed down to us from ages older than writing in Japan. For example, the question of the existence of cannibalism in early Japan, which has been settled by science through Professor Edward S. Morse's brilliant discovery of the kitchen middens or shell mounds at Omori, is conclusively proved also from the folk-tale of the Shu-ten-doji. In the twenty-second story in "Japanese Fairy World," we have the picture of a great