Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/20

2 shrines of Japan. Here then, if anywhere, we may watch literature as it is first born.

This primitive character of the early Japanese books must be insisted on, lest the reader feel himself disappointed when he compares the sacred books of Japan with those we have previously examined. Not even the "Pyramid Texts" of Egypt, not even the first Babylonian legends of the Flood, show man in such a primitive state of physical life and spiritual culture as is revealed in the ancient rituals of "Shinto," the original religion of Japan.

Even the legends of the Japanese only date back the earthly origin of the race to some six hundred years before Christ. At about that date, the old books say, the Sun-goddess Amaterasu sent down her grandchildren from Heaven to invade and occupy Japan. Their leader was the god, or chief grandchild of the goddess, now known as the first Mikado of Japan. Both as god and man he is highly honored under the Chinese name, given him many centuries after his death, of Jimmu or Jimmu Tenno.

We do not really know if the mighty Jimmu ever existed, and the date of his conquest of Japan has no authority that European chronology would accept for a moment. All that we positively know is that a thousand years later the Japanese race were in control of the land, and then, in the fifth or sixth century, there came to them Chinese scholars bringing the Chinese civilization and the Chinese writing. The Japanese welcomed these things; they absorbed their value as completely as they have absorbed modern civilization to-day. Almost immediately they began writing books of their own; and the earliest of these books to be preserved were the now celebrated "Kojiki" and "Nihongi," which thus present to us the statements of the first civilized Japanese as to the traditions of their past.

The "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" are the books which tell us of the invading god-emperor Jimmu. They even preserve the songs, the crudest of barbaric chants, which he and his