Page:The Thunder-Weapon in Ancient Japan.djvu/7

Rh The great borrowing from China on the part of the Japanese at this time and the fact that Ennin was on the coast of Shantung after spending the better part of a year in China cast some doubt on the validity of these passages as examples of native Japanese folklore, and we must look to Japanese mythology for evidence that the association of the thunderbolt with stones or stone weapons existed before the period of greatest borrowing from China.

Nobuhiro in his important study entitled Recherches sur quelques thèmes de la mythologie japonaise (Paris 1928) devotes much attention to thunder deities and has a whole section on “les emblèmes du dieu de tonnerre” (p. 63-70), in which he clearly shows that these are arrows, hoes, lances, and swords. Although three of these are weapons and the fourth an agricultural tool much like a weapon, something more than this is needed to prove that they were in origin stone weapons thought to be thunderbolts and were not simply emblems, as Matsumoto suggests, chosen because of their flashing or cleaving qualities.

The evidence in favor of the stone thunderbolt theory is to be found largely in the names and mythological traditions of certain Japanese shrines, particularly the two associated with the name Isonokami. Despite the second character of this name, it is; probable that the kami is not “above” or “upper” but “god” and that the name originally meant “stone-god.” The term “stone-god” cannot be immediately identified with a thunderbolt in Japan, for, since time immemorial, stones have been made into