Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/240

228 importation of the orange from the "Eternal Land" (Luchu?), brings us to the cycle of traditions of which Yamato-take, a son of the Emperor Keikō, is the hero. This prince, after assassinating one of his brothers, accomplishes the task of subduing both western and eastern Japan; and notwithstanding certain details unacceptable to European taste, his story, taken as a whole, is one of the most pleasing in Japanese legend. He performs marvels of valour, disguises himself as a woman in order to slay the brigands, is the possessor of a magic sword and fire-striker, has a devoted wife who stills the fury of the sea by sitting down upon its surface, has encounters with a deer and with a boar who are really gods in disguise, and finally dies on his way westward before he can reach his home in Yamato. His death is followed by a highly mythological account of the laying to rest of the white bird into which he ended by being transformed.

The succeeding reign is a blank, and the next transports us without a word of warning to quite another scene. The sovereign's home is now in Kyūshū—the south-westernmost island of the Japanese archipelago;—and four of the gods, through the medium of the sovereign's consort, who is known to posterity as the Empress Jingo, reveal the existence of the land of Korea, of which, however, this is not the first mention in the histories. The Mikado disbelieves the divine message, and is punished with death for his incredulity. But the empress, after a special consultation between her prime minister and the gods, and the performance of various religious ceremonies, marshals her fleet, and, with the assistance of the fishes both great and small and of a miraculous wave, reaches Shiragi (one of the ancient divisions of Korea), and subdues it. She then returns to Japan, the legend ending with a curiously naive tale of how she sat a-fishing one day on a shoal in the River Ogawa in Kyūshū, with threads picked out of her skirt for lines. The date of the conquest of Korea, according to the orthodox chronology, is A.D. 200.

The next episode is the warrior-empress's voyage up to Yamato,—another joint in the story, by means of which the Yamato cycle