Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 1/Chapter 3
Chapter III
JAPAN ON THE VERGE OF HISTORY
In one respect Japan's story differs from that of nearly all other countries: the current of her national life was never diverted from its normal channel by successful foreign invasions or by any overwhelming inflow of alien races. It is true that her codes of ethics and social conventions were largely modified, from time to time, by foreign influences. But it is also true that she impressed the stamp of her own originality on everything coming to her from abroad, and that, leading what may be called an uninterruptedly domestic existence during twenty-five centuries, she developed characteristics so salient that in studying her annals there is forced upon our attention a continuity of easily synthesised traits.
No traces of autocratic sovereignty are to be found in the history of the early colonists. The general who led the invaders received recognition as their chief, but the offices of the newly organised States were divided among his principal followers, not as arbitrarily conferred gifts, but as spoils falling to them by right. The occupants of these posts were not removable at the caprice of the Sovereign, and they enjoyed the privilege of transmitting their offices to their sons; a system of hereditary officialdom which remained in operation through long ages.
Thus the national polity in the earliest times assumed a patriarchal form. Public affairs were administered by a group of official families, and at the head of all stood a lineal descendant of the divine ancestors, the degree of his sway varying from time to time according to the docility of his coadjutors.
All these great families were supposed to be of divine lineage; they traced their origin to a Mikoto (an augustness) just as the Sovereign himself did. Some, presumably the most deserving, obtained offices near the throne when the spoils of conquest were distributed; others were appointed to provincial posts, and as these latter generally found their administrative regions occupied by barbarians whom they had to subdue at first and to hold in check afterwards, they gradually organised principalities virtually independent of the central government. That, however, is a historical development subsequent to the era now under consideration.
It does not appear that there was anything like a fully organised administration until some thirteen hundred years after the date traditionally assigned for the conquest of Yamato by the Emperor Jimmu. The functions of government were divided, not in accordance with any principle of convenient discharge, but simply with reference to the claims of the persons undertaking them. To two of the imperial princes were entrusted sacerdotal and executive duties; to two others, military duties, which consisted chiefly of guarding the new palace and capital; and to two others, the duties of worship and administration in the provinces. The performance of religious rites formed an essential part of state-craft in those times. In fact, the term (matsuri) for "worship" was identical with that for "government," and the identity continued until a very recent era, so that, in the language of every-day life, no distinction was made between the sacred business of prayer and the secular business of ruling. That fact reveals very clearly the foundation upon which the national polity stood. The Sovereign was the nation's high-priest. Like the Jewish patriarchs, he interceded for his people direct with Heaven, and ruled them by the authority he derived from the deities. His administrative assistants followed the same principle. They invoked the aid of Heaven for the discharge of all their duties, and its blessing upon all the affairs of the people under their control.
It cannot be affirmed that the high officers of State had any officially recognised designations in remote times, and the absence of such designations goes far to confirm the theory that the functions of the patriarchs were of a general character, and that no attempt to divide them systematically was made. They did, however, receive appellations from the people. Just as household servants speak of "the master" and a ship's crew of "the captain," so the first governor of a province came to be called "the imperial person of the country" (Kuni no mi-yatsuko); the first agricultural superintendent was known as "the lord of the fields" (agatanushi); the first high chamberlain as "the great man of the palace" (miya no obito). In like manner, such titles as "great body" (omi), "master of the multitude" (muraji), "honorable intermediary" (nakatomi) and so on, were employed as terms of respect, and ultimately passed into use as official titles.
The share assigned to a patriarch in the central or provincial administration became his inalienable property. He transmitted it to his son and to his son's son. Thus not only were offices hereditary but their occupants multiplied, so that all the posts and perquisites of a department fell finally into the possession of a clan. The head of the clan then came to be distinguished by the prefix O (great or senior); as O-mi (the senior honourable person), O-muraji (the great master of the multitude), and so on. There were no family names in the Occidental sense of the term. Men were distinguished instead by the titles of the administrative posts belonging to their houses. The name of the post preceded that of the per-son, as was natural, so that a man was spoken of as "Hierarch Kasumi" (Nakatomi no Kasumi), or "Guardsman Moriya" (Monobe Moriya), or "Purveyor Kujira" (Kashiwade no Kujira).[1]
Eminent as was the position assigned to religion in the polity of the ancient Japanese, no trace of a doctrinal creed, as creeds are understood in the Occident, is found in their lives. Their burial customs show that they believed in an existence beyond the grave, but they seem to have troubled themselves little about the nature of that existence, or about transcendental speculations of any kind. The chief denizen of celestial space, according to their creed, was a tutelary deity, the Goddess of Light, and since her worship, or the worship of some lesser spirit, had to preface every administrative act of importance, religious rites were placed, as has been already stated, at the head of all official functions. Yet special buildings for ceremonial purposes did not originally exist. The Emperor, as the nation's high-priest, worshipped in the palace, where were kept the insignia of sovereignty,—the sword, the mirror, and the jewel of divine origin. Not until the first century before Christ were shrines erected apart from the palace, and the immediate cause of the innovation was a pestilence which the soothsayers interpreted as a heavenly protest against the method of worship then pursued. The creed was not exclusive. Its pantheon, which in the beginning included only the deities of high heaven, was soon enlarged by the admission of other powers controlling the forces of nature, as well as by the spirits of deceased heroes, and ultimately received even the supernatural beings supposed to preside over the destinies of the aboriginal tribes. In other words, the civilised colonists consented to worship the ancestors of the semi-savage aborigines against whom they perpetually waged war. This might be interpreted to mean that upon the religion which the Japanese brought with them to Japan the religion of the autochthons whom they found there was engrafted. But nothing is known of the autochthonous creed. The true explanation seems to be that the Japanese, analysing their difficulty in subduing the aborigines, attributed it to the influence of the latter's deceased rulers, and concluded that the wisest plan would be to propitiate these hostile powers. Hence it is plain that they believed in malevolent spirits as well as in benevolent; or perhaps the more accurate statement would be that, according to their creed, immortal beings continued to be animated by the sentiments which had swayed them as mortals, and possessed power to give practical effect to their sentiments. They did not associate any idea of rewards and punishments with a future state. Their theory pointed to duality of the soul. They regarded it as consisting of two distinct elements: one the source of courage, strength, and aggressiveness; the other the mainspring of benevolence, refinement, and magnanimity. In the good man these elements were blended harmoniously during life, and they survived in like proportions after the death of his body. But whatever had been the quality of the mortal tenement, the immortal tenant passed from the edge of the grave into the "sombre realm" (Yomotsu-kuni), which was separated from this world by a "broad slope" (Yomotsu-hirazaka), never recrossed by a spirit that had eaten anything cooked in the land of darkness. The offerings made at the tombs of the deceased had the purpose of providing against that disaster of eternal banishment, and, in another sense, were a mark of filial piety, the natural outcome of faith in the terrestrial interference of the departed.
In addition to the celestial and the terrestrial deities, the animal and vegetable kingdom supplied objects of worship. Monster snakes, supposed to destroy the crops, were propitiated by sacrifice, and giant trees, venerated as the abode of supernal beings, were fenced off with ropes carrying sacred pendants.[2] The folk-lore of the nation includes several stories of losses and sufferings caused by cutting down sacred trees, and the rituals show that herbs, rocks, and trees were supposed to have the power of speech prior to the descent of the deities, when dumbness fell upon all these objects.
Out of such beliefs a rudimentary form of the doctrine of metempsychosis easily emerges. Yamatake, the great hero of prehistoric Japan, was transformed into a white bird, and Tamichi, the generalissimo vanquished by the Ezo, became a monster snake which devoured the desecrators of his tomb. Some ethnologists allege that the custom of human sacrifices existed in early days; but the theory is founded on a solitary legend of the Perseus-and-Andromeda type, which does not seem to justify any such inference. Everything, indeed, goes to show that while a sacrificial element undoubtedly entered largely into the rites of worship, it never involved the taking of human life, the objects offered to the gods being confined to the fruits of the earth, birds, animals, and the products of labour. Auguries were obtained by burning the hoof of an ox or the shoulder-blade of a stag, and deciphering the lines in the calcined bone. But there is reason to believe that no such method of sooth-saying had a place in the primæval superstitions of the Japanese; it probably came to them from Korea. A device more consistent with their own beliefs was to invoke a sign from heaven by music, when a deity descended and inspired the musician.
The most famous legend in Japan is that which is supposed to describe the origin of religious services. The Goddess of the Sun (Amaterasu Okami), having retired into a cave so that the universe was plunged in darkness, the eight hundred myriads of lesser deities assembled to propitiate her. Thereafter the act of worship took this shape: five hundred saplings of sakaki (Clyera japonica) with their roots were arranged round a mirror (made of copper) which typified the goddess of light. In the upper branches of the trees were hung balls representing the sacred jewel, and in the lower branches, blue and white pendants. A prayer was then recited by the chief hierarch, in lieu of the Emperor, and the service concluded with a dance and the lighting of fires, in imitation of the devices employed by the deities to lure the sun goddess from her retirement. The prayers offered on these occasions were probably rendered into exact formulæ at an early date, but they were not reduced to writing until the tenth century. Twenty-seven of them have been preserved, and seventy-five are said to have been in use. Their language is often majestic, poetical, and sonorous,[3] but not one of them contains a word suggesting that the primæval Japanese troubled themselves much about a future state after death or about posthumous punishment for sins committed during life. Their idea of crime was that it polluted the person committing it, but that its commission was inevitable. Hence purification services were performed twice in every year, the gods of the swift streams, the tumbling cataracts, and the raging tides being invoked to wash away and dissipate all offences. First among crimes was the removal of a neighbour's landmark—described as breaking down divisions between rice-fields; then followed the damming of streams and the destruction of water-pipes, whence it may be inferred that the problem of irrigation for purposes of rice-culture proved as perplexing to these ancient folk as it does to their modern descendants. On the same plane of heinousness stood the cruelty of flaying the living or the dead, and among lesser crimes were enumerated cutting and wounding, incest and the practice of witchcraft. Every religious service was accompanied by offerings betokening gratitude for past favours or beseeching future blessings, and the things prayed for were good harvests, an abundance of food, security of dwelling-houses against natural calamities, and against the intrusion of reptiles or polluting birds, tranquil and efficient government, and protection from tempests, conflagrations, pestilence, inundations, and vengeful deities—in a word, prosperity and peace. Incidentally, these rituals further show that the Japanese believed in a solid firmament walling the universe, though certain passages suggest that they thought this distant envelope light enough to be supported by the winds, which not only filled space, but were also capable of serving as a ladder for the feet of the deities when they descended to the earth. The fermented liquor called sake, that is to say, rice-beer, must have been highly appreciated in early times, for no ritualistic enumeration of offerings made to the gods is without a reference to "piled up sake-pots" or "bellying beer-jars ranged in rows."
It has been shown above that the story of the first mortal emperor's conquest of Yamato indicates the use of clumsy boats and a marked deficiency of navigating enterprise. But the rituals of Shintô—as Japan's ancient creed is called—do not confirm that idea. They speak of ships that "continually crowd on the wide sea-plane," and of "a huge vessel moored in a great harbour, which, casting off her stern moorings, casting off her bow moorings, drives forth into the vast ocean."
It is curious that among the evils from which deliverance was besought, earthquakes are nowhere mentioned, and that robbery is not included in the list of polluting crimes. Some have inferred that this commonest of all sins in all nations was unknown among the ancient Japanese. But that is a doubtful conclusion. It might be inferred with equal justice that incest was regarded with abhorrence, since the rituals class it among sins contaminating the perpetrator. Yet it is certain that men had relations with the mothers of their wives and even with their own mothers and daughters,—though facts will presently be cited which mitigate the horror of such acts,—that unnatural crimes of a most disgusting character were committed not infrequently, and that no veto is known to have been pronounced against them.
There was, in fact, no system of philosophy nor any code of ethics. India had Sidathra, China had Confucius, but neither in ancient, mediæval, nor modern time has Japan produced a great teacher of morality. She has had plenty of brilliant interpreters, plenty of profound modifiers, but no conspicuous originator.
The right of primogeniture was not recognised in the age here spoken of. A father chose his heir at will. Generally the choice fell on his youngest son, for reasons which become plain when the marital customs of the time are considered. The conception of marriage was practically limited to cohabitation. A husband incurred no obligations or responsibilities towards his wife. It is related that the first emperor (Jimmu), chancing to meet a band of seven maidens, made immediate proposals that one of them should become his mate. The girl agreed, and the sovereign passed the night at her house, a visit which he thenceforth became entitled to repeat whenever he pleased. That was wedlock. To be married involved no change in a woman's life except the liability to receive visits from her husband. As to the man, there was absolutely no duty of fidelity on his side. He might form as many different unions as fancy prompted. The children were brought up by the mother, and it was possible for one household to remain in entire ignorance of another's existence. Mutual knowledge generally signified feuds and fighting, for the father's favour was naturally bestowed on the children of his latest affection, and the elder branches of his offspring frequently rebelled against such partiality. Another result of the system was marriages between half-brothers and half-sisters, or between uncles and nieces. These unions were not condemned by the moral code of the time. Indeed, the existence of any relationship was sometimes unknown to the parties themselves, a man's wives and families in different places not necessarily having any mutual acquaintance. The only restriction recognised was that children of the same mother must not intermarry. It is easy to see that under these circumstances the ties of consanguinity did not bind men very closely. To be sons of the same father carried no obligation of friendship or sympathy. Often in the annals of the innumerable civil wars that disturbed Japan the reader is shocked by deeds of vengeance, treachery, or ambitious truculence that violate all the dictates of natural affection. The origin of these displays of callousness or cruelty must be sought in the ancient system which condemned a wife to perform the functions of a mere animal, and deprived her children of any claim on their father's love and protection.
"Houses" have been spoken of above, but a reservation is necessary: the upper classes lived in houses; the lower inhabited caves or holes in the earth, choosing hillsides for sites in order to escape inundations, which were then of calamitous dimensions and frequency. These cave-dwellings seem to have measured from four to six square yards in area, and to have been closed by a door four or five feet high. Common folk used them all the year round, and even princes and nobles found them comfortable as winter residences, transferring themselves in summer to huts built near the entrance of the caves.[4] In constructing houses of the best type, the palaces of the era, flat stones[5] were sunk in the ground to form a foundation, and on these was raised a stout upright, the "heavenly pillar" (ame no mihashira). At every corner also a pillar of lesser dimensions was erected, and between the tops of these corner pillars, as well as from each of them to the central post, beams were stretched, the whole bound together with wistaria withes. Reeds or rushes served for thatching, and heavy logs laid over the thatch prevented it from being blown away. The ends of the tie-beams projected high above the roof, a feature permanently preserved in Shintô architecture; a hole in the thatch gave exit to the smoke of the cooking-fire; the frames of doors and windows were tied in their places with stems of creepers, and the walls consisted of logs or bark, or of both combined. These edifices generally stood near a stream which carried off impurities; mats, rushes, or skins were spread for a bed, and furs, cloth, or silk served for coverlets. The floor was of timber, but whether of logs or of boards is not known. A religious service of consecration for propitiating the deities of timber and rice was held when the first emperor built his palace at Kashibara after he had conquered Yamato, and it became customary thenceforth to repeat the service at coronations and after harvest fêtes. Common people, when they built a residence, invited their friends to a "house-warming," but the Emperor invoked the gods against the entry of snakes that bit the inmates, or of birds that polluted the food; against groaning timbers, loosening ties, unevenness of thatch, and creaking floors.
All this indicates a comparatively low type of civilisation. And yet, as has been shown in a previous chapter, objects found in the tombs of these early Japanese show that they possessed much skill in the casting and chiselling of metals, that their arms and the trappings of their horses were highly ornamented, and that their costume had many elements of refinement.
Perhaps the most special feature of their habits was cleanliness. It distinguishes them from all other Oriental nations. Whether this propensity grew out of their religious observances or was merely reflected in them, there is no means of determining. Knowledge is limited to the facts that they held every form of pollution to be offensive to the gods; that the chief Shintô service, the "high mass" of the cult, has for its purpose the purification of the believer's body as well as of his heart: that chastity and simplicity were fundamental features of all the rites, constructions, and paraphernalia of the creed, and that the virtue of cleanliness received practical acknowledgment even among the lowest classes.
Songs and dances appear among the most ancient pastimes of the people. Love is supposed to have inspired the first ode composed in Japan, the Emperor Jimmu having been moved to song on meeting with the maiden Isuzu. The reference here is to mortal poets. A still earlier couplet is attributed to one of the immortals when she danced before the cave into which the Sun Goddess had retired. In the latter incident also ethnologists find the supposed origin of dancing, which from time immemorial has been at once a religious observance and an universally popular amusement. Virgins danced before the shrine of the Sun Goddess at the beginning of the nation, and from the highest noble to the meanest churl everyone loved the music of motion. The first costume-dance was prompted by pain, when a deity, vanquished in fight and threatened with drowning, painted his face red and lifted his feet in an agony of supplication. This hayato-mai (the warrior dance), as it is called, is still included among the classical mimes of the Imperial Court. It was performed to the music of a stringed instrument (the Wa-kin)[6] and of a flute, perhaps accompanied by a drum. Even the spirits of the dead were supposed to be moved by song and dance. When a man died, his corpse was placed in a building specially erected for the purpose. There it lay for ten days, while the relatives and friends of the deceased assembled and venerated his spirit, making music and dancing. This ceremony of farewell seems to have been originally prompted by a hope of recalling the departed, but it soon lost that character and became a mere token of respect. Ancient Japan was largely indebted to Korea for developments of musical instruments. On the death of the Emperor Ingyo (453 a. d.), the Korean Court sent eighty musicians robed in black, who marched in procession from the landing-place to the Yamato palace, playing and singing a dirge as they went.
The oldest organised form of amusement seems to have been the Ka-gaki, or poetical picnic. Parties of men and women met at appointed places, either in town or country, and composed couplets, delivering them with accompaniment of music or dancing. This kind of pastime had its practical uses: it brought lovers together and soon became a recognised preface to marriage. Among amusements confined to men, cock-fighting and hunting were most affected. Large tracts of the country being still unreclaimed, deer and wild-boar abounded. These were driven by beaters into open spaces, there to be pursued by men on horseback armed with bows and arrows. In the fourth century the pastime of hawking was introduced. It came from Korea: a king of that country sent a present of falcons to the Emperor of Japan, who caused a special office to be organised for the care of the birds.
Chinese annalists, writing in the third century, allege that the Japanese tattooed their faces and bodies, the positions and size of the designs constituting an indication of rank. Tattooing the body and cutting the hair were counted by the Chinese as violations of the rules of civilisation, and they offer an interesting explanation of the origin of these customs in Japan. They allege that the first rulers of that country were wandering princes of the Chou dynasty (1200 b. c.) who abandoned their patrimony in China, and migrated southwards, cutting their hair and tattooing themselves, to mark the completeness of their expatriation. The theory is quite untenable. One well-known Chinese work regards tattooing in Japan as a protection against the attacks of marine creatures of prey. But there are strong reasons to doubt whether tattooing was at any time prevalent among the Japanese proper. Possibly Chinese writers failed to distinguish between the inhabitants of the Riukiu archipelago and the people of Nippon, for tattooing of the face was never practised by the Japanese, whereas the habit did prevail among the people of Riukiu. Another reasonable hypothesis is that tattooing was introduced among a limited section of the nation when Japan received the Malayan element of her population. At all events, in every era it was confined to the lowest classes, namely, those who bared their bodies to perform the severe labour falling to their lot.
These Chinese annalists confirm the supposition suggested by the rituals, as noted above, that crimes of larceny and burglary were very rare in old Japan. They say, also, that Japanese women were neither sensual nor jealous, which is assuredly true in modern times and seems to have been true in every age of the nation's existence. Another fact adduced in praise of the people was that they gave the law courts very little occupation. But there is an unfavourable interpretation of that state of affairs. The severity of the law, when occasion for its enforcement did arise, was terrible. If political considerations aggravated a crime, the whole family of the criminal were executed, and sometimes every member, even to distant relations, was reduced to the condition of serfdom. The people in general may be said to have been serfs with regard to the interval separating them from the upper classes. Thus, if an inferior met a superior, the former had to step aside and bow profoundly. He was further required to squat, or kneel, with both hands on the ground, when addressing a man of rank. That custom appears to have existed from the earliest time, and cannot be said to have yet become wholly extinct.
The accounts that Chinese annalists in the third century gave of contemporaneous Japan, indicate that intercourse existed between the two countries at that remote epoch. Indeed China and Korea began at an early date to act some part in the civilisation of Japan, and the Japanese themselves have always frankly admitted that they owe many of their refinements and accomplishments to their continental neighbours. But the common belief about that matter needs modification.
One naturally expects that since a section of the original Japanese colonists arrived viâ Korea, they must have received some impress of that country's civilisation during their passage through it, and must also have preserved permanent touch with it subsequently. The former anticipation is largely borne out by a comparison of the two countries' customs, for they practised in common the rules that prisoners taken in war and members of a criminal's family should be reduced to slavery; that the corpses of persons executed for crime should be exposed; that the personal attendants of a high dignitary should be buried alive at his interment; that a bridegroom should visit his bride at her own house; that before engaging in war or undertaking any important enterprise, prayer should be addressed to heaven and augu-ries drawn from scorched bones, and that festivals in honour of the deities should be held in spring, in autumn, and at the close of the year. There is here too much similarity to be merely fortuitous. But as to the relations between the two nations, they were limited for a long time to mutual raids. In the century immediately preceding the Christian era, when the Japanese had been reduced almost to helplessness by a pestilence, the first historical reference to Korea is found, namely, that an incursion of Korean free-booters took place into the island of Kiushiu, and that thousands of the invaders settled in the deserted hamlets of the plague-stricken Japanese. Japan's attention was thus disagreeably directed towards her neighbour, and when, by and by, inter-tribal disputes disturbed the peace of Korea, the Yamato rulers were easily induced to interfere. It appears, further, that Korea constantly lent assistance to the semi-savage aborigines of Kiushiu, whose subjugation long remained a difficult problem for the Japanese. Indeed, the only questions of foreign policy with which the early Japanese colonists had to deal arose out of the fact that the autochthons whom they sought to bring under their sway, received aid in the south from Korea and in the north from the Tartars. There was not much probability that Japan would become a disciple of Korean ethics under such circumstances. Hence, though Korea and China are often bracketed together as Japan's instructors, the truth is that Korea was only a channel, whereas China was a source. Originally Korea did not stand on a much higher plane than her island neighbour in any respect, and in some her level was distinctly lower. But when she came within the range of Chinese civilisation, she began to reflect a faint light. Her record ought to have been better than it is, for she fell under the direct influence of China at a very early date. In the twelfth century before Christ, a band of Chinese wanderers found their way to the eastern region of the peninsula, and settling there, imparted to the tribe which received them forms of etiquette, principles of justice, methods of irrigation, tillage, sericulture, and weaving, and the provisions of "the Eight Fundamental Laws." Again, in the first century before Christ, a group of Chinese nobles, accompanying a fugitive prince, established themselves in the district lying nearest to Japan. And in the second century after Christ, northwestern Korea was overrun by a Chinese army, and divided into four districts each under the rule of a Chinese satrap. If, then, the atmosphere of Korea had been favourable to the growth of Chinese civilisation, she should have become a well-equipped teacher for Japan at an early date. But she never showed any strongly receptive faculty. Japan had to go direct to China, and that was an immense undertaking in days when means of communication were primitive. The character that the journey bore in the recollection of persons making it may be gathered from the writings of Chōnen, a Bonze, who, in company with five acolytes, travelled to the Court of a Sung emperor, in the year 984 a. d.: "I turn my face to the setting sun, and journey westward over a hundred thousand li (thirty-three thousand miles) of boundless billows, I watch for the monsoon and return eastward, climbing over thousands of thousands of wave-mountain peaks. Towards the end of summer, I raise my anchor at Chêh-Kiang, and, in the early spring, I reach the suburbs of my metropolis." Thus the journey occupied six months even in Chōnen's day. What time and toil must it have involved nine centuries earlier! The Japanese appear to have essayed it only thrice during the three opening centuries of the Christian era: first in the year 57 a. d., when envoys, visiting the Chinese court, received from the ruler of the Middle Kingdom a gold seal and a ribbon; secondly in 107 a. d., when a hundred and sixty slaves were presented for the Chinese monarch's acceptance; and thirdly in 238 a. d. These facts are quoted from Chinese history. In Japanese annals the third embassy takes the form of an armed invasion of Korea, and constitutes one of the most celebrated as well as one of the most disputed incidents of Japan's story. A female chieftain, the Empress Jingo, is represented as having organised the expedition in obedience to divine orders. Her flotilla, led by a fierce deity and protected by a benignant god, travelled over sea on the crest of a tidal wave, and sweeping into the realm of her enemy, terrified him into unresisting submission. At the portals of the Korean palace she set up her staff and spear to stand there for five centuries, and she compelled the monarch of the defeated nation to swear that until the sun rose in the west and set in the east, until streams flowed towards their source, until pebbles from the river bed ascended to the sky and became stars, his allegiance should remain inviolate. That is the romantic and picturesque form into which the writers of Japanese history (the Nihongi) wove the legend four centuries later. But modern critics have discovered discrepancies which induce them to cut down the tale to vanishing proportions, and to dismiss Jingo as a myth. Their iconoclasm is probably excessive. For Chinese annalists say that, at the very time when Jingo's figure is so picturesquely painted on the pages of Japanese records, a female sovereign of Japan sent to the Court of China an embassy which had to beg permission from the ruler of northwestern Korea to pass through his territory en route westward. Thus, although the celebrated empress' foreign policy be stripped of its brilliant conquests and reduced to the dimensions of mere envoy-sending, her personality at least is recalled from the mythical regions to which some sinologues would relegate it. The Chinese relate, it may be mentioned incidentally, that she was old and unmarried at the time of the coming of her envoys; that she possessed skill in magic arts, by which she deluded her people; that she had a thousand female attendants, but suffered no man to see her face except one official, who served her meals and acted as a means of communication with her subjects; and that she dwelt in a palace with lofty pavilions surrounded by a stockade and guarded by soldiers.
Only three instances of direct official communication with China during the first thousand years of Japan's supposed national existence imply very scanty access to the great fount of Far-Eastern civilisation. Yet, from another point of view, these embassies are significant. For when Japan sent her first envoys to Loyang, the then capital of the Middle Kingdom, she had never been invaded by her neighbour's forces, nor ever even threatened with invasion, and in the complete absence of tangible displays of military prowess—the only universally recognised passport to international respect in those epochs—the homage that China received from the island empire bears eloquent testimony to the position the former held in the Orient. In truth she towered gigantic above the heads of Far-Eastern States in everything that makes for national greatness. The close of the third century saw the rise of the Han dynasty and the completion of the magnificent engineering works at the Shensi metropolis; works which still excite the world's wonder and must have appeared almost miraculous in the eyes of people such as the Japanese were in that era. It is therefore surprising, that the interval between the civilisation of the two empires remained so long unbridged, and the explanation suggested by the above retrospect is that Korea proved a bad medium of transmission, and that China was almost inaccessible by direct means. Some special factor was needed to bring the real China within easier reach of Japanese observation, and that factor was furnished in the fourth century by a wave of Chinese colonists who came to Japan in search of profitable enterprises. Nothing is known about the prime cause of their migration, but the Chinese seem to have been as ardent fortune-questers fifteen centuries ago as they are to-day, and seeing that they had already exploited the northwest, the east and the southwest of Korea, the fact that they pushed on to Japan excites no surprise. A large ingress of Koreans occurred at nearly the same time. They were not voluntary emigrants, but fugitives from the effects of defeat in civil war. Their advent, however, compared with that of the Chinese, had no special importance except as illustrating Japan's freedom from international exclusiveness at that epoch.
The Chinese brought with them a compilation destined to serve as a primer to Japanese students in all ages, "The Thousand Characters," that is to say, a book containing a selection of the ideographs in commonest daily use; and they brought also the "Analects of Confucius," which soon became, and has ever since remained, the gospel of Japanese ethics. There is no reasonable doubt that the existence of an ideographic script was known to the Japanese long before the fourth century. That conclusion is easily reached. For whatever may be said about the legend that the diagrams of Fuh (3200 B. C.) or the tortoise-shell mottling of Tsang (2700 b. c.) was the embryo of the ideograph, unquestionably the Chinese developed that form of writing as far back as the eighteenth century before Christ; and since they virtually began to overrun Korea six hundred years subsequently, and intercourse existed between Korea and Japan from a date certainly not later than a thousand years after the latter event, it is plain that both Korea and Japan must have known about the ideograph long before "The Thousand Characters" and the "Analects of Confucius" reached the Court at Yamato. But to know about the ideograph and to use it are two very different things. An alphabet, or even a syllabary, being a purely phonetic vehicle, lends itself to the transcription of any language. But ideographs, having their own inflexible sounds and their own fixed significances, cannot readily serve to transcribe the words of a foreign language which have different sounds and different significances. Suppose that it were required to write English by means of Greek monosyllables. Such a word as "garrison," for instance, might be composed phonetically by putting together γάρ ἴς and ὅν, but if these monosyllables necessarily conveyed the meaning of "for," "strength," and "his" respectively, it would be perplexing to have to attach to their combination the meaning of "a body of troops for the defence of a fortress." That is a comparatively easy example of the task that confronted the Japanese when they attempted to adapt the ideographs of China to the uses of their own language. In fact, they did not think of making the attempt until the ideograph had been known to them as a kind of distant acquaintance for many generations, and even when the "Analects" reached them, their ambition was limited at first to deciphering the strange script. History has not thought it worth while to record how or by whose genius the ideographs were first employed as a kind of syllabary for the purpose of writing Japanese. That is what had virtually happened, however, before the fifth century. And very soon something else happened also, namely, a radical modification of the Japanese language. For the more familiar the knowledge that students obtained of the ideograph, the less could they reconcile themselves to use it in a purely phonetic manner. It conveyed to their eyes a significance quite unconnected with the meaning of the Japanese word its sound conveyed to their ears. Therefore by degrees sense took precedence of sound, and Japanese words were transcribed by means of ideographs which corresponded with their meaning, but were pronounced in a new manner, divested of all the harshness and confusing tones of the Chinese tongue. This is a wearisome subject, but some knowledge of it is essential to any one desirous of understanding the genius of the Japanese language and appreciating its unique excellence as a vehicle for translating new ideas. Suppose that a Japanese wants to write the compound word "Western-jewel." In his own original language the sounds would be nishi-no-tama. But he takes two ideographs which in China are pronounced see-yuh, and having written them down in their proper sense, he reads them either sai-gyoku or nishi-no-tama, calling the former the on, or Chinese pronunciation—though it is really a Japanese modification of the Chinese sounds—and the latter the kun, or pure Japanese sound. Hence one of the results of using the ideographs was that the Japanese language acquired an alternative pronunciation: it became a dual language as to sound without changing its construction. It acquired also an extraordinary capacity of expansion, becoming the most flexible vehicle for translating ideas that the world has ever possessed. For the Chinese language, which was thus grafted on the Japanese, is not so much a collection of words as a vast thesaurus of materials for constructing words. It is, in fact, a repertoire of forty thousand monosyllables each of which has its exact significance. These syllables may be used singly, or combined two, three, four, or five at a time, so as to convey every conceivable idea, however complex, delicate, or abstruse. The genius of man has never invented any machinery so perfect for converting thoughts into sounds. Possessors of an alphabet may denounce the ideograph as a clumsy, semi-civilised form of writing, and may accuse it of developing the mechanics of memory at the expense of the intellectual faculty. But the Chinese ideographist can oppose to such criticism the answer that as a vehicle for rendering the products of the mind the ideograph is without rival, and that, while the Anglo-Saxon has to devise a vocabulary for his scientific and philosophical developments by the halting aid of dead languages, exact equivalents for every new conception can be coined readily by the unassisted ideographic mint. The chronological sequence of this retrospect may be anticipated so far as to say that it was owing to the possession of such mechanism that the Japanese scholar found no serious difficulty in fitting an accurate terminology to the multitude of novel ideas presented to him by Western civilisation in the nineteenth century, just as it would scarcely have been possible for him to assimilate the ethics of Confucianism and the civilisation of China fifteen centuries earlier, had he not simultaneously made this great linguistic acquisition.[7]
But, as stated above, the Japanese had long been admiring and marvelling at the ideographic script, and had long been studying it solely for the sake of the literature to which it gave access, before they succeeded in using it to transcribe their own language. That they seem to have done during the sixth century, for towards its close they began to compile the first records of their country's history,—began to reduce to writing such tales as had been handed down by tradition during the preceding twelve hundred years. A celebrated litterateur, statesman, and religionist, Prince Shotoku, and an equally celebrated Prime Minister and patron of Buddhism, Soga no Umako, essayed this maiden historiographical task. Their work did not survive, but there is no doubt that much of its contents found a place in the Kojiki and Nihongi of the eighth century, the oldest Japanese annals now extant.
Here an interesting question suggests itself. According to the most conservative estimate, China had possessed a written history for at least nine hundred years before the first Japanese envoys reached her shores. Does her history show that she knew, or thought she knew, anything about the Japanese before they introduced themselves to her notice by means of ambassadors? Of course it is quite plain that the two nations must have had some intercourse prior to the opening of official relations; otherwise the Japanese envoys could not have been intelligible when they reached the Chinese Court. The question here, however, is not of Chinese history relating to a remote past. The question is, Did Prince Shotoku and Premier Umako find in Chinese history, when its pages were first opened for their inspection, any explanation of the Japanese nation's origin? It has been related that the predecessors of Japan's first mortal sovereign are declared by her historians to have been heavenly deities, and that the recorded incidents of their careers are fabulous and supernatural. Now the only islands spoken of by the early Chinese historians in terms suggesting Japan, are described as the abode of genii, the land of immortals possessing the elixir of life, a corpse-reviving drug, golden peaches weighing a pound each, timber of immense strength yet so buoyant that no superimposed weight would sink it, rare trees, a mountain plant that could be plaited into mats and cushions, mulberries an inch long, and an environment of black sea, where the waves, not driven by any wind, rose to a height of a thousand feet. At the risk of challenging a cherished faith, it is difficult to avoid the hypothesis that from these fables the compilers of Japan's first written history derived the idea of an "age of the gods" and of a divinely descended emperor. The unique qualification of Shotoku and Umako for their task of history-making was familiarity with Chinese ideographic script and with the literature of the Middle Kingdom. Could anything be more natural, more inevitable, than that they should search the pages of that literature for information about the early ages of their nation's existence; or that they should place implicit reliance upon all the information thus acquired? A child, when it sits down to transcribe the head-lines of its first copy-book, does not think of questioning the logic or morality of the precepts inscribed there. Shotoku and Umako were in the position of children so far as Chinese historical records were concerned. From the annalists of the kingdom at whose civilised feet the whole semi-barbarous world sat, they learned that, prior to the year 700 b. c., islands lying in the region of Japan had been known as the habitation of genii and immortals, and with immortals and genii the Prince and the Prime Minister peopled the Japanese Islands.
Sinologues have shown that these primitive Japanese annals contain internal evidence of extensive reliance on Chinese sources. The posthumous names—that is to say, the historical names—given to the forty-two emperors from Jimmu to Mommu (697 a. d.), are all constructed on Chinese models; the name "Jimmu" itself is an exact imitation of the title chosen by the Toba Tartars for their remote ancestor; the war-like lady whose alleged invasion of Korea stands out so prominently in Japan's ancient history, was evidently called after the Chinese Empress Wu, whose name and style corresponded with "Jingo." Of course, it is not implied that every event recorded in Japan's first written annals is to be counted of foreign suggestion. Domestic traditions, more or less trustworthy, are doubtless embodied in their pages, as well as reflections of Chinese prehistorical myths. But it does seem a reasonable conclusion that, among many borrowings made by Japan from China, the idea of her "Age of Gods" has to be included.
The sequence of events has been somewhat anticipated here for the sake of explaining the introduction of ideographic script into Japan, an event belonging to the second half of the sixth century. During the interval of nearly two hundred years which separated that consummation from the great wave of Chinese and Korean immigration that reached Japan in the beginning of the fourth century, marked progress had been made in many of the essentials of civilisation. The science of canal cutting, the art of fine embroidery, improved methods of sericulture and of silk-weaving were introduced by the immigrants, and the intelligent interest taken by the Government in encouraging progress may be inferred from the fact that it caused the new-comers to distribute themselves throughout the country so as to extend the range of their instruc-tion. Some idea of the part played by these immigrants is suggested by the fact that, in the second half of the fifth century, when it was deemed advisable to re-assemble the foreign experts and organise them into separate departments, the families enrolled in the sericultural section alone aggregated nearly nineteen thousand members. By this time (450 a. d.) the policy of specially importing skilled aid direct from China had been inaugurated, and large bodies of female weavers and embroiderers were invited to settle in Japan. They taught the use of the loom so successfully that fine brocades for the palace were among the products of the time. At the same epoch the first two-storeyed house was constructed. It is strange that the Japanese, who through their embassies to the Han, the Tsin, and the Song Courts, must have acquired some knowledge of the splendours of the Chinese capitals as Loyang, Hsian, and Nanking, should have been content to live until the middle of the fifth century in log huts tied together with wild-vine ligatures. Such is the fact, however, and no explanation has been suggested. A little later, but still in the fifth century, the art of tanning skins was imparted by Korean immigrants and greatly developed by Chinese instruction.
In the domain of morals, the fourth century, as has been shown, brought to Japan a knowledge of the Chinese classics, and her historians claim that she then learnt the golden rule, as well as the Confucian precepts of refraining from excess, abhorring evil and curbing the passions. They also claim that she quickly began to practise these ethical canons, and they point to the career of the Emperor Nintoku (313–399) as an example of the new morality. But Nintoku, though he displayed some of the most picturesque virtues of a ruler, was an extreme type of libertine. He crowned a long list of excesses by marrying his step-mother's daughter. Fifty years later, the Nero of Japanese history appeared in the person of Yuraku (457–459), who exiled an official in order to obtain possession of his wife, and perpetrated a wholesale slaughter of his own brothers, their children, and other members of the Imperial family. His successor (Seinei) carried out a similar massacre, and the Imperial line would have become extinct had not a child been secreted and reduced to the position of a serf in order to escape the quest of the official assassins. Buretsu, who reigned a few decades later (499–507), ranks even below Yuraku as a fierce and merciless despot, and at the same time the great families who had become depositories of administrative power behaved with the utmost arrogance, despising the laws, defying the sovereign's authority, and perpetrating all kinds of excesses. In brief, if Confucianism, and its comparatively high code of moral precepts, obtained recognition in Japan during the fourth century, its civilising influence is not to be detected in the fifth, which may justly be called the blackest era in the history of Japanese imperialism.
Of course the moral condition of the inferior classes was not better than that of the Court. The selfish aims of religion became so paramount as to deprive it of all dignity. Among the tutelary deities added to the pantheon there were some whose attributes should have deprived them of any title to respect; others whose veneration betrayed a scarcely credible depth of superstition. An extreme example was the worship of caterpillars, which, at that epoch, infested the orange trees and the ginger vines. The changes these insects underwent were considered typical of the poor growing rich, the old renewing their youth, and men built shrines and offered sacrifices to the gods thus manifested.
Society was disfigured by class dissensions. The great families which for over a thousand years had monopolised the principal offices of State as hereditary rights, were no longer represented by one or two households; they had grown to the dimensions of clans, and their members lived on the proceeds of extortion and oppression, secured by the collective protection of the clan against inconvenient results. Profit and prosperity seem to have been the paramount motives of the era. Servants were so indifferent to the dictates of loyalty that they turned their hand against their liege lords, and wives had so little sense of family fidelity that they cheated their husbands. Superstition had invaded every domain of life. There existed a belief that exhibitions of the divine will could always be obtained by employing some process of divination or repeating some formula of incantation. Judicial decisions were based entirely on the result of ordeal; dreams were regarded as revelations for guidance at important crises, and the necessity of avoiding pollution dictated grotesque rules of conduct. Thus the mere fact of encountering a stranger, or of coming into contact with any of his belongings, was held to cause contamination that demanded a service of purification, and a traveller was consequently required to carry a bell which he rang as he moved along, after the manner of a leper in mediæval Europe. If he boiled his food by the roadside, he exposed himself to the lawful displeasure of the nearest household, and if he borrowed cooking utensils from anyone in the neighbourhood, they had to be solemnly purified before being returned to their owner or allowed to touch any other object. Evidently inns could not exist under such circumstances, and the difficulties of travel were enormous, as everything needed for the journey must be carried by the wayfarer. A woman had to be moved into a segregated hut at the time of parturition, and a ceremony of purification, a species of "churching," was necessary before she might return to her place in society. To have been present at a sudden death was another source of contamination, rendering a man responsible to the nearest house or hamlet, and involving elaborate rites of cleansing. It resulted that the companions of a man who fell sick by the roadside or was drowned, used generally to fly precipitately without waiting to succour or inter him, the promptings of charity and of fellowship being thus subserved to the dictates of unreasoning superstition. In short, the nation offered a striking example of well-developed material civilisation side by side with most rudimentary morality. A religion was wanted. The Shintô cult, after long and uninterrupted trial, a trial lasting for more than eleven hundred years, had proved itself essentially deficient in the guiding influences of a creed. Its want of any code of sanctions and vetoes, its indifference to a future state, its negative rules of conduct, its exaltation of deities whose powers were exercised for temporal purposes only—all these attributes deprived it of elevating effect upon the masses. Confucianism was powerless to correct these evils. It appealed to the intellect and left sentiment untouched. A religion was wanted, and it came in the form of Buddhism.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 4.
Note 4.—Personal names were taken from the terminology of natural objects. Thus an Emperor was called "large wren," and noblemen were designated "mackerel," "red fish," "firefly," "weazel," "bonito," "earth-worm," "dragon," "whale," etc. No change in this system occurred until the introduction of Chinese learning and Buddhism, when curiously incongruous appellations began to be adopted; as "Head-fisherman Amida" (Amabe no Amida), "Silk-embroiderer Confucius" (Kinunui no Koshi), "Bow-maker Buddha" (Yuge no Shaka), "Field-dog-keeper Laotsze" (Agata no Tsukai no Roshi), and others equally startling, even courtesans taking the names of deities. In the ninth century the Emperor Nimmiyo set a new example. He gave himself a name signifying "just and righteous" (seiryo), being thus the first to import an abstract idea into personal nomenclature. The fashion of the nanori (self-given name) was thus inaugurated. A few years previously, another sovereign (Kwammu, 782-806) caused an eminent scholar to assign posthumous names to the former occupants of the Throne, and the result was that the Rulers of Japan came to be known in history by names of which many were borrowed from the annals of China or Tartary, and none was borne during his lifetime by the sovereign thus designated. In mediæval times, strange confusion was caused by extending the old methods of nomenclature without regard to the motives that had governed them. It thus fell out that many of the official titles which had been prefixed to personal names in the early ages and used in lieu of patronyms, took permanent place in the language as family appellations, and were employed without the slightest discrimination as to their fitness. To this abuse was due the common adoption of such names as Otomo (Great subject), Okura (Imperial treasury), Inukai (Master of hounds), Hatori (Weaver), and so on. A still more indiscriminate extension of this habit is attributable to the levelling of time-honoured social distinctions that took place during the military epoch, when soldiers ruled the country and provincial captains supplanted the Court nobles in the metropolis. The old official titles then began to do duty as personal names, so that (to convert the facts into their English equivalents) the sons of private soldiers received baptismal names such as "Lord Chamberlain" or "Commodore"; the child of a farmer might be dubbed "Prince" or "Lord Chamberlain," and a courtesan or danseuse went by the name of "High Prelate" or "Field Marshal," even differences of sex being lost sight of in the general confusion. Another method of naming was inaugurated in very early times: the sovereign bestowed a patronym, much as titles were given in the West. In constructing such a name, the feat that it commemorated was translated into symbolical language—as when a great archer was called "noble target,"—or some natural object of special beauty or grandeur was taken, or else a part of the donor's name was joined to a part of the recipient's. The greatest family that Japan ever possessed—the Fujiwara (wistaria plain)—had the honour of obtaining its designation from an Emperor. There are only 292 family names in Japan, and of these 39 are derived from the nomenclature of the vegetable kingdom, 44 from that of other natural objects, 14 from that of geographical divisions, and the rest from ancient official titles, moral or physical qualities, and miscellaneous sources. The method that finally came into commonest vogue may be thus described. Parents in naming their sons generally adopted a numerical suffix,—taro (great male) for the eldest; jiro (second male) for the next; saburo (third male) for the next, and so on—and, by way of prefix, chose the name of some natural object, as kin (gold), gin (silver), tetsu (iron), matsu (pine), ume (plum), take (bamboo), etc. Thus there resulted such names as Kintaro, or Matsujiro, or Ginzahuro, which had the advantage of conveying information about the number of a man's elder brothers as well as about himself. Another method of constructing boys' names was to use the numerical component as prefix, appending to it the designation of an office, as suke (assistant official), hiyo-yei (military guard), yemon (gate guard), etc. Thus were obtained Tarosuke, Jiro-hiyoyei (abbreviated to Jirobei) Sahuro-yemon, and so on. It will be easily understood that names of the latter kind were originally confined to persons eligible for the offices indicated: they are, in fact, an outcome of the ancient custom which merged the personality of the individual in his official position, and bestowed on families a hereditary title to certain posts. For a similar reason, family names, since they had their origin in offices of State, might not be borne by commoners; that is to say, they were limited to the comparatively small section of the nation which could trace its descent from the chiefs of the first colonists and had been admitted to that rank for special reasons. The rule held until modern times. Hence, if a man possessed a family name, it was possible to be at once assured that he belonged to the patrician order. Japanese names are a source of considerable perplexity to foreigners, because, in addition to the family name (uji or miyoji) and the personal name (zokumiyo), there was a child-name (osana); there was an "adopted name" or "true name" (nanori or jitsumiyo); there was a posthumous name (okurina or kaimei), and there was sometimes an art name (go). The "adopted" or "true" name was nothing more than a second personal name—independent of any of the suffixes or prefixes mentioned above—which was taken by a patrician lad on emerging from childhood, the posthumous name was given by the Buddhist priests and inscribed on the tomb, and the art name was taken by a painter, an author, a musician, an artisan, or a professional expert of any kind.
Just as in the West it has always been a point of etiquette to avoid using the name of a person of rank to whom one addresses oneself, so in Japan, the post of an official, or the palace of a nobleman, or some other impersonal designation was always used in speaking to illustrious individuals. But that is a matter connected with the genius of the language rather than with the question of nomenclature.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 5.
Note 5.—These gohei (sacred offerings), as they are called, have never ceased to be an important part of the paraphernalia of worship. They may be seen to-day suspended at the shrines, near the sepulchres of the dead and before the family altar. It is supposed by some that they originally served merely as means of accentuating the outlines of the rope fences enclosing a deified tree, and that, like all other objects employed for ceremonial purposes, they were subsequently endued with sanctity of their own. Another, and more probable, theory is that they were pieces of the cloth offered to the deities.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 6.
Note 6.—Admirable translations of many of these rituals have been made by Sir Earnest Satow, Mr. W. G. Aston, and Dr. Florenz.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 7.
Note 7.—"Rock-house" (iwa-iye) or "demon's closet" (oni no setsuin) was the term applied to these caves by later generations.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 8.
Note 8.—It is doubtful whether in the oldest form of building the pillars were not sunk in the ground without stone foundations.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 9.
Note 9.—It would seem that a refined sense of tone existed among the early Japanese, for the records say that the Emperor Ojin, who reigned at the close of the third century, used ship-building wood for the body of the Wa-kin and that the instrument gave particularly melodious notes.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 10.
Note 10.—Examples of adaptability of Chinese ideographs are innumerable. Thus, dempo (transmitted intelligence) is the exact equivalent of "telegram;" Kaikwan-zei (sea-gate tax) well expresses "customs duty;" rigaku (natural-law science accurately represents "physics;" Kikwa-ho (country-change law) conveys without mistake the idea of "naturalization law," and such instances might be multiplied ad infinitum.