Kasasa;[1] and it is a land whereon the morning sun shines straight, a land which the evening sun’s sunlight illumines. So this place is an exceedingly good place.”[2] Having thus spoken, he made stout the temple-pillars on the nethermost rock-bottom, and made high the cross-beams to the Plain of High Heaven,[3] and dwelt there.
[Sect. XXXV.—The Duchess of Saru.]
So then he charged Her Augustness the Heavenly-Alarming-Female [saying]: “Do thou, who wast the one to make known this Great Deity Prince of Saruta who respectfully served as my august vanguard,[4] respectfully escort him [back]; and do thou likewise bear the august name of that Deity, and respectfully serve me.” Wherefore the Duchesses of Saru bear the name of the Male Deity the Prince of Saruta, and the women are Duchesses of Saru.[5]
- ↑ Etymology uncertain. An alternative form of this name, which is preserved in the “Chronicles,” is Nagasa, winch Hirata thinks may stand for Nagasaki.
- ↑ This is the sense of the original Japanese text of this passage as literally as it can be rendered, and so the older editors understood it. Motowori however, though not daring actually to alter the characters, assumes that they are corrupt, and in his kana rendering gives us this instead: “Thereupon, passing searchingly through a bare-backed empty country, he arrived at the august cape of Kasasa, and said: ‘This land is a land whereon the morning sun shines straight, etc.’ ” His evident reason for wishing to alter the reading is simply and solely to conceal the fact that Korea is mentioned, and mentioned in a not unfriendly manner, in the traditional account of the divine age, i.e. long before the epoch of its so-called revelation and conquest by the Empress Jin-gō (see Sects. XCVI to XCVIII). That the parallel passage of the “Chronicles” lends some sanction to his view is no excuse for so dishonest a treatment of the text he undertakes to commentate; for the “Records” and the “Chronicles” often differ greatly in the accounts they have preserved. One of Motowori’s arguments is that, as Kasasa is said to have been in the province of Hiuga, it could not have been opposite to Korea, seeing that Hiuga faces east and hot west. He here forgets that a little later on in his own same Commentary (Vol. XVII, p. 86) he asserts that Hiuga in ancient times included the provinces of Ohosumi and Satsuma, the latter of which does face west.
- ↑ I.e., he built himself a palace to dwell in (Conf. Sect. XXXII, Note 27).
- ↑ See Sect. XXXIII from a little before Note 11 to Note 17.
- ↑ Q.d., instead of the men being Dukes, as would be more natural. The title was confined to females (see Sect. XXXIII, Note 33).
