for the most trivial offences. Of branding, or rather tattooing, the face as a punishment there are one or two incidental mentions. But as no tattooing or other marking or painting of the body for any other purpose is ever alluded to, with the solitary exception in one passage of the painting of her eyebrows by a woman, it is possible that the penal use of tattooing may have been borrowed from the Chinese, to whom it was not unknown.
The shocking obscenity of word and act to which the “Records” bear witness is another ugly feature which must not quite be passed over in silence. It is true that decency, as we understand it, is a very modern product, and is not to be looked for in any society in the barbarous stage. At the same time, the whole range of literature might perhaps be ransacked in vain for a parallel to the naïve filthiness of the passage forming Sect. IV. of the following translation, or to the extraordinary topic which the hero Yamato-Take and his mistress Miyazu are made to select as the theme of poetical repartee.[1] One passage likewise would lead us to suppose that the most beastly crimes were commonly committed.[2]
To conclude this portion of the subject, it may be useful for the sake of comparison to call attention to a few arts and products with which the early Japanese were not acquainted. Thus they had no tea, no fans, no porcelain, no lacquer,—none of the things, in fact, by which in later times they have been chiefly known. They did not yet use vehicles of any kind. They had no accurate method of computing time, no money, scarcely any knowledge of medicine. Neither, though they possessed some sort of music, and poems a few of which at least are not without merit,[3] do we hear anything of the art of drawing. But the most important art of which they were ignorant is that of writing. As some misap-
- ↑ See Sect. LXXXVII.
- ↑ See Sect. XCVII.
- ↑ A translation,—especially a literal prose translation,—is not calculated to show off to best advantage the poetry of an alien race. But even subject to this drawback, the present writer would be surprised if it were not granted that poetic fire and grace are displayed in some of the Love-Songs (for instance the third Song in Sect. XXIV and both Songs in Sect. XXV). and a quaint pathos in certain others (for instance in Yamato-Take’s address to his “elder brother the pine-tree,” and in his Death-Songs contained in Sect. LXXXIX).
