no break between the fabulous and the real, unless indeed it be at the commencement of the fifth century of our era, i.e. more than a thousand years later than the date usually accepted as the commencement of genuine Japanese history. The only breaks are,—not chronological,—but topographical.
This fact of the continuity of the Japanese mythology and history has been fully recognized by the leading native commentators, whose opinions are those considered orthodox by modern Shintoists; and they draw from it the conclusion that everything in the standard national histories must be equally accepted as literal truth. All persons however cannot force their minds into the limits of such a belief; and early in the last century a celebrated writer and thinker, Arawi Hakuseki, published a work in which, while accepting the native mythology as an authentic chronicle of events, he did so with the reservation of proving to his own satisfaction that all the miraculous portions thereof were allegories, and the gods only men under another name. In this particular, the elasticity of the Japanese word for “deity,” kami, which has already been noticed, stood the eastern Euhemerus in good stead. Some of his explanations are however extremely comical, and it is evident that such a system enables the person who uses it to prove whatever he has a mind to.[1] In the present century a diluted form of the same theory was adopted by Tachibana no Moribe, who, although endeavouring to remain an orthodox Shintoist, yet decided that some of the (so to speak) uselessly miraculous incidents need not be believed in as revealed truth. Such, for instance, are the story of the speaking mouse, and that of Izanagi’s head-dress turning into a bunch of grapes. He accounts for many of these details by the supposition that they are what he calls wosana-goto, i.e. “child-like words,” and thinks that they were invented for the sake of fixing the story in the minds of children, and are not binding on modern adults as articles of faith. He is also willing to allow that some
- ↑ As a specimen of the flexibility of his system, the reader to whom the Japanese language and Japanese legend are familiar is recommended to peruse pp. 13–21 of vol. I of Arawi Hakuseki’s “Ko Shi Tsū” (古史通), where an elaborate rationalistic interpretation is applied to the story of the amours of Izanagi and Izanami. It is amusing in its very gravity, and one finds it difficult to believe that the writer can have been in earnest when he penned it.
