Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Vol. 13: Japan

followers are supposed to have sung. They also provide a legendary account of the gods who preceded Jimmu, and of the Mikados who succeeded him down to the time of the arrival of the Chinese.

Of these two ancient and highly honored books, the "Kojiki" is slightly the older—it was finished in A.D. 712—and is much more distinctly Japanese. It devotes itself mainly to the gods and tells of men only as they are god-men, related to the deities or inspired by them to compose poetry. For already the art of poetry—a peculiarly Japanese art quite unlike our Western ideas—was highly honored among the Mikado's followers. From the "Kojiki," therefore, Japan's oldest book, we get our clearest vision of the earlier barbaric ages and the earliest spirit of the Japanese.

The "Nihongi," on the contrary, while almost as old as the "Kojiki," is a wholly Chinese-influenced work. It reviews the same traditions as the "Kojiki," but polishes them all and revises them to fit the newly acquired Chinese ideas. In short, it gives such an amazing Chinese twist to everything the "Kojiki" had told that no student of human nature is likely to neglect the opportunity of comparing these two books. More clearly here than in any other works of Japan's present transformation—perhaps more clearly than anywhere else in the world—can we see an entire nation changing not only its outer garments but its views, its ways of thought, and almost its very soul. Carlyle's great vision in "Sartor Resartus"A novel by Thomas Carlyle that uses the metaphor of clothes to represent the changing forms of society and belief. is here made actual, with its picture of man, the eternal spirit, clothing his invisible and incorporeal self in ever-shifting shadows of new bodies, new beliefs, and new habits, extending outward to the mere physical adornments of constantly changing fashion.

Only incidentally do the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" refer to religion. They are, or regard themselves as, histories—"records of ancient matters." The religion under which the Japanese emerged from barbarism was the unquestionably ancient faith of Shintoism. This held its own not only against the first sweep of Chinese civilization with its