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

…were, and how often they had been recorded, no man can say; but by A.D. 712, the date the "Kojiki" was completed, Chinese learning had been knocking at Japan's door for more than a century. The first official Chinese visit was made by an ambassador in A.D. 608; however, Buddhism had entered the country from Chinese sources at least fifty years earlier (A.D. 553). Therefore, it is clear that the "Kojiki" was by no means Japan's first book; it is merely the first to survive from generations of carefully prepared and treasured court records.

Between the "Kojiki" and the "Nihongi," the "Kojiki" is much more valuable for its account of the early gods. When we turn to what purports to be the history of the MikadosThe Emperors of Japan., particularly the later ones, the "Nihongi" is much more comprehensive, though perhaps not as reliable. The "Kojiki" begins with raw and crude accounts of the births of many gods, whose multi-syllabled compound names each hold a special value to Japanese readers. These are the gods of Shinto—that is, the ancestors of the Japanese people. Thus, they are not strictly "gods" in the divine sense. We translate the Chinese character for these figures as "deities" simply because we have no other way to tell their story. These crude, barbaric figures are not gods in the sense of being all-powerful, ruling the earth, or being immortal. They are merely "ancestors"—barbaric men and women magnified by the passage of time.

Therefore, the tales of the "Kojiki" soon begin to center on Ama-terasu, the Sun-goddess, and her children, because these were the specific ancestors of the Japanese. Consequently, the tales often drift into beast-fables. These beast-stories are quite unlike those in Buddhist or Hindu books, as they carry no moral lesson. They are presented simply as historical incidents—actual events that have somehow become strangely distorted. We have also selected from the "Kojiki" the story of the great Yamato-take, the "Champion of Japan,"1 because this is clearly an ancient native tradition.