P'anku states: "P'anku came into being in the great waste; his beginning is unknown. In dying he gave birth to the material universe. His breath was transmuted into the wind and clouds, his voice into thunder, his left eye into the sun, and his right eye into the moon." Hirata, a Shinto theologian of the nineteenth century, endeavours to combat the obvious inference from this comparison by pointing out that the sun is masculine in China and feminine in Japan. How little weight is due to this objection appears from the fact that two so nearly allied nations as the English and the Germans differ in the sex which they attribute to the sun, as do also closely-related tribes of Australian aborigines and Ainus of Yezo. And does not Shakespeare himself make the sun both masculine and feminine in the same sentence when he says: "The blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta?"[1]
The ascription of the female sex to the most prominent among the Shinto Gods is not owing merely to caprice. Myth-makers have often more substantial reasons for their fancies than might be supposed. In the present case evidence is not wanting to show that women played a very important part in the real world of ancient Japan, as well as in that of imagination. Women rulers were at this time a familiar phenomenon. Not only Japanese but Chinese history gives us glimpses of a female Mikado who lived about a.d. 200, and whose commanding ability and strong character have not been wholly obscured by the mists of legend. Women chieftains are frequently mentioned. Indeed the Chinese seem to have thought that feminine government was the rule, for their historians frequently refer to Japan as the "Queen-country." In more historical times several of the Mikados were women, and at a still later
- ↑ The Australian coloured gentleman quoted in Mr. Andrew Lang's Custom and Myth was apparently fresh from a perusal of this passage when he compared the sun to "a woman of indifferent character in a coat of red kangaroo skins."
