JAPAN
studied by any one desiring to make himself acquainted with the essence of her indigenous religion or her pictorial and decorative arts, for they there play a picturesque and prominent part. But they have nothing to do with sober history. Possibly it may be urged that nations whose traditions deal with a Mount Sinai, a pillar of cloud and fire, and an immaculate conception, have no right to reject everything supernatural in Oriental annals. That superficial retort has, indeed, been made too often. But behind it there undoubtedly lurks in the inner consciousness of the educated and intelligent Japanese a resolve not to scrutinise these things too closely. Whether or not the "age of the gods"—kami no yo—of which, as a child, he reads with implicit credence, and of which, as a man, he recognises the political uses, should be openly relegated to the limbo of absurdities; whether the deities had to take part in an immodest dance in order to lure the offended Sun Goddess from a cave to which her brother's rudeness had driven her, thus plunging the universe in darkness; whether the god of impulse fought with the god of fire on the shores of the Island of Nine Provinces; whether the procreative divinities were inspired by a bird; whether the germs of a new civilisation were carried across the sea by a prince begotten of the sunshine and born in the shape of a crimson jewel,—these are not problems that receive very serious consideration in Japan, though neither a Colenso nor a
28
