ON THE VERGE OF HISTORY
benignant god, travelled over sea on the crest of a tidal wave, and sweeping into the realm of her enemy, terrified him into unresisting submission. At the portals of the Korean palace she set up her staff and spear to stand there for five centuries, and she compelled the monarch of the defeated nation to swear that until the sun rose in the west and set in the east, until streams flowed towards their source, until pebbles from the river bed ascended to the sky and became stars, his allegiance should remain inviolate. That is the romantic and picturesque form into which the writers of Japanese history (the Nihongi) wove the legend four centuries later. But modern critics have discovered discrepancies which induce them to cut down the tale to vanishing proportions, and to dismiss Jingo as a myth. Their iconoclasm is probably excessive. For Chinese annalists say that, at the very time when Jingo's figure is so picturesquely painted on the pages of Japanese records, a female sovereign of Japan sent to the Court of China an embassy which had to beg permission from the ruler of northwestern Korea to pass through his territory en route westward. Thus, although the celebrated empress' foreign policy be stripped of its brilliant conquests and reduced to the dimensions of mere envoy-sending, her personality at least is recalled from the mythical regions to which some sinologues would relegate it. The Chinese relate, it may be mentioned incidentally, that she was old
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