Introduction
To be sure, Shintoism was never displaced by Buddhism, but the latter made a tremendous appeal to the Japanese temperament, as the Diaries show. In fact, it was not until the Meiji Period (1867–1912) that Shintoism was again made the state religion. With the introduction of Chinese civilization came the art of writing, when is not accurately known, but printing from movable blocks followed from Korea in the eighth century. As was inevitable under the circumstances, Chinese came to be considered the language of learning. Japanese scholars wrote in Chinese. All the "serious" books—history, theology, science, law—were written in Chinese as a matter of course. But, in 712, a volume called "Records of Ancient Matters" was compiled in the native tongue. It is the earliest book in Japanese now extant.
If the scholars wrote in a borrowed language, the poets knew better. They wrote in their own. and the poetry of the Nara Period has been preserved for us in an anthology, the "Manyoshu" or "Collection of One Thousand Leaves." This was followed at the beginning of the tenth century by the "Kokinshu" ("Ancient and Modern Poems"), to which, however, the editor, Tsurayuki, felt obliged to write a Chinese preface. The Ladies of the Diaries were extremely familiar with these volumes, their own writings are full of allusions to poems contained in them; Sei-Shōnagon, writing early in the eleventh century, describes a young lady's education as consisting of writing, music, and the twenty volumes of the
