Sky-Luxuriant-Dragon-fly-Lord-Youth. The name of “Land-of-the Eight-Great-Islands”[1] therefore originated in these eight islands having been born first. After that, when they had returned,[2] they gave birth to the Island of Ko [-zhima][3] in Kibi,[4] another name for which [island] is Brave-Sun-Direction-Youth. Next they gave birth to the Island of
- ↑ Oho-ya-shima-kuni. A perhaps still more literal English rendering of this name would be “Land of the Grand Eight Islands” or “Grand Land of the Eight Islands,” for the word oho must be regarded rather as an Honorific than as actually meant to convey an idea of size.
- ↑ “To the Island of Onogoro,” says Motowori; but we are not told that the god and goddess had ever left it.
- ↑ Ko means “infant” or “small.” The original of the alternative personal name is Take-hi-gata-wake. Gata (or, without the nigori, Kata) here and in other names offers some difficulty. The translator renders it by the equivalent of the usual Japanese signification of the character 方, “direction,” with which it is written.
- ↑ Etymology uncertain.
much disputed. Mabuchi, in his “Addenda to the Commentary on the Collection of a Myriad Leaves,” derives the name from yama-to, “mountain-gate.” Motowori, in a learned discussion to be found in his “Examination of the Synonyms of Japan,” pp. 24–27, proposes three other possible derivations, viz. yama-to, “mountain-place,” yama-to (supposed to stand for yama-tsubo and to mean “mountain-secluded”), and yama-utsu (utsu being a supposititious Archaic form of uchi), “within the mountains.” Other derivations are yama-to (山外), “without the mountains,” yama-ato, “mountain-traces” and yama-todomi, “mountains stopping,” i.e. (as Moribe, who proposes it, explains), “far as the mountains can be seen.” Another disputed point is whether the name of Yamato which here designates the Main Island of the Archipelago, but which in the common parlance of both ancient and modern times is the denomination on the one hand of the single province of Yamato and on the other of the whole Empire of Japan, originally had the wider application or the more restricted one. Motowori and the author of the “Exposition of the Foreign Notices of Japan” seem to the present writer to make out the case in favour of the latter view. Motowori supposes the name to have denoted first a village and then a district, before being applied to a large province and finally to the entire country. The “Island of the Dragon-fly” is a favourite name for Japan in the language of the Japanese poets. It is traced to a remark of the Emperor Jim-mu, who is said to have compared the shape of the country round Mount Hohoma to “a dragon-fly drinking with its tail.” Conf. also the tradition forming the subject of Sec. CLVI of the present translation.
