Ancient Japan. Indeed it is the earliest authentic connected literary product of that large division of the human race which has been variously denominated Turanian, Scythian and Altaïc, and it even precedes by at least a century the most ancient extant literary compositions of non-Aryan India. Soon after the date of its compilation, most of the salient features of distinctive Japanese nationality were buried under a superincumbent mass of Chinese culture, and it is to these “Records” and to a very small number of other ancient works, such as the poems of the “Collection of a Myriad Leaves” and the Shintō Rituals, that the investigator must look, if he would not at every step be misled into attributing originality to modern customs and ideas, which have simply been borrowed wholesale from the neighbouring continent.
It is of course not pretended that even these “Records” are untouched by Chinese influence: that influence is patent in the very characters with which the text is written. But the influence is less, and of another kind. If in the traditions preserved and in the customs alluded to we detect the Early Japanese in the act of borrowing from China and perhaps even from India, there is at least on our author’s part no ostentatious decking out in Chinese trappings of what he believed to be original matter, after the fashion of the writers who immediately succeeded him. It is true that this abstinence on his part makes his compilation less pleasant to the ordinary native taste than that of subsequent historians, who put fine Chinese phrases into the mouths of emperors and heroes supposed to have lived before the time when intercourse with China began. But the European student, who reads all such books, not as a pastime but in order to search for facts, will prefer the more genuine composition. It is also accorded the first place by the most learned of the native literati.
Of late years this paramount importance of the “Records of Ancient Matters” to investigators of Japanese subjects generally has become well-known to European scholars; and even versions of a few passages are to be found scattered through the pages of their writings. Thus Mr. Aston has given us, in the Chrestomathy appended to his “Grammar of the Japanese Written Language,” a couple of interesting extracts; Mr. Satow has illustrated by occasional extracts his elaborate papers on the Shintō Rituals printed in these “Transactions,” and a remarkable essay
