mouth of Are, which accounts for the completion of the manuscript in so short a time as four months and a half. Are’s age at this date is not stated, but as he was twenty-eight years of age some time in the reign of Temmu Tennô, it could not possibly have been more than sixty-eight, while taking into account the previous order of Temmu Tennô in 681 for the compilation of a history, and the statement that he was engaged on the composition of the Kojiki at the time of his death in 686, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that it belongs to about the last year of his reign, in which case Are was only fifty-three in 711.”
The previous order of the Emperor Tem-mu mentioned in the above extract is usually supposed to have resulted in the compilation of a history which was early lost. But Hirata gives reasons for supposing that this and the project of the “Records of Ancient Matters” were identical. If this opinion be accepted, the “Records,” while the oldest existing Japanese book, are, not the third, but the second historical work of which mention has been preserved, one such having been compiled in the year 620, but lost in a fire in the year 645. It will thus be seen that it is rather hard to say whom we should designate as the author of the work. The Emperor Tem-mu, Hiyeda no Are, and Yasumaro may all three lay claim to that title. The question, however, is of no importance to us, and the share taken by Are may well have been exaggerated in the telling. What seems to remain as the residue of fact is that the plan of a purely national history originated with the Emperor Tem-mu and was finally carried out under his successor by Yasumaro, one of the Court Nobles.
Fuller evidence and confirmatory evidence from other sources as to the origin of our “Records” would doubtless be very acceptable. But the very small number of readers and writers at that early date, and the almost simultaneous compilation of a history (the “Chronicles of Japan”) which was better calculated to hit the taste of the age, make the absence of such evidence almost unavoidable. In any case, and only noticing in passing the fact that Japan was never till quite recent years noted for such wholesale literary forgeries (for Motowori’s condemnation of the “Chronicles of Old Matters of Former Ages” has been considered rash by later scholars),—it cannot be too much emphasized that in this
