superseded the native one as to cause the latter to have been almost forgotten excepting by the members of the Shintō priesthood. This happened in the case of the Chinese method of divination by means of a tortoise-shell, whose introduction caused the elder native custom of divination through the shoulder-blade of a deer to fall into desuetude. Whether indeed this native custom itself may not perhaps be traced back to still earlier continental influence is another question. So far as any documentary information reaches, divination through the shoulder-blade of a deer was the most ancient Japanese method of ascertaining the will of the gods. The use of the Chinese sexagenary cycle for counting years, months, and days is another instance of the imported usage having become so thoroughly incorporated with native habits of mind as to make the anachronism of employing it when speaking of a period confessedly anterior to the introduction of continental civilization pass unnoticed. As for the (to a modern European) grotesque notion of pretending to give the precise months and days of events supposed to have occurred a thousand years before the date assigned to the introduction of astronomical instruments, of observatories, and even of the art of writing, that is another of those inconsistencies which, while lying on the very surface, yet so easily escape the uncritical Oriental mind.[1] Semi-civilized people tire of asking questions, and to question antiquity, which fills so great a place in their thoughts, is the last thing that would occur to any of their learned men, whose mental attitude is characteristically represented by Confucius when he calls himself “A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients.”[2] As regards the question of language, standard Chinese soon became easier to understand than Archaic Japanese, as the former alone was taught in the schools, and the native
- ↑ Details as to the adoption by the Japanese of the Chinese system of computing time will be found in the late Mr. Bramsen’s “Japanese Chronological Tables,” where that lamented scholar brands “the whole system of fictitious dates applied in the first histories of Japan,” as “one of the greatest literary frauds ever perpetrated, from which we may infer how little trust can be placed in the early Japanese historical works.” See also Motowori’s “Inquiry into the True Chronology,” pp. 33–36, and his second work on the same subject entitled “Discussion of the Objections to the Inquiry into the True Chronology,” pp. 46 et seq.
- ↑ “Confucian Analects,” Book VII. Chap. I. Dr. Legge’s translation.
