is, however, not completely a matter of opinion. For we have in the “Shan Hai Ching[1]” a positive statement concerning a Northern and a Southern Yamato (倭), and the Chinese annals of both the Han dynasties tell us of the division of the country into a much larger number of kingdoms, of which, according to the annals of the later Han dynasty, Yamato (邪馬臺) was the most powerful. A later official Chinese historian also tells us that Jih-pên (日本, our Japan) and Yamato had been two different states, and that Jih-pên was reported to have swallowed up Yamato. By Jih-pên the author evidently meant to speak of the island of Tsukushi or of part of it. That the Chinese were fairly well acquainted with Japan is shown by the fact of there being in the old Chinese literature more than one mention of “the country of the hairy people beyond the mountains in the East and North,”—that is of the Yemishi or Ainos. No Chinese book would seem to mention Idzumo as having formed a separate country; and this evidence must be allowed its full weight. It is possible, of course, that Idzumo may have been incorporated with Yamato before the conquest of the latter by the Tsukushi people, and in this case some of the inconsistencies of the history may be traceable to a confusion of the traditions concerning the conquest of Idzumo by Yamato and of those concerning the conquest of Yamato by Tsukushi. Perhaps too (for so almost impossible a task is it to reconstruct history out of legend) there may not, after all, be sufficient warrant for believing in the former existence of Idzumo as a separate state, though it certainly seems hard to account otherwise for the peculiar place that Idzumo occupies in mythic story. In any case, and whatever light may hereafter be thrown on this very obscure question, it must be remembered that, so far as clear native documentary evidence reaches, 400 A.D. is approximately the highest limit of reliable Japanese history. Beyond that date we are at once confronted with the miraculous; and if any facts relative to earlier Japan are to be extracted from the pages of the “Records” and “Chronicles,” it must be by a process very different from that of simply reading and taking their assertions upon trust.
With regard to the origin, or rather to the significance, of the clearly fanciful portions of the Japanese legends, the question here
- ↑ 山海經.
