Hereupon,[1] regretting the errors in the old words, and wishing to correct the misstatements in the former chronicles, She, on the eighteenth day of the ninth moon of the fourth year of Wa-dō,[2] commanded me Yasumaro to select and record the old words learnt by heart by Hiyeda no Are according to the Imperial Decree, and dutifully to lift them up to Her.[3]
In reverent obedience to the contents of the Decree, I have made a careful choice. But in high antiquity both speech and thought were so simple, that it would be difficult to arrange phrases and compose periods in the characters.[4] To relate everything in an ideographic transcription would entail an inadequate expression of the meaning; to write altogether accord-
- ↑ This word is here used as an initial particle without special significance.
- ↑ I.e., 3rd November, A.D. 711. Wa-dō (和銅) is the name of a Japanese “year-period” which lasted from A.D. 708 to 714.
- ↑ I.e., present them to her. With this sentence ends the fourth division of the preface.
- ↑ I.e., the simplicity of speech and thought in early Japan renders it too hard a task to rearrange the old documents committed to memory by Are in such a manner as to make them conform to the rules of Chinese style.
Satow’s translation of the Ritual of the Praying for Harvest,” Vol. VII, Pt. II, p. 111 of these “Transactions,” and the present writer’s “Classical Poetry of the Japanese,” p. 111). Such unusual phenomena as connected stalks, i.e., trunks springing from the same root and uniting again higher up, and “joint rice-ears,” i.e., two rice-ears growing on a single stem, are considered lucky omens by the Chinese, and their appearance is duly chronicled in those Japanese histories that are composed after the Chinese model. The “continuous beacon-fires” and the “repeated interpretations” are phrases alluding to the foreign lands (i.e. the various small Korean states) speaking strange languages, whence tribute was sent to Japan. The text, as it stands, gives the impression that the arrival of the tribute-ships was announced by beacon-fires being lighted. Motowori however wishes us to understand the author’s meaning to be that foreign states which, in the natural course of events, would be inimical, and the approach of whose ships would be signalized by the lighting of beacon-fires, now peacefully sent gifts to the Japanese monarch. It may by added that the whole sentence is borrowed scarcely without alteration from the “Wê Hsüan” (文選). Bum-mei is the Japanese pronunciation of the characters 文命, the original name of Yü (禹), a celebrated legendary emperor of China. Ten-Itsu is the Japanese pronunciation of the characters 天乙, the original name of the ancient emperor T’ang (湯), who is said to have founded the Shang dynasty in the eighteenth century B. C.
