Page:Nihongi by Aston.djvu/413

When the water has gone,
It raises up (its stem that was) bent down,
And its roots perish not.

Wodate addressed him, saying:—"Capital! Pray let us hear something more."

The Emperor at length made a special dance,

This is what was anciently called a Tatsutsu (stand out) dance. The manner of it was that it was danced while standing up and sitting down.

and striking an attitude, said:—

Of Yamato,
Soso chihara
Asachihara^[1]
The younger Prince am I.

(XV. 12.) Hereupon Wodate thought this profoundly strange, and asked him to say more. The Emperor, striking an attitude, said:—

The sacred cedar^[2]
Of Furu in Isonokami—^[3]
Its stem is severed,
Its branches are stripped off.
Of him who in the Palace of Ichinobe
Governed all under Heaven,^[4]
The myriad Heavens,
The myriad lands—
Of Oshiha no Mikoto
The august children are we.^[5]

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ing-mat" (a rice straw mat), a conventional epithet or makura-kotoba of kaha, skin, perhaps because the Japanese used skins for sleeping on at one time. It has, properly speaking, nothing to do with kaha, river, but the unexpected conjunction is witty—from a Japanese point of view. The allusion to the position of the two Princes is plain.

1. Chihara, or as it may be read Ashihara, means reed plain, a poetical term for Japan. So so is interpreted as an onomatope representing the rustling of reeds. Asa is shallow, and asachihara is said to be a plain on which the reeds grow short. The speech (or poem) is a (no doubt with intention) mysteriously worded announcement of Woke's rank as an Imperial Prince.
2. The sugi or Cryptomeria Japonica.
3. In Yamato.
4. He never reigned. See above, p. 336.
5. There is hardly any metre here. This passage is just on the border line between poetry and prose.