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It is agreed that the so-called "letters" are nothing more than copies of marks produced by the action of fire upon bones used in divination. The Japanese cleverly adapted the Chinese ideographs to syllabic purposes, but they never devised a script of their own. *Kanekata, who wrote the Shaku Nihongi in the era 1264 1274.
The "Nihongi" gives dates of events supposed to have happened fifteen hundred years before, with an accuracy which may be called villainous; while the "Kojiki" states that Wani, a Korean teacher, brought the "Thousand Character Classic" to Japan in A.D. 285, though that famous Chinese book was not composed until the sixth century, or A.D. 550.
The whole Imperial line, the "Sun's Succession," represented one unbroken descent from the Goddess of the Sun. Hirata wrote: "There exists no hard and fast line between the Age of the Gods and the present age and there exists no justification whatever for drawing one, as the Nihongi does."
Now Gojiro's father had promised him that when he read through five volumes of the Nihongi, or Ancient History of Japan, he would give him for a present a book of wonderful Chinese stories. Gojiro performed his task, and his father kept his promise.
At the funerals of great personages such sacrifices were common. Owing to beliefs of which all knowledge has been lost, these sacrifices assumed a character much more cruel than that of the immolations of the Greek Homeric epoch. This custom was abolished, by the Emperor Suinin, about nineteen hundred years ago; and the Nihongi declares that it was then an ancient custom.
Almost every deity mentioned in the Ko-ji-ki or Nihongi has a shrine somewhere; and hundreds of others including many later apotheoses have their temples. Numbers of temples have been dedicated, for example, to historical personages, to spirits of great ministers, captains, rulers, scholars, heroes, and statesmen.
There can indeed be little doubt that the compilers of the Nihongi embellished the bald tradition with imaginary details; used names which did not exist until centuries after the epoch referred to; drew upon the resources of Chinese history for the utterances they ascribe to the Empress and for the weapons they assign to her soldiers, and were guilty of at least two serious anachronisms.
The full form of the ritual, when compared with a legend in the "Nihongi," shows that a myth was "partly devised to explain the connection of an hereditary family of priests with the god whose shrine they served; it is possible that the claim to be directly descended from the god had been disputed."
Accordingly he built a shrine in that place and made the spirit go and dwell there. This is the Kami of Omiwa.* *Aston's Translation of the Nihongi.
Several other myths scarcely less remarkable are to be found in the Ko-ji-ki and Nihongi; but they are mingled with legends of so light and graceful a kind that it is scarcely possible to believe these latter to have been imagined by the same race.
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