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Updated: November 13, 2025
It has also to be remembered that the same compilers were required to robe their facts in Chinese costume and that the consequent ill-fits and artificialities do not of necessity vitiate the facts. In the particular case under consideration did the Kojiki stand alone, little doubt would ever have been entertained about the reality of an armed expedition to Korea, under the Empress Jingo.
Now to visit Kitzuki has been my most earnest ambition since I learned the legends of the Kojiki concerning it; and this ambition has been stimulated by the discovery that very few Europeans have visited Kitzuki, and that none have been admitted into the great temple itself. Some, indeed, were not allowed even to approach the temple court.
There seems to be a sense of divine magic in the very atmosphere, through all the luminous day, brooding over the vapoury land, over the ghostly blue of the flood a sense of Shinto. With my fancy full of the legends of the Kojiki, the rhythmic chant of the engines comes to my ears as the rhythm of a Shinto ritual mingled with the names of gods: Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami.
Another fact, made repulsively clear, about life in ancient Japan, is that the high ideals of truth and honor, characteristic at least of the Samurai of modern times, were utterly unknown in the days of the kami. Treachery was common. Instances multiply on the pages of the Kojiki where friend betrayed friend. The most sacred relations of life were violated.
A faith existed before it, which was its source. It grew out of superstitious teaching and mistaken tradition. T. Matsugami. "Makoto wo moté KAMI NO MICHI wo oshiyuréba nari." "Ware wa Micni nuri, Mukoto nari, Inochi nari." John xiv. 6. The New Testament in Japanese. "The Kojiki" mid its Myths of Cosmogony.
These norito had already assumed elegant literary form, rich in poetic merit, long before Chinese writing was known. They, far more than the less certain philosophy of the "Kojiki," are of undoubted native origin.
The Kojiki reveals to us, likewise, the childlike religious ideas of the islanders. Heaven lay, not about but above them in their infancy, yet not far away. Although in the "Notices," it is "the high plain of heaven," yet it is just over their heads, and once a single pillar joined it and the earth.
These monuments of history, poetry and liturgies are the "Kojiki," or Notices of Ancient Things; the "Manyöshu" or Myriad Leaves or Poems, and the "Norito," or Liturgies. The Ancient Documents. The first book, the "Kojiki," gives us the theology, cosmogony, mythology, and very probably, in its later portions, some outlines of history of the ancient Japanese.
It will change the state of things truthfully pictured in such books as the Genji Monogatari, or Romance of Prince Genji, with its examples of horrible lust and incests; the Kojiki or Ethnic scripture, with its naïve accounts of filthiness among the gods; the Onna Dai Gaku, Woman's Great Study, with its amazing subordination and moral slavery of wife and daughter; and The Japanese Bride, of yesterday all truthful pictures of Japanese life, for the epoch in which each was written.
We can not wonder, therefore, that modern historiographers have devoted much labour to tracing the route followed by Yamato-dake's troops and rationalizing the figurative or miraculous features of the narratives told in the Kojiki and the Nihongi.
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