A History of the Japanese People. Kikuchi Dairoku
project took practical shape. Her Majesty, at the instance, doubtless, of Prince Shotoku, one of the greatest names in all Japan's annals, instructed the prince himself and her chief minister, Soga no Umako, to undertake the task of compiling historical documents, and there resulted a Record of the Emperors (Tennoki), a Record of the Country (Koki), and Original Records (Hongi) of the Free People (i.e., the Japanese proper as distinguished from aliens, captives, and aborigines), of the great families and of the 180 Hereditary Corporations (Be). This work was commenced in the year 620, but nothing is known as to the date of its completion. It represents the first Japanese history. A shortlived compilation it proved, for in the year 645, the Soga chiefs, custodians of the documents, threw them into the fire on the eve of their own execution for treason. One only, the Record of the Country, was plucked from the flames, and is believed to have been subsequently incorporated in the Kojiki '(Records of Ancient Things).' No immediate attempt seems to have been made to remedy the loss of these invaluable writings. Thirty-seven years later the Emperor Temmu took the matter in hand. One of his reasons for doing so has been historically transmitted. Learning that "the chronicles of the sovereigns and the original words in the possession of the various families deviated from the truth and were largely amplified with empty falsehoods," his Majesty conceived that unless speedy steps were taken to correct the confusion and eliminate the errors, an irremediable state of affairs would result.
Such a preface prepares us to learn that a body of experts was appointed to distinguish the true and the false, and to set down the former alone. The Emperor did, in fact, commission a number of princes and officials to compile an authentic history, and we shall presently see how their labours resulted. But in the first place a special feature of the situation has to be noted. The Japanese language was then undergoing a transition. In order to fit it to the Chinese ideographs for literary purposes, it was being deprived of its mellifluous polysyllabic character and reduced to monosyllabic terseness. The older words were disappearing, and with them many of the old traditions. Temmu saw that if the work of compilation was abandoned solely to princely and official littérateurs, they would probably sacrifice on the altar of the ideograph much that was venerable and worthy to be preserved. He therefore himself undertook the collateral task of having the antique traditions collected and expurgated, and causing them to be memorized by a chamberlain, Hiyeda no Are, a man then in his twenty-eighth year, who was gifted with ability to repeat accurately everything heard once by him. Are's mind was soon stored with a mass of ancient facts and obsolescent phraseology, but before either the task of official compilation or that of private restoration had been carried to completion the Emperor died (686), and an interval of twenty-five years elapsed before the Empress Gemmyo, on the 18th of September, 711, ordered a scholar, Ono Yasumaro, to transcribe the records stored in Are's memory. Four months sufficed for the work, and on the 28th of January, 712, Yasumaro submitted to the Throne the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Things) which ranked as the first history of Japan, and which will be here referred to as the Records.
THE NIHONGI AND THE NIHON SHOKI
It is necessary to revert now to the unfinished work of the classical compilers, as they may be called, whom the Emperor Temmu nominated in 682, but whose labours had not been concluded when his Majesty died in 686. There is no evidence that their task was immediately continued in an organized form, but it is related that during the reign of Empress Jito (690–696) further steps were taken to collect historical materials, and that the Empress Gemmyo (708–715)—whom we have seen carrying out, in 712, her predecessor Temmu's plan with regard to Hiyeda no Are—added, in 714, two skilled littérateurs to Temmu's classical compilers, and thus enabled them to complete their task, which took the shape of a book called the Nihongi (Chronicle of Japan).
This work, however, did not prove altogether satisfactory. It was written, for the most part, with a script called the Manyo syllabary; that is to say, with Chinese ideographs employed phonetically, and it did not at all attain the literary standard of its Chinese prototype. Therefore, the Empress entrusted to Prince Toneri and Ono Yasumaro the task of revising it, and their amended manuscript, concluded in 720, received the name of Nihon Shoki (Written Chronicles of Japan), the original being distinguished as Kana Nihongi, or Syllabic Chronicles. The Nihon Shoki consisted originally of thirty-one volumes, but of these one, containing the genealogies of the sovereigns, has been lost. It covers the whole of the prehistoric period and that part of the historic which extends from the accession of the Emperor Jimmu (660 B.C.) to the abdication of the Empress Jito (A.D. 697). The Kojiki extends back equally far, but terminates at the death of the Empress Suiko (A.D. 628).
THE FUDOKI
In the year 713, when the Empress Gemmyo was on the throne, all the provinces of the empire received orders to submit to the Court statements setting forth the natural features of the various localities, together with traditions and remarkable occurrences. These documents were called Fudoki (Records of Natural Features). Many of them have been lost, but a few survive, as those of Izumo, Harima, and Hitachi.
CHARACTER OF THE RECORDS AND THE CHRONICLES
The task of applying ideographic script to phonetic purposes is exceedingly difficult. In the ideographic script each character has a distinct sound and a complete meaning. Thus, in China shan signifies "mountain," and ming "light." But in Japanese "mountain" becomes yama and "light" akari. It is evident, then, that one of two things has to be done. Either the sounds of the Japanese words must be changed to those of the Chinese ideographs; or the sounds of the Chinese ideographs must alone be taken (irrespective of their meaning), and with them a phonetic syllabary must be formed. Both of these devices were employed by a Japanese scholar of early times. Sometimes disregarding the significance of the ideographs altogether, he used them simply as representing sounds, and with them built up pure Japanese words; at other times, he altered the sounds of Japanese words to those of their Chinese equivalents and then wrote them frankly with their ideographic symbols.
In this way each Japanese word came to have two pronunciations: first, its own original sound for colloquial purposes; and second, its borrowed sound for purposes of writing. At the outset the spoken and the written languages were doubtless kept tolerably distinct. But by degrees, as respect for Chinese literature developed, it became a learned accomplishment to pronounce Japanese words after the Chinese manner, and the habit ultimately acquired such a vogue that the language of men—who wrote and spoke ideographically—grew to be different from the language of women—who wrote and spoke phonetically. When Hiyeda no Are was required to memorize the annals and traditions collected and revised at the Imperial Court, the language in which he committed them to heart was pure Japanese, and in that language he dictated them, twenty-nine years later, to the scribe Yasumaro. The latter, in setting down the products of Are's memory, wrote for the most part phonetically; but sometimes, finding that method too cumbersome, he had recourse to the ideographic language, with which he was familiar. At all events, adding nothing nor taking away anything, he produced a truthful record of the myths, traditions, and salient historical incidents credited by the Japanese of the seventh century.
It may well be supposed, nevertheless, that Are's memory, however tenacious, failed in many respects, and that his historical details were comparatively meagre. An altogether different spirit presided at the work subsequently undertaken by this same Yasumaro, when, in conjunction with other scholars, he was required to collate the historical materials obtained abundantly from various sources since the vandalism of the Soga nobles. The prime object of these collaborators was to produce a Japanese history worthy to stand side by side with the classic models of China. Therefore, they used the Chinese language almost entirely, the chief exception being in the case of the old poems, a great number of which appear in the Records and the Chronicles alike. The actual words of these poems had to be preserved as well as the metre, and therefore it was necessary to indite them phonetically. For the rest, the Nihon Shoki, which resulted from the labours of these annalists and literati, was so Chinese that its authors did not hesitate to draw largely upon the cosmogonic myths of the Middle Kingdom, and to put into the mouths of Japanese monarchs, or into their decrees, quotations from Chinese literature. "As a repertory of ancient Japanese myth and legend there is little to choose between the Records and the Chronicles. The former is, on the whole, the fuller of the two, and contains