An Introduction to the History of Japan. Katsuro Hara
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The other chronicle, the Nihongi, was finished eight years after the Kojiki, and submitted to the Empress by Prince Toneri, the president of the historiographical commission. If we suppose this commission to be a continuation of what was inaugurated by the royal order of the Emperor Temmu in the tenth year of his reign, then the commission may be said to have taken about forty years in compiling the chronicle. In some respects the Kojiki may be regarded as one of the byproducts of the compilation, Hieta-no-Are being probably one of the assistants of the commission. The essential difference between the two chronicles is that the Kojiki was exclusively compiled from Japanese sources, written by Japanese as well as by naturalized Koreans, and retained much of the colloquial form of ancient Japanese narrated stories, while in the case of the Nihongi many Chinese historical works were consulted, and historical events were so arranged as to conform to what was stated in those Chinese records. Many bon mots, it is true, were often borrowed from ancient Chinese classics, and this ornamented and exaggerated style was often pursued at the expense of historical truth, and on that account most of the later historians of our country give less credit to the Nihongi than to the Kojiki, though this scepticism about the former is somewhat undeserved.
It is beyond question that the two chronicles mentioned above are the oldest historical works written in Japan, now extant. They are not, however, the earliest attempts at historical compilation in our country. Just a hundred years before the compilation of the Nihongi was finished, the Empress Suiko, in the twenty-eighth year of her reign, that is, in 620 A.D. ordered the Crown Prince, known as Shôtoku, and Soga-no-Umako, the most influential minister in her court, to compile the chronicles of the imperial house, of various noted families and groups of people, and a history of the country with its provinces. If these chronicles had been completed and preserved to this day, they would have been the oldest we have. Unfortunately, however, by the premature death of the Crown Prince, the compilation was abruptly terminated, and what was partly accomplished seems to have been kept at the house of Soga-no-Umako, until it was burnt down by his son Yemishi, when he was about to be executed by imperial order in 645 A.D. Fragments of the archives, it is said, were picked up out of the blazing fire, but nothing more was ever heard of them. There is a version now called the Kujiki, and this has been misrepresented to be that very chronicle, which, it was feigned, was not really lost, but offered in an unfinished state to the Empress the next year after the death of prince Shôtoku. If this be true, the record which was burnt must have been one of several copies of the incomplete chronicle, which, as Euclid would say, is absurd! It is now generally agreed that the chronicle is spurious, though it may contain some citations from sources originally authentic.
Whatever be the criticism on the chronicle Kujiki, there is no doubting the fact that the work of compiling a history was initiated in the reign of the Empress Suiko, and partly put into execution. Not only that. There might have been many other chronicles and historical manuscripts in existence anterior to the compilation of the Nihongi, and afterwards lost. In the Nihongi are mentioned the names of the books which were consulted in the course of compilation. Among them may be found the names of several sets of the annals of a peninsular state called Kutara, various Chinese historical works, and a history of Japan written by a Korean priest. Some of the books are not named explicitly, and passages from them are cited as "from a book" merely, but we can easily perceive that they were mostly from Japanese records.
So far I have spoken about chronicles which were compiled of set purpose as a record of the times and worthy to be called historical works. As to other kinds of manuscripts, for instance, various family records and fragmentary documents of various sorts, there might have been a considerable number of these, and it is probable that they were utilized by the compilers of the Kojiki and of the Nihongi, though the latter mentions very few of such materials, and the former is entirely silent concerning its sources. The question then arises how this presumably large number of manuscripts came to be formed. We have no written character which may be called truly our own. All forms of the ideographs in use in our country were borrowed from China, intact or modified. And in ancient Japan an utter lack of knowledge of the Chinese characters prevailed for a long time throughout most classes of the people. If this were so, by whom were those documents transcribed? In the reign of the Emperor Richû, circa 430 A.D., scribes were posted in each province to prepare archives, a fact which implies that the emperor and magistrates had their own scribes already. Who then were appointed as the scribes? To explain this I must turn for a while to the history of the Korean peninsula and its relations with China.
Wu-ti, the most enterprising emperor of the Han dynasty, was the first to push his military exploration into the Korean peninsula, and from 107 B.C. onward the northern parts of the peninsula were successively turned into Chinese provinces. This was the beginning of the infiltration of Chinese civilisation into those regions. Afterwards on account of the internal disturbances of the Chinese empire, her grip on the conquered provinces became a little loosened, but at the beginning of the third century A.D. a strong independent Chinese state constituted itself on the east of the river Lyao, and Chinese influence thereby once more extended itself vigorously over the northern half of the peninsula: a new province was added to the south. In the districts which had thus become Chinese provinces, not only were governors sent from China, but a number of colonists must also have settled there, so that through them Chinese civilisation continued to infiltrate more and more, though very slowly, into the peninsula. This infiltration lasted till the middle of the fourth century, when the Chinese provinces in the peninsula were overrun and occupied by the Kokuri or the Koreans properly so called, who came from the northeast, and by this invasion of the barbarians the progress of civilisation in the peninsula was for a time obstructed. Still there might have remained a certain number of the descendants of the older Chinese colonists, and it is possible that they still retained some vestige of the civilisation introduced by their ancestors. The history of the peninsula at this period may be well pictured by comparing it to the history of Britain with its lingering Roman civilisation at the time of the Saxon conquest. It is just at the end of this period that Japan came into close contact with the peninsular peoples.
It is almost impossible to ascertain from reliable sources how far back we can trace our connection with the peninsula. According to a chronicle of Shiragi, a state which once existed in the southeast of the peninsula, one of the Japanese invasions of that state is dated as early as 49 B.C. Since the value of the chronicle as historical material is very dubious, it is dangerous to put much faith in this statement at present. We may, however, venture to assume that in the first half of the third century A.D. the intercourse between Japan and Korea became suddenly very intimate. Japan invaded the peninsula more frequently than before, and our emissaries were despatched to the Chinese province established to the north of it. Nay, not only that, some of them penetrated into the interior of China proper, as far as the capital of Wei, and on the way back seem to have been escorted by a Chinese official stationed in the peninsular province. Memoirs by those Chinese who had thus opportunities of peeping into a corner of our country, were incorporated by Chen-Shou, a Chinese historian at the end of the third century, in his general description of Japan, a chapter in the San-kuo-chih, which has remained to this day one of the most valuable sources concerning the early history of our country. This intercourse between the peninsula and Japan, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, happened to be accentuated by the expedition of the Empress Jingu to Shiragi in the middle of the fourth century. Soon after this expedition, Chinese civilisation, which had achieved a considerable progress during the long Han dynasty, began to flow into Japan, and effected a remarkable change in both the social and the political life of our country. For just at this time the two northern states of the peninsula, Korea or Kokhuri and Kutara, advanced rapidly in their civilisation, so that a school to teach Chinese literature was founded in the former, while in the latter a post was instituted in the royal service for a man of letters. And Shiragi, another state in the south-eastern part of the peninsula, ceased to be a barrier to communication between those two peninsular states and Japan, as it had been before the expedition of the Empress.
Among the boons conferred by the introduction of Chinese civilisation through the intermediation of the peninsular states, that which had had the most beneficial and enduring effect was the use of the written character. It cannot be said with certainty that the Chinese characters were totally unknown to the Japanese before