call Japan, the Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits, the
Region Between Heaven and Earth, the Island of the Congealed Drop, the
Sun's Nest, the Princess Country, the Land of Great Peace, the Land of
Great Gentleness, the Mikado's Empire, the Country ruled by a Theocratic
Dynasty. He considers that only with the vice brought over from the
Continent of Asia were ethics both imported and made necessary.[18]

All this has been solemnly taught by famous Shint[=o] scholars of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still practically
promulgated in the polemic Shint[=o] literature of to-day, even after
the Kojiki has been studied and translated into European languages. The
Kojiki shows that whatever the men may have been or done, the gods were
abominably obscene, and both in word and deed were foul and revolting,
utterly opposed in act to those reserves of modesty or standards of
shame that exist even among the cultivated Japanese to-day.[19] Even
among the Ainos, whom the Japanese look upon as savages, there is still
much of the obscenity of speech which belongs to all society[20] in a
state of barbarism; but it has been proved that genuine modesty is a
characteristic of the Aino women.[21] A literal English translation of
the Kojiki, however, requires an abundant use of Latin in order to
protect it from the grasp of the law in English-speaking Christendom. In
Chamberlain's version, the numerous cesspools are thus filled up with a
dead language, and the road is constructed for the reader, who likes the
language of Edmund Spencer, of William Tyndale and of John Ruskin kept
unsoiled.

The cruelty which marks this early stage shows that though moral codes
did not exist, the Buddhist and Confucian missionary were for Japan
necessities of the first order. Comparing the result to-day with the
state of things in the early times, one must award high praise to
Buddhism that it has made the Japanese gentle, and to Confucianism that
it has taught the proprieties of life, so that the polished Japanese
gentleman, as to courtesy, is in many respects the peer and at some
external points the superior, of his European confrere.

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