grandchild of the Sun-Goddess[11] became the Ruler of the Empire, and bears the composite name of Kamu-yamato-ihare-biko, but is commonly called by his "canonical name," Jimmu, a title given him long after his decease. From such heavenly origin sprang all the Emperors of Japan, and the present Mikado, like all his predecessors, is thus conceived as an offspring of Heaven, a direct descendant of the ancient heavenly deities. The significance of this fact will appear conspicuously when we come to notice more particularly the essential elements in the Shinto cult.

On this remarkable cosmogony and mythology we do well at this point to offer the following observations:

(1) These accounts of the origin of the Japanese Archipelago and its rulers are regarded as genuine traditions handed down from former ages. One part of the tradition is that the Emperor, who took pains to have the old records carefully looked after, employed a person living in his household, who was gifted with marvelous memory; "he could repeat without mistake the contents of any document he had ever seen, and never forgot anything that he had heard;" and from the lips of this man of prodigious memory the scribe Yasumaro wrote down the contents of the Ko-ji-ki.[12]

(2) Notice, in the next place, that the island world of Japan is all the world which these records know anything about. The universe of this cosmogony consists of "the islands of the Central-Land of the Reed-Plains," with their inland and surrounding seas, and "the Plain of High Heaven," which, however, was not conceived as very far away above them.

(3) The entire description of the beginnings of heaven, and earth, and gods, and men accords with the idea of a continuous process of evolution. The first three heavenly deities "were born alone, and hid their persons," or disappeared. All the other deities are spoken of as begotten, or born, and the deities give birth to the different islands of the earth.[13]

(4) The world-idea of this old mythology is in notable keeping with the ancestor worship, and the Animism which enter so largely into the Shinto faith. In spite of all the wars and discords of the deities, this a primordial monism, so to speak, at the basis of Japanese cosmogony, and of all its diverse generations of the heavens and the earth; and yet there is no one Supreme Ruler in all the Pantheon of eight hundred myriad gods. When a great council of the gods assembles in the bed of the Tranquil Heavenly River, no one deity is chief among them, and we are at a loss to imagine who has authority to call them together or to preside over the assembly. Izanagi seems for a while to be the chief creator and ruler, but after a time he disappears, and the Sun Goddess, his daughter Amaterasu, has her heavenly domain shaken and ravaged by her younger brother, but is avenged by the heavenly assembly of gods, who fine and punish the offender, "and expel him with a divine expulsion." So the Sun Goddess maintains her dominion by the help of the eight hundred myriad gods, no one of whom is invested with supreme power. It appears from certain poems of the Manyoshu that the moon as well as the sun was extensively worshiped among the primitive Japanese.[14]

(5) It accords with all these ideas that the devotees of the "pure Shinto" faith trace all their history back to the age of the gods, and recognize some deity in, or back of, all phenomena. Japan is the country of the gods; every Japanese is a descendant or offspring of the gods, and the Mikado is the direct descendant of the imperial line which has continued in unbroken succession from the beginning of the world. Japan is, therefore, superior to all other countries, and the Japanese, being thus directly from the gods, are superior in every respect to other people. Sprung from the gods, they need no codes of moral law (like the Chinese), for they are naturally perfect, and do the right things spontaneously.

7. The Japanese a Self-centered People. The Japanese people, with such traditions and such a faith, would naturally be a self-centered people, and they conceived their island-empire as occupying the summit of the earth. The Mikado is the Son of Heaven, entitled and empowered to reign perpetually over the land and the sea. But as all the people are descendants of the gods, and the islands and all that is in them have also been begotten of the gods, it follows that the worship of ancestors is a worship of all the gods of whom they have knowledge, and all the lower animate and inanimate things in the world are also in some way instinct with the deities from whom they were born, and whose they are.

Accordingly, the honoring of the gods is a fundamental thing in the Shinto thought and in the Japanese civilization and government. Every loyal subject of the Mikado's Empire is expected to be true to the ancient faith. It is assumed that religion and worship and the proper administration of government are all essential to each other. The Japanese word (Matsuri-goto), which is used to denote the art of government, means, literally, worshiping. And it is a common thought and saying: "Everything in the world depends on the spirit of the gods of heaven and earth, and therefore the worship of the gods is a matter of primary importance. The gods who do harm are to be appeased, so that they may not punish those who have offended them; and all the gods are to be worshiped, so that they may be induced to increase their favors."[15] One of the rules which all the ministers of the Mikado emphasized in the old times, before the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, was, "First serve the gods, and afterwards deliberate on matters of government."[16]

8. Essence of the Shinto Cult. From what we have now stated it is to be seen that reverence and worship of the ancestors of the Japanese, and the recognition of the Mikado's divinity as the incarnation and earthly representation of the celestial gods, constitute the essence of the Shinto cult. All the Japanese are offsprings of the gods, but the imperial "Sovran Grandchild" of Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess,[17] is pre-eminently divine and worshipful. The first Mikado, however, was not the real son of Amaterasu, according to the