Читать книгу A Brief History of Japan - Jonathan Clements - Страница 10

CHAPTER 1

THE WAY OF THE GODS:

PREHISTORIC AND MYTHICAL JAPAN

The old women said the sea used to be lower. There were bays and inlets that had once been flat ground but were now steeped in saltwater. It was getting harder to find deer. There used to be all sorts on the wide plains. The old women said that they were good meat. The old women had plenty of stories like this, but the young only knew what they could see themselves.

The men hadn’t caught a deer for months. But there was always food. Down by the shore, you could pull shellfish from the shallows. One day, one of the girls pulled up something else—a bone knife.

The old women said that we, or people like us, had once lived there, but now the land was returned to the sea.

The old women said that if the deer were gone, then we would soon follow. We should leave these long, thin islands and head north, to the greater lands beyond the rising sun.

Everybody knew they were there. You could see the clouds that formed above them. You could see the birds that returned there. Some of the fishermen, straying too far in their canoes, even claimed to have seen the lands themselves: lush and green, with smoking mountains.

Not all the old ones agreed. Most of the womenfolk did not mind the dwindling deer. Stick to the fish from the reef, they said. Save nuts and berries in jars against lean times. There were always shellfish to be pulled from the mud, and mud to make pots.

Then there were Ship People. They came from the direction of the setting sun. If we moved, they might not find us again. The Ship People came to take our cowrie shells, and traded them for magical wonders: hard tools that did not break; the pig creatures that ate anything and yielded succulent meat; the wondrous disc that reflected everything it saw, shining with the sun’s light when turned upon it, revealing your true self when you stared into it.

The old people argued about the future, and their children were dragged in like canoes at the edge of a whirlpool. All were agreed there were too many of us. The shoreline was getting crowded. You had to walk further into the shallows to find enough shellfish for dinner. It took longer and longer to find fruits from the forest. We should move on, onward toward the rising sun, to the new lands that looked so green.

No, some said, we should stay. Save more shells for the Ship People, to trade for more of their pigs and their strange seeds.

The arguments had been boiling for months, even years, but people were hungrier than they admitted, and that made them easier to anger. The wiser old women feared encounters with other tribes.

What if there are already people in the green lands, they wondered. What then?

But the menfolk were sure of themselves. We shall wield our mallet heads, they said. Wielding our stone mallets, we will crush them.

Both sides thought they had won. The fishermen and their families got into their boats and headed to the north and east. They took any of the forest folk who wanted to go. But simply by leaving, they were making it possible for others to stay. Tell the Ship People—they said—tell them that we have gone toward the rising sun, where the lands are so plentiful that we will live forever. Tell them that, if any of you survive the next winter.

Japan was born fifteen million years ago, pushed away from the edge of Eurasia by the formation of the Japan Sea. At the time it was quite flat, but it sits at the confluence of three massive tectonic plates—the Eurasian, the Pacific, and the Philippine—which mashed together to buckle and warp the land into towering mountains. These heights, young in geological terms, created steep watercourses and fast rivers that rushed down toward the sea, dragging sediment with them.

Elsewhere, the tectonic plates were forced downward. Only a million years after Japan was first formed, its first volcanoes burst into life, peppering the landscape with its oldest craters. Two million years ago, the northern part of the island of Honshū was ripped apart by huge eruptions, the scars of which still form circular lakes and ridges, some miles wide. The map of Japan remains dotted with suspiciously round lakes and islands, or curved bays that indicate the forgotten edge of ancient craters. Even in the era of human settlements, occasional disasters have depopulated entire regions. Parts of Japan have been settled “for the first time” on multiple occasions, the newcomers being unaware that the bones of earlier inhabitants lay beneath their feet, under layers of ash and mud.

Even today, a tenth of the world’s active volcanoes can be found in Japan. Throughout its history, the nation’s geographical situation has led to periodic disaster—not merely volcanic eruptions, but landslides caused by the precarious purchase of soil on its steep mountains, and earthquakes from the continued push and shove of underground forces. From Japan’s times of legend through to the modern era, there are tales of entire mountains falling into the sea; of new islands born from a flaming abyss; of the ground tearing itself apart only to invite great, overwhelming inrushes of the sea. It is no coincidence that tsunami is a Japanese word. Once every 800 to 1,100 years, for example, the sediments of north Japan show the evidence of a “tsunamigenic” deposit—a thick layer of mud left behind by an immense flood from the sea, caused by an offshore earthquake in a fault line to be found 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) away on the sea bed. Court chronicles in 869 CE reported an earthquake and an onrushing tidal wave that killed a thousand people and wiped out the garrison town of Tagajō. It would be 1,142 years before the process repeated itself in 2011.

Japan confounds all expectations. It never fails to surprise. Modern visitors can still be shocked by how green it is—even now, one of the local names for the land is the Green Archipelago (midori no rettō). True enough, contemporary cities are all too often a charm-less jumble of skyscrapers and storm drains, their landscapes ruined by big-box supermarkets. But Japan’s cities huddle on a remarkably small area of land, much of it only reclaimed from the sea in the last century. Tōkyō, Nagoya, and Ōsaka occupy the only large areas of flat terrain in the whole country south of Hokkaidō: the plains of Kantō, Nōbi, and Kansai. Even these, however, are relatively small by global standards.

Inland, more than two-thirds of Japan’s area comprises uninhabitable mountains, thickly forested today with non-native trees. In prehistoric times, the land was covered in woods of evergreen oak, hinoki cypress, and camphorwood. It was these native trees that supplied the lumber for the earliest Japanese buildings, although today they are so rare that they are usually only found on holy ground, preserved within the precincts of temples and shrines. These forests were rapaciously destroyed by the middle of the Dark Ages, cleared to meet a rising need for farmland and for firewood as fuel in a land with poor-quality coal, but also felled for building material. Eschew-ing stone for most construction, the Japanese preferred to work with wood. The largest wooden building ever built, the great Buddhist temple of Tōdaiji in Nara, required 900 hectares of forest—about nine square kilometers. And wooden materials need regular replacing, which ensures not only continued drains on resources, but also means that much of “old” Japan is actually more recent.

By the time the Japanese first began to write down their own history, those ancient forests were disappearing, replaced by red pines, deciduous oaks, and greater concentrations of chestnut and walnut. This modern appearance is also the result of a bold, concerted effort at reforestation dating from the sixteenth century, when Japan’s overlords realized that the continued plundering of the hillsides would have a disastrous effect on farming. Just over half of Japan’s land area is forested today.

Japan is also a long country: its southernmost reaches in the Ryūkyū Islands share the latitude of the Bahamas; its northernmost point in Hokkaidō matches that of Quebec. Although recent centuries and the draconian codes of the samurai have forced a certain homogeneity of culture on the Japanese, with regional differences often confined to genteel subtleties of clothing or refined differences in cuisine, ancient Japan was much more diverse, spanning everything from subtropical islanders to snowbound bear hunters.

Japan’s latitude places much of its land mass closer to the south than much of Europe, making it substantially warmer than those countries that decided the norms of a temperate climate. It is also wetter—even in the middle of Japan’s Alps, you are never more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the sea; humidity is high and summer rains help a strong growing season. This, in turn, means that swings in global climate can often have the opposite effect in Japan than in those latitudes where most English-language historians live. When global temperatures took a turn for the warmer, European historians celebrated Roman vineyards in England and Viking colonies in Greenland, but Japan suffered droughts and disease. When global temperatures dropped and Elizabethan Londoners looked out glumly on a frozen Thames, a cooler, more temperate Japan experienced a boom in agriculture and population.

One of the most crucial elements of Japanese geography has been the size of the Korea Strait (known in Japan as the Tsushima Strait, so named for the island in its middle) that separates it from mainland Asia. With a width of 200 kilometers (124.5 miles) at its narrowest point, this body of water arguably keeps Japan at a perfect “Goldilocks” distance—not so far as to make it impossible to trade and communicate, but far enough to prevent most large-scale military operations. The crossing was safe enough for a premodern ship that could afford to wait out storms in a safe harbor, but famously deadly to an armada of hostile enemies with no safe port.

Humans first arrived before the strait was formed. At the end of the last Ice Age, southern Japan was linked to Korea first by a land bridge and then, for some time, by a strait narrow enough to make the opposite shore tantalizingly visible. In the far north, Japan was linked to Siberia by a similar land bridge that connected Hokkaidō to Sakhalin and the Russian coast. To the south, the Ryūkyū Islands were larger, and mostly within sight of each other, all the way from proto-Taiwan to the edges of the Japanese mainland. Settlers hence approached the region from both north and south.

Somewhere off the Japanese coast, no doubt, there are multiple archaeological sites that were once home to these forgotten peoples, now drowned beneath the waters that rose at the end of the Ice Age. Unfortunately, these areas also formed much of the flat plains that afforded hunting opportunities for big game: the grasslands where the ancient Jōmon people once hunted bison, for example, are now beneath the sea.

Their descendants wandered inland, into the river valleys and the coasts. In the far north of Honshū, Aomori Bay offered a vast foraging area for crustaceans, fish, and seaweed. In the south, the straits between the islands of Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū formed an idyllic Inland Sea, protected from storms but rich in marine life. The currents forced through these passages sometimes created treacherous whirlpools—in Japanese, naruto—but otherwise the Inland Sea was, and still remains, a beautiful patch of gentle water, scattered with green islands.

This protected waterway has had a powerful influence on the development of the Japanese state, encouraging marine commerce and transport links. Where there are fishermen there are fishing boats, and where there are boats there are easy links to transport produce and goods to the next island and across the horizon.

Excavations of ancient graves find bodies dusted with red ochre (an adornment mentioned in some Chinese sources), and an aristocratic class of women wearing single-piece shell bracelets too tight to be removed and too delicate to allow for the possibility of manual labor. Whoever these women were, they presumably donned their bracelets in childhood and left them on permanently thereafter, suggesting a class of priestesses or shamans who were not expected to hunt or gather.

Many of the adult bodies seem to have had certain teeth removed—four lower incisors and two lower canines, possibly at the time of marriage or at several ritual occasions in maturity. Others had forked incisions in their teeth, seemingly filed in particular patterns to denote a tribal association or relationship.

Ceramics remain one of the main means of examining a prehistoric society; although complete artifacts rarely survive, their shards are remarkably hard-wearing. The early Japanese left astonishingly beautiful pots and figurines marked with rope-like patterns or multiple string-like rows of rolled clay. In 1877, the archaeologist Edward Morse described his findings of such prehistoric Japanese pottery as “cord-marked”—translated into Japanese as “Jōmon,” this became the standard term use for the dominant culture of the Japanese islands from the end of the last Ice Age until around 300 BCE.

These pots may have flourished among the Jōmon people because of the climate, as the cooler conditions of the Younger Dryas of around 10,000 BCE forced them to store large quantities of acorns, nuts, and berries for winter food. By the later Jōmon period, there is evidence of trade between isolated communities. Commodities traveled far from their place of origin, at first in long, thin dugout canoes—examples have been found that were three meters (10 feet) long and barely half a meter (1.5 feet) wide. A fashion for chunky jade beads spread across the north, while multiple tribes began using obsidian arrowheads and scrapers, gaining the sharp volcanic glass from three main sites in the south, central, and northern regions. Tribes far inland were found to have dined occasionally on swordfish. The remains of bears have also been found in Jōmon sites—Jōmon archers are believed to have used arrows poisoned with aconite to bring down larger prey.

Today’s Japanese archaeologists twitch at the term “hunter-gatherer.” They don’t like the implication of rootless foraging that the phrase inevitably evokes, arguing instead that even the early Jōmon appear to have been far more organized. Living in a realm of relative abundance, they enjoyed a semi-sedentary existence in villages, but headed outward on “collecting” expeditions in multiple directions, depending on the time of year and the food that was in season. These goods were then stored in their distinctive pots. The Jōmon people appear to have undertaken limited horticulture, but nothing so serious or widespread as to be called farming.

It is said that the First Emperor of China had heard stories of legendary isles of the immortals found somewhere to the east of his realm. According to several courtiers and self-appointed experts, the secret of eternal life was waiting somewhere in that direction. However, only qualified wizards, pure youths, and maidens could approach these hallowed lands.

Determined to grab the elixir of eternal life for himself, the First Emperor ordered the oddest of colonial enterprises—a flotilla crewed by a thousand virgins, which sailed away from the Chinese coast sometime around 212 BCE. They were turned back by sea monsters—or so claimed their untrustworthy leader, Xufu. When the First Emperor eventually heard this excuse, he sailed for a while along the Chinese coast, standing at the prow of his ship with a crossbow, presumably hoping to harpoon any unlucky whales. Xufu’s virgin fleet set off again two years later, sailing into the sunrise, never to be seen again.

There is no direct evidence that the sailors of the virgin fleet—if it even ever existed—reached Japan. If they did, they would have cut a strange dash amid the tribes of the later Jōmon period. But the story of the First Emperor’s venture has often excited Asian novelists and poets, who have wondered if one of the many tribes that made up ancient Japan was really a Chinese colony.

Sometime after the era of the First Emperor, the gazetteer known as The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing) made what may have been the first written reference to the land of Wa, somewhere out in the northeastern sea beyond what is now known as Korea. This claim sits amid a bunch of “here-be-dragons”-type suppositions, including giant crabs, a salamander with a human face, and a tribe of mer-people that apparently lived in the ocean nearby. However, the term Wa would come to be used to refer to the Japanese islands for the next few centuries.

There has been much speculation about the origins of this name, including some fanciful ideas: that it was a mistranslation of Japanese attempts to say “our country” (wa ga kuni); that it is a mangling of the name of Duke Ngwa, a legendary chieftain sent from what is now the Shanghai region to colonize the seas; or that it is perhaps intended to mean “vassal.” However, the most likely interpretation is that the Chinese intended “Wa” to mean the land of “dwarves”—a reference to the small stature of the indigenous people, particularly from the lofty perspective of their newly arrived rulers.

Beyond the archaeological record, our understanding of the Japanese past largely drops out of the sky in the early 700s CE, when courtiers collaborated on two documents designed to replace lost archives—the Kojiki (Account of Ancient Matters), and the Nihongi or Nihon-shoki (Chronicles of Japan). There were earlier histories, but they were burned during a palace coup, and these more recent books were attempts to both reconstruct the lost information and redact the parts of it that did not serve the rulers’ agenda. We deal with their annalistic materials—lists of rulers, wars, and real-world events—in the next chapter, but their accounts of Japan’s mythical past most likely reflect distant and garbled retellings of the beliefs of the earliest inhabitants.

“Thus,” wrote the compilers of the Kojiki, “though the world’s beginnings are far-off and distant, early sages speak of an age where spirits were born and people first established.”

In the beginning, they say, there was formless chaos, from which the two opposing principles, Heaven and Earth, separated. Some unexplained interaction of these primordial forces created the first gods. There is a reed-like line between them, implied by the rotation of the Pole Star about its axis, and from this line came shadowy early super-beings. From them, somehow, comes a brother-sister pairing of the gods Izanagi (the Beckoner) and Izanami (the Beckoness). Standing on the bridge between Heaven and Earth, they churn the waters of the sea with the tip of their jewelled spear. The first islands form from the sacred waters that drop from the tip, and the couple descends to live there.

Very quickly, they realize that their bodies are different, and seek to cancel out these differences by sleeping together. They arrange a marriage ceremony in which they approach each other in a circle around the pillar of heaven (central roof-posts being a feature of Yayoi-period architecture) and greet each other.

Their first two children are deformed and disowned. They burn bones to attract the advice of their divine ancestors, and are told that Izanami has botched the ceremony by speaking first—something a woman should never do. They restage the ritual, this time with Izanagi speaking first, and the happy couple’s union produces a set of islands, seemingly a prehistoric rundown of Kyūshū and its environs, the Inland Sea and the lower part of Honshū. In addition to their brood of geographical features, they also spawn a number of gods (kami). The last is the personification of fire, which kills Izanami in childbirth.

Death in the time of the gods is not necessarily a permanent condition, however. Even Chinese chroniclers in the Dark Ages noticed the odd Japanese custom of leaving a body in state for ten days on the off chance that it might spring back to life. Resolving to retrieve his wife from Yomi, the land of the dead, Izanagi travels there, only for her to tell him that he is too late. (The name Yomi, meaning “Yellow Springs,” suggests perhaps a volcanic region of sulfurous pools, but is also a cognate with a similar Chinese name for the underworld, and so may be a mainland import.) The dead may only be retrieved from Yomi if they have never eaten its food, but Izanami has already dined. Refusing to take her word for it, Izanagi lights a magical torch, which reveals his wife’s body already crawling with maggots, and her flesh peeling off to create the eight deities of thunder.

Izanagi flees, pursued first by hags sent by his wife, then by warriors of the undead, then by the eight gods of thunder, and finally by Izanami herself. He flings away his clothes and possessions, creating many new landmarks in what are now forgotten or disappeared places. At the gateway to the underworld, he rolls a boulder in front of the entrance, shutting his wife within and leading to an unholy spousal row.

She threatens that if he blocks her path, she will curse a thousand mortals to die every day. He counters that he will arrange fifteen hundred births a day to hold her off, thereby establishing the cycle of human life and the growth of human society.

And so Izanagi is a bachelor once more, still shedding gods like dandruff, particularly when he bathes to wash away the taint of the underworld. He washes his eyes in a stream, for example, creating the sun goddess Amaterasu (Heaven Shines) and the moon god Tsu-kiyomi (Moon Counting). And he blows his nose, creating a whole host of new troubles by making the storm god, Susano’o (Rushing Raging Man).

A possible confusion over the nature of such gods survives today as a pun in Japanese, where kami means both “god” (written with a word imported from China) and “above.” But in the Ainu language—which is spoken today only among the people of Hokkaidō, but was once possibly spoken substantially further to the south—the very similar word kamuy also means “above,” and is used to describe tribal totems. It seems that the confused tale of Japan’s time of gods may indeed represent a hodgepodge of origin myths from assimilated local tribes, whose odd geographic features, totems, and guardian deities have been coopted into a sprawling, ever-growing narrative. Some of the names may even refer to places in what is now Korea, thereby making them impossible to find on a map of Japan.

In any case, the tale goes on: the sun and moon fall out when the latter murders a minor goddess of food, separating day and night thereafter. Izanagi himself fades from the story after he is last seen arguing with Susano’o, the Rushing Raging Man, over his responsibilities. Susano’o, like Izanagi’s other children, has been given a realm to rule over, but instead sits weeping because he wishes to meet his mother. Banished by Izanagi, Susano’o stops off to see his sister on his way out, leading to a contest with the sun goddess over who can create the most divinities. Although this appears at first to be good-natured and cordial, before long Susano’o is acting like the very worst of divine siblings—letting horses run wild on his sister’s rice paddies, shitting under the throne in her palace just before the sacred time of harvesting first fruits, and in a final indignity, ripping a hole in the roof of her weaving hall and throwing in the flayed corpse of a pony.

As one well might, the sun goddess Amaterasu flees into seclusion, shutting herself away in a cave and plunging the world into darkness. The various thousands of deities assemble in panic and try to lure her out of the cave, hanging a sacred mirror on a nearby tree along with a comma-shaped jewel, and performing several rituals that mean nothing to today’s readers but may evoke some half-remembered ceremony of olden times. Considering that this mirror and jewel (or their more modern facsimiles) are two of Japan’s three sacred treasures, it is likely that the tale of the disappearing sun goddess reflects a disaster in ancient Japan—an eruption, an eclipse, or perhaps even 536 CE, the year without a summer—which obliged the various contending tribes of indigenous and newcomer peoples to collaborate. Notably, the several contradictory accounts contained in the Nihongi do not merely name the gods and their various methods, but annotate them with the family names of their descendants at the Japanese court in the 700s, when the tale was written down.

Eventually, Amaterasu is lured out by the raucous shouts that greet a lascivious dance performed by the Terrible Female of Heaven. Wondering what could possibly be so interesting in the world, since she is no longer in it, Amaterasu pokes her head out of the cave and is swiftly dragged into the open. The gods tie a sacred cord to her that will prevent her from going back into the cave, and the sun is no longer able to disappear.

Susano’o is censured and banished for his acts—hardly much of a punishment, as he was already leaving when he stopped in to see Amaterasu in the first place. Not to be outdone, he kills a fertility goddess as he sets off, scattering the ground with grains, which suggests at least part of the story had its origin in the cycle of the seasons. He then descends to earth, where he runs into an old couple who offer him the last surviving one of their eight daughters if he will slay the eight-headed, eight-tailed dragon that has killed all the others. Susano’o sets a trap by leaving out strong rice wine that has been brewed eight times, which gets the dragon so drunk that the god is able to defeat it. While ripping open its corpse, he finds a sword embedded in its tail—the Sword of the Gathering of Clouds of Heaven—which he presents to his sister Amaterasu by some way of apology.

And so the stories go on, in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, with multiple generations of begettings and begats as the descendants of these early gods feud and forage, make love and make babies. It does not take much healthy cynicism to see in the stories a recurring and universal motif of tribes jostling for resources and supremacy, and legitimizing their victories in retrospect by claiming to enjoy the favor of the gods.

Amaterasu’s grandson Ninigi, whose full name translates as “Truly Winning Have I Won with Rushing Might Ruling Grand Rice Ears of Heaven,” is sent down to rule the entire land, bearing sacred treasures to prove he is divine—the Sword of the Gathering of Heaven, the mirror that once captured the light of Amaterasu herself, and a comma-shaped jewel—the significance of which remains unclear. There are some more couplings and plighting of troths, and three generations later, it is Ninigi’s descendant, Jinmu, who is recorded in the annals as the first emperor of Japan.

Jinmu, it was said, was born on the southwestern isle of Kyūshū, and began a long march eastward along the coast of the Inland Sea in search of a place that would be more suitable for ruling the whole archipelago. With the aid of a three-legged crow sent down by Amaterasu to guide him, he finds a wondrous paradise—a verdant plain backed by marvelous hills, rich in fruits and games, and with ample room for expansion. This is Yamato, the “Gateway to the Mountains” and the heartland of the emperors.

The stories of Jinmu, as recorded in the Nihongi, are themselves echoes of Stone Age folktales, complete with tribal chants celebrating the crushing of enemy skulls with rocks and the subhuman status of the hero’s “Shrimp Barbarian” foes. Jinmu himself springs into song to inspire his men, but it is not clear if he is composing new war chants or is simply the first to be recorded performing verses that date even further back into ancient times.

In a sense, only the religious elements of prehistoric Japan endure in some form today. Many grave mounds still exist, often in incongruous locations—little green hillocks of woodland shoved in the middle of a shopping district or housing estate. Certain beliefs also appear to have survived in some form down through the centuries, in the form of Japan’s indigenous religion of Shintō, “the Way of the Gods.”

We should be careful not to see prehistorical parallels when they are not necessarily there—many elements of modern Shintō, including the very idea that it is an organized “religion,” are relatively recent innovations. Still alive in modern Shintō is the sense that human beings are closely connected to the sacred: daily life is steeped in portents and intimations of the divine; shrines persist in the middle of bustling shopping districts; one rarely has to wander far from the roadside before bumping into a rock tied with sacred rope or some similar such indicator of reverence for nature spirits. Shintō is often confused, even by the Japanese themselves, with folk traditions specific to particular locales, associated with local landmarks or the marking of the seasons of the agricultural year. Other superstitions and events lift—inadvertently or otherwise—elements of Buddhist belief.

Shintō—at least the uses to which it was put by the editors of the Kojiki and Nihongi—is more than a mythology. Its beliefs remained a central underpinning of the Japanese nation until 1945, and are still implicit in many rituals performed by Japan’s ceremonial head of state, the emperor. New emperors still offer a sheaf of rice to Amaterasu, and incumbent emperors annually offer harvest donations to the gods in general.

Many of Shintō’s nature gods were reinterpreted with the advent of Buddhism in the medieval period, reimagined as Japanese incarnations of Buddhist saints. There has certainly been a degree of ad-mixture at a folk level, and many Shintō shrines offer protective amulets or wooden prayer boards (ema) in return for “donations” by visitors who were once called pilgrims but who are increasingly regarded and treated as mere tourists. Visit a Shintō shrine today and you will see visitors washing their hands at an entrance spring, clapping their hands together to startle away evil spirits, and offering prayers for a variety of ancient and modern concerns: lost objects, safe childbirth, cures for disease and infertility, success in education or a career. They might even offer a donation for the chance to draw a prophetic message or omen written on a ticket or a slip of wood.

At certain crucial moments in Japanese history, Shintō has been invoked as an element of Japanese culture that is inarguably home-grown. Whenever foreign influences loom, be they Buddhist scriptures or Christian preachers, or even the onset of the modern world itself, Shintō is a fallback position. It arose in Japan; its stories relate to Japanese folk beliefs and geography. It is manifest in weathered ropes binding rocks; wooden wands decorated with paper leaves; ancient trees and sacred gardens; and in the great mountains that loom in the hinterland. A poem from the time of the composition of the Kojiki and Nihongi offered praise to an unidentified sovereign, expressing a wish for eternal peace with an unscientific, deeply devout Shintō sensibility of the natural world growing in stature with age:

May your reign

Last for a thousand upon eight thousand years

Until mere pebbles

Grow into mighty rocks

Thick with moss.

A thousand years later, it was adopted as the lyrics to the Japanese national anthem, which takes its name from the opening line: Kimigayo. Every day, Japanese schoolchildren, sportsmen, and politicians rise to their feet and sing lyrics invested with an ancient, atavistic power. Emperor Jinmu’s three-legged crow still flutters on the flag of the Japanese Football Association—an extra limb presumably being a great advantage in soccer.