CHAPTER VIII.
When day broke on the morning of the 8th July we got our first sight of the “terra incognita”—the hermetic land—the land which had been invaded but never conquered—hence called the “virgin empire.” The high, bold shores of Japan were before us—the “kingdom of the origin of the sun.”
Japan has been continually spoken of as the unknown land. It is difficult to see with what correctness this designation should have been given it, unless those countries only are known upon which the physical eye of some numbers may have rested. Taking the extant information at command, it can very properly be said, with Macfarlane, that we “know more of the Japanese than we knew of the Turks a hundred years ago;” and he might have added, than other nations knew of America, though discovered half a century earlier than Japan.
The works on the country are numerous; among them those of the Jesuits, and the German and Swedish medical officers of the Dutch prison factory at Dezima. The printed data of the former, and the archives of the Jesuit headquarters at Rome and at other places, could furnish the earliest and most thorough information. “Les Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses,” or the pages of Charlevoix, which tell of the labors of the Jesuit pioneer missionary in Japan, Francis Xavier,—make it anything but an unknown land.
Then there are the books, whose size might well deter the stoutest, but whose pages would well repay the industrious search of the inquirer—the product of the close observation and assiduous notation of Kœmpfer,[1] Thunberg, Siebold; and the Dezima Opperhoofds—Titsinghe, Doeff, Meylan, and Warehouse Master Fischer, in lesser size; the quaint accounts of old William Adams, pilot, and Captain Saris, Englishmen; the work of the Russian Golownin, as far as he could gather information, while undergoing his hard but perhaps justly retributive imprisonment in Matsmai; the works of Sir Stamford Raffles; Reports of the East India Company; the pages of the Asiatic Journal, &c.
With such sources of information as these, it would be a piece of affectation to suppose the majority of the reading community without some knowledge of the early and past history of Japan; but for such as may possibly have not given it any attention, it may be well to give a hurried glance at the early history of the country, as derived from compilations of the before-cited authorities, and also down to the condition of the empire at the time of our visit—which is to be found in a fine synoptical article which appeared some time since in a foreign Quarterly Review—without further acknowledgment.
Well, then, to begin with the mythological. As the Japanese have it, their origin was superhuman, and their primitive history is in this wise: From primeval chaos arose a self-created supreme God, throned in the highest heaven, to whom, with some brevity, is given the name, Ameno-mi-naka-nusimo-kami. What then existed of a universe was governed by seven celestial gods who next arose. The last of these, not admiring the celibacy of his predecessors, with whom the goddesses had dwelt as sisters, took unto himself a wife. The marital state, it appears, had the effect of awakening his latent energy, and one day he said to his spouse: “There should be somewhere a habitable earth; let us seek it under the waters that are boiling beneath us.”
Like Ithuriel, he possessed a spear, and thrusting it into the waters he then withdrew it. The drops which fell from the spear—which, perhaps, was weeping the puncture which he had given the aqueous element—like the tears of Niobe, became solidified, and thus came into existence the present insulated empire.
Others, however, not having the fear of Japanese gods before their eyes, have a perverseness in the belief, that the receding waters of the deluge left bare Japan, or that it may have been since upheaved by volcanic action from the mighty deep.
The Adam of Japan was Ten Sio Dai Dsin. From him sprang the nation; though Syn Mou is represented as the founder of the empire. The physical conformation of the Japanese indicates their Mongolian origin.