Note 18 — Chapter II
Reading edition
The Japanese, of even the more educated classes—teachers and others—will say in all seriousness that their ancestors “came from heaven.” The ancestors of all other races they consider to have been earth-born. On this assumption they base their conception of the superiority of the Japanese race to all other races. There is a mountain in the southern part of Japan, near Kagoshima, to which the Japanese point as the actual spot on which their first ancestors alighted when they descended from heaven.