Note 2 — Chapter LIV · CHŌ-SEN: A PROVINCE OF JAPAN.

This myth of Kija, as the actual founder of civilization east of the Yalu, took its literary form only in the eighth century, when the Coreans had become saturated with Chinese ideas. Then the peninsulars, made acquainted with Chinese historiography, and having but one model before them, faithfully followed it (as did the Japanese also), the Coreans surpassing even the greater nation in pride of antiquity and in the glorification of heroes, who loom up in vaster proportions according as the unrecorded centuries multiply and recede into the past. Historical science has already begun to change this perspective of antiquity as surely as hospitals have furnished object-lessons in the law of cause and effect. Corean gods and demons, more numerous even than old Japan’s mythical menagerie and pantheon, are being steadily banished to the realms of fairy-land.2