Note (return) — Chapter III · - "THE KOJIKI" AND ITS TEACHINGS

All this has been solemnly taught by famous Shintō scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still practically promulgated in the polemic Shintō literature of to-day, even after the Kojiki has been studied and translated into European languages. The Kojiki shows that whatever the men may have been or done, the gods were abominably obscene, and both in word and deed were foul and revolting, utterly opposed in act to those reserves of modesty or standards of shame that exist even among the cultivated Japanese to-day.19 Even among the Ainos, whom the Japanese look upon as savages, there is still much of the obscenity of speech which belongs to all society20 in a state of barbarism; but it has been proved that genuine modesty is a characteristic of the Aino women.21 A literal English translation of the Kojiki, however, requires an abundant use of Latin in order to protect it from the grasp of the law in English-speaking Christendom. In Chamberlain's version, the numerous cesspools are thus filled up with a dead language, and the road is constructed for the reader, who likes the language of Edmund Spencer, of William Tyndale and of John Ruskin kept unsoiled.