Indeed, it is evident that some of the leading
kami were born in Korea or Tartary.
Then as now the people in Japan loved nature, and were quickly sensitive
to her beauty and profoundly in sympathy with her varied phenomena. In
the mediaeval ages, Japanese Wordsworths are not unknown.[13] Sincerely
they loved nature, and in some respects they seemed to understand the
character of their country far better than the alien does or can. Though
a land of wonderful beauty, the Country of Peaceful Shores is enfolded
in powers of awful destructiveness. With the earthquake and volcano, the
typhoon and the tidal wave, beauty and horror alternate with a swiftness
that is amazing.
Probably in no portion of the earth are the people and the land more
like each other or apparently better acquainted with each other. Nowhere
are thought and speech more reflective of the features of the landscape.
Even after ten centuries, the Japanese are, in temperament, what the
Kojiki reveals them to have been in their early simplicity. Indeed, just
as the modern Frenchman, down beneath his outward environments and his
habiliments cut and fitted yesterday, is intrinsically the same Gaul
whom Julius Caesar described eighteen hundred years ago, so the gentleman
of T[=o]ki[=o] or Ki[=o]to is, in his mental make-up, wonderfully like
his ancestors described by the first Japanese Stanley, who shed the
light of letters upon the night of unlettered Japan and darkest Dai
Nippon.
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