The student of Japanese history is confronted, at the outset, with a serious difficulty. In ancient times the Japanese had no literary script, so that all events had to be handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition. The art of writing was introduced into Japan, from China probably, in the latter part of the third century A. D.; but it was not used for recording events until the beginning of the fifth century. All these early records, moreover, were destroyed by fire; so that the only “reliance for information about ... antiquity” has to be placed in the _Kojiki_,[74] or “Records of Ancient Matters,” and the _Nihongi_,[75] or “Chronicles of Japan.” The former, completed in 712 A. D., is written in a purer Japanese style; the latter, finished in 720 A. D., is “much more tinctured with Chinese philosophy”; though differing in some details, they are practically concordant, and supply the data upon which the Japanese have constructed their “history.” It is thus evident that the accounts of the period before Christ must be largely mythological, and the records of the first four centuries of the Christian era must be a thorough mixture of fact and fiction, which it is difficult carefully to separate. [Illustration: ŌSAKA CASTLE] According to Japanese chronology, the Empire of Japan was founded by Jimmu Tennō in 660 B. C. This was when Assyria, under Sardanapalus, was at the height of its power; not long after the ten tribes of Israel had been carried into captivity, and soon after the reign of the good Hezekiah in Judah; before Media had risen into prominence; a century later than Lycurgus, and a few decades before Draco; and during the period of the Roman kingdom. But according to a foreign scholar who has sifted the material at hand, the first absolutely authentic date in Japanese history is 461 A. D.,[76]—just the time when the Saxons were settling in England. If, therefore, the Japanese are given the benefit of more than a century, there yet remains a millennium which falls under the sacrificial knife of the historical critic. But while we cannot accept unchallenged the details of about a thousand years, and cannot withhold surprise that even the Constitution of New Japan maintains the “exploded religious fiction” of the foundation of the empire, we must acknowledge that the Imperial family of Japan has formed the oldest continuous dynasty in the world, and can probably boast an “unbroken line” of eighteen or twenty centuries. 1. “_Divine Ages._” 2. _Prehistoric Period_ [660 B. C.—400 (?) A. D.].