Whatever be the criticism on the chronicle _Kujiki_, there is no doubting the fact that the work of compiling a history was initiated in the reign of the Empress Suiko, and partly put into execution. Not only that. There might have been many other chronicles and historical manuscripts in existence anterior to the compilation of the _Nihongi_, and afterwards lost. In the _Nihongi_ are mentioned the names of the books which were consulted in the course of compilation. Among them may be found the names of several sets of the annals of a peninsular state called Kutara, various Chinese historical works, and a history of Japan written by a Korean priest. Some of the books are not named explicitly, and passages from them are cited as "from a book" merely, but we can easily perceive that they were mostly from Japanese records. So far I have spoken about chronicles which were compiled of set purpose as a record of the times and worthy to be called historical works. As to other kinds of manuscripts, for instance, various family records and fragmentary documents of various sorts, there might have been a considerable number of these, and it is probable that they were utilized by the compilers of the _Kojiki_ and of the _Nihongi_, though the latter mentions very few of such materials, and the former is entirely silent concerning its sources. The question then arises how this presumably large number of manuscripts came to be formed. We have no written character which may be called truly our own. All forms of the ideographs in use in our country were borrowed from China, intact or modified. And in ancient Japan an utter lack of knowledge of the Chinese characters prevailed for a long time throughout most classes of the people. If this were so, by whom were those documents transcribed? In the reign of the Emperor Richu, _circa_ 430 A.D., scribes were posted in each province to prepare archives, a fact which implies that the emperor and magistrates had their own scribes already. Who then were appointed as the scribes? To explain this I must turn for a while to the history of the Korean peninsula and its relations with China.