The mischievous Susanoō, so famous in the pre-historic legends, told in the Kojiki, half scamp, half benefactor, who planted all Japan with trees, brought the seeds from which they grew from Corea. His rescue of the maiden doomed to be devoured by the eight-headed dragon (emblem of water, and symbolical of the sea and rivers) reads like a gallant fellow saving one of the human beings who for centuries, until the now ruling dynasty abolished the custom, were sacrificed to the sea on the Corean coast fronting Japan. In Kiōto, on Gi-on Street, there is a temple which tradition declares was “founded in 656 A.D. by a Corean envoy in honor of Susanoō, to whom the name of Go-dzu Tenno (Heavenly King of Go-dzu) was given, because he was originally worshipped in Go-dzu Mountain in Corea.” Dogs are not held in any honor in Japan, as they were anciently in Kokorai. Except the silk-haired, pug-nosed, and large-eyed chin, which the average native does not conceive as canine, the dogs run at large, ownerless, as in the Levant; and share the work of street scavenging with the venerated crows. Yet there are two places of honor in which the golden and stone effigies of this animal—highly idealized indeed, but still inu—are enthroned. The ama-inu, or heavenly dogs, in fanciful sculpture of stone or gilt wood, represent guardian dogs. They are found in pairs guarding the entrances to miya or temples. As all miya (the name also of the mikado’s residence) were originally intended to serve as a model or copy of the palace of the mikado and a reminder of the divinity of his person and throne, it is possible that the ama-inu imitated the golden Corean dogs which support and guard the throne of Japan. Access to the shrine was had only by passing these two heavenly dogs. These creatures are quite distinct from the “dogs of Fo,” or the “lions” that flank the gateways of the magistrate’s office in China. Those who have had audience of the mikado in the imperial throne-room, as the writer had in January, 1873, have noticed at the foot of the throne, serving as legs or supports to the golden chair, on which His Majesty sits, two dogs sitting on their haunches, and upright on their forelegs. These fearful-looking creatures, with wide-open mouths, hair curled in tufts, especially around the front neck, and with tails bifurcated at their upright ends, are called “Corean dogs.” For what reason placed there we know not. It may be in witness of the conquest of Shinra by the empress Jingu, who called the king of Shinra “the dog of Japan,” or it may point to some forgotten symbolism in the past, or typify the vassalage of Corea—so long a fundamental dogma in Japanese politics. It is certainly strange to see this creature, so highly honored in Fuyu and dishonored among the vulgar in Japan, placed beneath the mikado’s throne.