The Japanese themselves do not pretend that there is any native documentary evidence in support of their history at the date of Zinmu, and the best writers allow that no writings prior to the seventh century are authentic. The introduction of Chinese letters into Japan is generally attributed to Onin, a learned man who came from Corea about the year 285 A.D. But prior to the date of Onin, many of the names of offices and officers were Chinese. It is hardly credible that, with the communication which is known to have existed at different times between Japan and China, and also with Corea, there should have continued for so long a time such complete ignorance. More than one embassy had resided at the court of China for months. The Chinese annals speak of an embassy during the reign of the Han dynasty, A.D. 238, when China was divided into “three kingdoms.” The ruler of Woo, one of these three, proposed to invade Japan, but the expedition miscarried. Nearly two centuries before this, in A.D. 57, an embassy was sent from Japan to China by Sei nin, which arrived at the court of Kwang ou, of the Eastern Han dynasty, in the last year of his reign. It is unlikely that, residing as such an embassy must have done for a considerable time at the court of China, they should not have brought away some knowledge of letters or some instructors in reading and writing. This Corean, Onin, may have been brought over to replace or to reteach what had been lost: for in more recent times it is known that, after the long civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so little attention had been given to the instruction of youth that only two men were found in the empire competent to teach the written language. We may be permitted to believe that much of what became tradition had at one time been committed to writing, and that, corroborated as it is at some points by Chinese history, there is a foundation for much of that part of history subsequent to the time of Zinmu, for the support of which there existed, when writing recommenced, no documentary evidence. THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN The line of gods carried on through godlike mortal descendants was prolonged in ordinary mortals, the first of whom was Zinmu. It is of little consequence by whom this pedigree was written or invented. It evidently was solely written for the then _de facto_ rulers of the land. It does not pretend to deal with the people of Japan, or with the mode in which the peopling of the empire took place, but simply invents and details a divine pedigree for one family. At the time when this family is first heard of, the islands of Japan are acknowledged by Japanese historians to have been already peopled and divided into villages, each under some municipal rule.