lder words were disappearing, and with them many of
the old traditions. Temmu saw that if the work of compilation was
abandoned solely to princely and official litterateurs, they would
probably sacrifice on the altar of the ideograph much that was
venerable and worthy to be preserved. He therefore himself undertook
the collateral task of having the antique traditions collected and
expurgated, and causing them to be memorized by a chamberlain, Hiyeda
no Are, a man then in his twenty-eighth year, who was gifted with
ability to repeat accurately everything heard once by him. Are's mind
was soon stored with a mass of ancient facts and obsolescent
phraseology, but before either the task of official compilation or
that of private restoration had been carried to completion the
Emperor died (686), and an interval of twenty-five years elapsed
before the Empress Gemmyo, on the 18th of September, 711, ordered a
scholar, Ono Yasumaro, to transcribe the records stored in Are's
memory. Four months sufficed for the work, and on the 28th of
January, 712, Yasumaro submitted to the Throne the Kojiki (Records of
Ancient Things) which ranked as the first history of Japan, and which
will be here referred to as the Records.

THE NIHONGI AND THE NIHON SHOKI

It is necessary to revert now to the unfinished work of the classical
compilers, as they may be called, whom the Emperor Temmu nominated in
682, but whose labours had not been concluded when his Majesty died
in 686. There is no evidence that their task was immediately
continued in an organized form, but it is related that during the
reign of Empress Jito (690-696) further steps were taken to collect
historical materials, and that the Empress Gemmyo (708-715)--whom we
have seen carrying out, in 712, her predecessor Temmu's plan with
regard to Hiyeda no Are--added, in 714, two skilled litterateurs to
Temmu's classical compilers, and thus enabled them to complete their
task, which took the shape of a book called the Nihongi (Chronicle of
Japan).

This work, however, did not prove altogether satisfactory. It was
written, for the most part, with a script called the Manyo syllabary;
that is to say, with Chinese ideographs employed phonetically, and it
did not at all attain the literary standard of its Chinese prototype.
Therefore, the Empress entrusted to Prince Toneri and Ono Yasumaro
the task of revising it, and their amended manuscript, concluded in
720, received the name of Nihon Shoki