s divided
during many centuries into three principalities whose records serve
as mutual checks. Finally, Korean historians do not make any such
demand upon our credulity as the Japanese do in the matter of length
of sovereigns' reigns. For example, while the number of successions
to the throne of Japan during the first four centuries of the
Christian era is set down as seven only, making fifty-six years the
average duration of a reign, the corresponding numbers for the three
Korean principalities are sixteen, seventeen, and sixteen,
respectively, making the average length of a reign from twenty-four
to twenty-five years. It is, indeed, a very remarkable fact that
whereas the average age of the first seventeen Emperors of Japan, who
are supposed to have reigned from 660 B.C. down to A.D. 399, was 109
years, this incredible habit of longevity ceased abruptly from the
beginning of the fifth century, the average age of the next seventeen
having been only sixty-one and a half years; and it is a most
suggestive coincidence that the year A.D. 461 is the first date of
the accepted Japanese chronology which is confirmed by Korean
authorities.

*Aston's essay on Early Japanese History

In fact, the conclusion is almost compulsory that Japanese authentic
history, so far as dates are concerned, begins from the fifth
century. Chinese annals, it is true, furnish one noteworthy and much
earlier confirmation of Japanese records. They show that Japan was
ruled by a very renowned queen during the first half of the third
century of the Christian era, and it was precisely at that epoch that
the Empress Jingo is related by Japanese history to have made herself
celebrated at home and abroad. Chinese historiographers, however, put
Jingo's death in the year A.D. 247, whereas Japanese annalists give
the date as 269. Indeed there is reason to think that just at this
time--second half of the third century--some special causes operated
to disturb historical coherence in Japan, for not only does Chinese
history refer to several signal events in Japan which find no place
in the latter's records, but also Korean history indicates that the
Japanese dates of certain cardinal incidents err by exactly 120
years. Two cycles in the sexagenary system of reckoning constitute
120 years, and the explanation already given makes it easy to
conceive the dropping of that length of time by recorders having only
tradition to guide them.

On the whole, whatever