Kojiki. Records of Ancient Matters. Earliest Japanese history and mythology, prior to the influence of Chinese ideas. The Nihongi is a slighter later version done in the Chinese style. They are the two oldest Japanese histories.
The earliest official compilations of Japanese history, preserving the earliest Japanese history and mythology, prior to the influence of Chinese ideas. The Kojiki was probably finished in 712 AD. The Nihongi is a slighter later version done in the Chinese style.
"The Kojiki and Nihongi are the books which tell us of the invading god-emperor Jimmu. They even preserve the songs, the crudest of barbaric chants, which he and his followers are supposed to have sung. They also give a legendary account of the gods who had preceded Jimmu, and of the Mikados who succeeded him down to the time of the coming of the Chinamen.
Of these two ancient and highly honored books, the Kojiki is slightly the elder -- it was finished in AD 712 -- and is much the more Japanese. It devotes itself mainly to the gods, and tells of men only as they are god-men, related to the deities or inspired by them to compose poetry. For already the art of poetry, a peculiarly Japanese art quite unlike our Western ideas of poetry, was highly honored among the Mikado's followers. From the "Kojiki" therefore, Japan's oldest book, we get our clearest vision of the earlier barbaric ages and the earliest spirit of the Japanese.
The Nihongi, on the contrary, while almost as old as the Kojiki, is a wholly Chinese work. It reviews the same traditions as the Kojiki, but polishes them all, revises them to fit the newly acquired Chinese ideas. In short, it gives such an amazing Chinese twist to everything the Kojiki had told, that no student of human nature is likely to neglect the opportunity of comparing these two books. More clearly here than in any other words of Japan's present transformation, more clearly perhaps than anywhere else in the world, can we see an entire nation changing not only its outer garments, but its views, its ways of thought, almost its very soul."
