Myth has charms that history lacks. History is stern, myth fanciful. History challenges the imagination, myth plays with it.

Island myths come readily to an island country. Japan has many. In the eighth-century chronicle ¡°Kojiki¡± we read, ¡°Hereupon all the heavenly deities commanded (the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami) to make, consolidate and give birth to this drifting land. Granting to them a heavenly jeweled spear, they thus deigned to charge them. So the two deities, standing upon the Floating Bridge of Heaven, pushed down the jeweled spear and stirred with it.¡± When they ¡°drew the spear up, the brine that dripped down from the end of the spear was piled up and became an island. This is the Island of Onogoro¡± ¨C proto-Japan.

And proto-Japan Japan remained, for millennium upon millennium, if by ¡°proto¡± we mean the state preceding civilization. The Jomon Period (c.10,000 B.C. to c.200 B.C.) was, if ¡°savage,¡± admirable in its way: peaceful as few ¡°savage¡± cultures are, sufficiently content with its condition to give the impression it didn¡¯t so much fail to rise to civilization as reject it as superfluous. Who needs it? Who needs writing, cities, agriculture, government and all the messy complications they bring? Hunting and gathering fed them, fertility and the worship of fertility spirits perpetuated them, an artistic bent produced clay figurines of such dazzling raw beauty that their remains astonish their posterity to this day, and on Jomon rolled, life toward its end very little different from it had been at its beginning 10,000 years earlier.