I it must be admitted that the women do | back to the year 660 B.C. for the origin of Some hundred and fifty pages of Sir The elaborate legal code known as the Taihô Riyô,* said to have been promulgated in the districts within the immediate rule of the mikado in the eighth century, is Chinese in style, terminology, and substance. Up to the commencement of the current decade, the civilization of the Japanese was almost entirely Chinese in character; and even at the present day the acceptance of Western civilization is principally confined to a comparatively small section of the ruling class, the members of which are with few exceptions ci-devant Samurai. The Samurai are probably the descendants, with more or less admixture of aboriginal blood, of the primitive Chinese or Korean immigrants; the number of Chinese words, altered only in pronunciation, received into the language, especially into the book and newspaper language, daily increases, and it is still doubtful whether silent Chinese influence will not carry the day against at least the moral and spiritual forces of European civilization. The almost com * An interesting account of this, by Mr. C. J. Tarring, will be found in Vol. III., P. 2, of the Transac * Dobell's Annual Reports on Diseases of the Chest, tions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. (London: Trüb1878. ner and Co.) furnished as "alms," influence and support were purchased, the priests of the existing religions were insulted and attacked, their idols destroyed, their shrines and temples manded to become Roman Catholics by their burnt. The people were in many places comconverted lords, the alternative being banishment and loss of all they possessed. plete absence of any traces of an in- | With the doubloons of Spain and Portugal, digenous Japanese civilization, and even of any noteworthy development of the civilization introduced from the Middle Kingdom, is a remarkable feature in the history of the Japanese people, and one that should be carefully borne in mind in estimating the national character, and in drawing conclusions as to the real meaning and probable outcome of the political and social changes now in progress. For the story of the medieval wars of the Hei and Gen, of the usurpation of Yoritomo, the founder of the Shôgunate, and of the deeds of Nobunaga, Taikosama and the great Iyeyasu or Gongen Sama, the first of the Tokugawa dynasty, and the deified hero of the splendid temples and shrines at Nikkô sources of in And (p. 296): It appears beyond all doubt certain that, as the Roman Catholic missionaries made progress in Japan, they became less wise, less prudent, and less just in the course which they pursued, they or their converts making war upon the Buddhist priests, whom they called devils, overthrowing their gods and temples, instant converts to Christianity or to take and commanding the people either to become themselves off from their families, their homes, and all they possessed. The italics in the last extract are our own. numerable legends, romances, and dramas we must refer our readers to the sixth and several following chapters of Sir E. Reed's first volume. To ourselves the most interesting portion of Japanese his- The writings of Charlevoix, the corretory is the Christian episode of the six-spondence of the missionaries preserved teenth and seventeenth centuries. We in the "Lettres Edifiantes," and the varialtogether dissent from the harsh judg-ous authorities summed up in M. Léon ment Sir E. Reed has deemed it necessary Pagès' exhaustive and easily accessible to pass upon early Christianity in Japan. We have no great sympathy with Catholicism, but we have a regard for justice, and justice has not been meted out to the pioneer missionaries of that faith in the Sun-Source Empire. No records left behind by the native Christians of that age have come to light, and the only indigenous accounts of their doings that appear to have been preserved are the compilations of the enemies and persecutors of their faith. Quoting from one of these writers, Sir E. Reed says of the early missionaries: "Histoire de la Chrétienté au Japon," demonstrate with abundant clearness the utter falsity of these monstrous accusations, brought by Japanese authors translations of extracts from whose works seem alone to have been consulted by Sir E. Reed - against the Christian fathers. The missionaries squabbled among themselves, and, doubtless, were not always wise in their policy, or prudent in their fervor. It is possible, too, that the converted lords may occasionally have compelled their vassals to adopt the "evil doctrine," though no single instance of such compulsion can, we believe, be found in the reports sent to Rome by the missionaries during the hundred years that Christianity was more or less tolerated by the government of the Shôguns, and it cannot be supposed that facts were wilfully kept back or carelessly passed over by the fathers, that would have testified to the success of their operations. It was not until 1614, considerably more than half a century after the visit of Xavier in 1548 or 1549, that any active measures were taken against the Christians, less on account of any positive doctrines they professed, than because they disbelieved "in the gods and Buddha," which, being interpreted, probably meant at bottom merely a disinclination to pay Shintô and Buddhist tithes and church-rates. The proclamations of ོ༢ ... ported the unifying policy of the Shôguns, the persecutions that culminated in the massacre of Shimabara in 1637 of the Hizen insurgents, whose rising is said by a native writer "to have been mainly caused by the bad government of the reigning prince," * would probably never have defaced the pages of Japanese history. The persecuting spirit lingered down to our own times. It was only in April 1873 that the notice boards at the entrances of villages and towns prohibiting the "evil sect," whose doctrines, by the way, Sir E. Reed likens to those of Buddhism, were removed. In the previ Iyeyasu, of which an interesting sum- there existed in the beginning one God, and nobody and nothing besides .. whose name signifies THE LORD OF THE CENTRE OF HEAVEN ; and next, and before anybody or anything else entered upon the scene, appeared [two other gods, their] names respectively signifying LOFTY PRODUCER, and DIVINE PRoducer. But these are merely synonymous epithets of the sun, and the Japanese originally worshipped, as they still worship, the sun, as the most prominent natural object and as the source of all life and light. This is not monotheism; at first probably the sun was reverenced purely as a natural object; the anthropic ideas involved in the epithets we have cited had a much later birth. Whatever remains Shintô may possess of an indigenous religion, it cannot be doubted that, in the form under which we know it, doctrines akin to those of Taoism have entered largely into its composition. The myths of Shintô, though Christianity in Japan, by J. H. Gubbins, of Translation of Mr. E. Satow, Japanese secretary H.B.M.'s Consular Service, Japan. Transactions of the Association Society of Japan, vol. vi., pt. 1. to the British Legation in Japan. Thou shalt honor the Gods and love thy Thou shalt clearly understand the principle of will of his Court. The political ingenuity of the last commandment, especially of the concluding portion of it, is amusing. not more repulsive, as Sir E. Reed justly guage and literature of Japan is full of observes, than those of Greece, have curious information. True, it is not free found no Homer to enshrine them in from errors, but Sir E. Reed does not song, and it must be confessed that it pretend to possess even a rudimentary would be difficult to extract from most of knowledge of the language, and his misthem any poetic meaning or to invest takes are, for the most part, not of a serithem with any attractiveness for the Eu- ous character. For some of them, indeed, ropean mind. A considerable number of he is not primarily responsible, as, for inthem are collected in these volumes, to stance, the statement made on the authorthe pages of which we must refer the ity of Captain Brinkley, R. A., for many reader for examples of the mythological years professor of mathematics in one of inventiveness of the ancient Japanese. the government colleges in Tôkiyô, that Although Buddhism is tolerated, the offi- "twelve or thirteen thousand characters cial religion is a sort of improved Shin- must be stowed away in the memory, tôism, of which the following three com- beyond the reach of time and the necesmandments, promulgated by the govern- sity of revision, before the young Japanese ment in 1872, form the basis. can fairly start in pursuit of science." masters of more than five thousand charVery few Japanese, in point of fact, are acters; with three thousand, almost any book, save such technical terminology as it may contain, may be easily deciphered, and it is wonderful how far a knowledge of even fifteen hundred will carry the European student of Japanese literature.* The system of writing, however, is sufficiently complicated to justify its being Shintô, whatever may be its value from characterized by Captain Brinkley as "a a philosophical point of view, has un- terrible blemish; even the natives spend doubtedly been of immense service in pre- from five to seven years in acquiring a serving the unity of the Japanese Empire sufficient command of it. It has reduced through many vicissitudes. Its cardinal a noble tongue to a dissonant, brokendoctrine, the divine origin and absolute down Chinese jargon, and maintains the supremacy of the mikado, has never been Japanese- if not to their own harm, to lost sight of, even in the most troublous that of the rest of the world in an intimes; and Yoritomo, Nobunaga, Hide- tellectual isolation through which only yoshi and Iyeyasu, though they arrogated scholars favored with leisure and posto themselves all executive power, never sessed of great patience and enthusiasm failed to recognize the religious and legal can ever hope to win. It is almost wholly pre-eminence of the mikado, through this difficulty of mere decipherment, that whom, and through whom alone, the gods prevents foreign residents, though well communicated with the people and acquainted with the spoken language, watched over their safety and welfare. from being capable of reading "a news Nor has it fallen before the learning and paper article, a book, or a letter addressed influence of the Buddhist clergy, who, to them," and not, as our author appears indeed, do not seem at any time to have to suppose, the difference that exists besought its downfall, but rather to have en-tween the written and colloquial vocabucroached upon its domain and to have found in it a sort of natural, as opposed to a revealed Buddhism, more or less obscured by superstitious practices. The mikado himself was often, if not always, more or less of a Buddhist, and the Japanese generally appear to have viewed the *In the Chinese version of the Bible, and 27 other "way of Buddha" and "the way of the books printed at their press, the Shanghai Presbyterian Mission employed 1,100,000 characters, but only 5,150 gods," as equally certain paths to happi- different characters. In the translation of the Scrip ness and to heaven; the latter route, per-tures 4,141 different characters were used. In the above haps, being rather preferred by the 28 works 13 characters were found to occur over 10,000 times each, 229 over a thousand times each, and 3,715 peasantry, and the former by such of the characters (many probably as phonetics to render proper higher classes of society as were not names) less than 25 times each, showing that with a knowledge of some 1,500 characters and their com Confucianists. pounds the whole of the 28 works might be deciphered with little difficulty. Sir E. Reed's disquisition on the lan laries and styles. Pure Japanese is, as ... 22 than another: in that tongue, so different | the construction as to rest the power of We cannot accord to the literature, properly so called, of Japan, any very high rank. It is at best an echo of that of China. Some of the medieval romances are pretty, especially that known as Taketori Monogatari, "The Tale of Taketori;" and many of the poems in the ancient collection (tenth century, A.D.) called the Manyoshin (“The Myriad Leaves ") have a certain quaint beauty, when not disfigured by puns or meaning less " 'pillow words," that eke out the metre, such as it is, but not the sense. Sir E. Reed passes a high but wellmerited eulogium upon the present Cabinet, of the members of which he gives brief but interesting biographies. With the exception of the premier, Sanjô, and his vice, Iwakura, who are kugè, they are all members of the Samurai class, of respectable but not noble lineage. Most of them were, up to 1868 or even later, among the bitterest opponents of Western civilization: they have, however, long since fully recognized either its superiority or the necessity of its adoption, and by the wisdom and moderation of their rule won the admiration and regard no less of foreigners than of their countrymen. Their task, however, is still far from being altogether an easy one. They are obliged to defer more or less to the prejudices of an immense army of bureaucrats, in whose ranks the more energetic or more fortunate of the Samurai have found refuge, while the poverty and ignorance of the masses constitute serious difficulties in the way of effecting much-needed reforms. No constitutional means have yet been devised, either for the sufficient expression of such intelligent public sentiment as exists in the country, or for the peaceful accomplishment of such ministerial changes as may from time to time become necessary to ensure a due representation of the best public opinion in the councils of the mikado. From the upper ranks of the bureaucracy there too often mounts an unwholesome atmosphere of intrigue, in which healthy, governmental action becomes impossible, and on the whole it seems that the future of Japan can only be permanently assured by so remodelling The kuge were nobles of the mikado's court, of higher rank but less power than the daimiyô or territorial nobility, who were supposed to own the suzerainty of the Shôgun, and support of the commonalty, enlightened and instructed by a free and wellinformed press. How this reform is to be accomplished, to what extent its accomplishment is possible, are difficult problems, which we do not pretend to solve, and which in all probability will not be solved unless and until some native political genius shall appear on the scene, adequate to the task and sufficiently favored by circumstances to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. The government is in reality an oligarchy, in form a simple despotism, tempered by a Supreme Council, consisting of the prime minister and two vice prime ministers, together with the heads of the various departments of State. The emperor is a man of largeminded and liberal views, and deservedly popular with all classes. Sir E. Reed, who had the honor of a personal interview with his Majesty, speaks of the descendant of the sun-goddess in terms of enthusiasm which the recent history of Japan fully justifies. The kuwôgd, or empress, has won the love of the people by the sweetness and affability of her demeanor, and especially by the interest she exhibits in the education and elevation of her sex. During the last ten years the government has put an end to many abuses and accomplished great positive reforms, but much yet remains to be done. Among the more pressing needs are the remodelling of the constitution upon an extended representative basis, the enactment of a more humane and scientific penal code, of a public criminal procedure, and of a code of civil law. The position of women, too, is still deplorably low, and complete emancipation from their present state of humiliating thraldom to their male relatives is an indispensable condition of any permanent social progress. The existing laws or rather customs of marriage, succession, and adoption, require a radical reform, and we trust that the government, with the assistance of the public, may be able to abolish the "terrible blemish" of Chinese caligraphy which throttles, imprisons, and isolates the intellect of the nation. With questions of religion the government does not appear in the least to concern itself. Christianity has full toleration accorded to it, and Buddhism is raising its head again, while the official Shintô is dying of inanition. The members of the higher ranks of the bureaucracy - the real rulers of the |