The Mikado's Empire

extended travel were limited only by my duties. Nothing Japanese was foreign to me, from palace to beggar's hut. I lived in Dai Nippon during four of the most pregnant years of the nation's history. Nearly one year was spent alone in a daimiō's capital far in the interior, away from Western influence, when feudalism was in its full bloom, and the old life in vogue. In the national capital, in the time well called "the flowering of the nation," as one of the instructors in the Imperial University, having picked students from all parts of the empire, I was a witness of the marvelous development, reforms, dangers, pageants, and changes of the epochal years 1872, 1873, and 1874. With pride I may say truly that I have felt the pulse and heart of New Japan.

I have studied economy in the matter of Japanese names and titles, risking the charge of monotony for the sake of clearness. The scholar will, I trust, pardon me for apparent anachronisms and omissions. For lack of space or literary skill, I have had, in some cases, to condense with a brevity painful to a lover of fairness and candor. The title justifies the emphasis of one idea that pervades the book.

In the department of illustrations, I claim no originality, except in their selection. Many are from photographs taken for me by natives in Japan. Those of my artist-friend, Ōzawa, were nearly all made from life at my suggestion. I have borrowed many fine sketches from native books, through Aimé Humbert, whose marvelously beautiful and painstaking work, "Japon Illustré," is a mine of illustration. Few artists have excelled in spirit and truth Mr. A. Wirgman, the artist of The London Illustrated News, a painter of real genius, whose works in oil now adorn many home parlors of ex-residents in Japan, and whose gems, fine gold, and dross fill the sprightly pages of The Japan Punch. Many of his sketches adorn Sir Rutherford Alcock's book on the vicissitudes of diplomatists, commonly called "The Capital of the Tycoon," or "Three Years in Japan." I am indebted both to this gentleman and to Mr. Laurence Oliphant, who wrote the charming volume, "Lord Elgin's Mission to China and Japan," for many illustrations, chiefly from native sketches. Through the liberality of my publishers, I am permitted to use these from their stores of plates. I believe I have in no case reproduced old cuts without new or correct information that will assist the general reader or those who wish to study the various styles of the native artists, five of which are herein presented. Hokusai, the Dickens, and Kamo, the Audubon of Japanese art, are well represented. The photographs of the living

and of the renowned dead, from temples, statues, or old pictures, from the collections of daimiōs and nobles, are chiefly by Uchida, a native photographer of rare ability, skill, and enthusiasm, who unfortunately died in 1875. Four vignettes are copied from the steel-plate engravings on the greenbacks printed in New York for the Ono National Banking Company of Tokio, by the Continental Bank-note Company of New York.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance derived from native scholars in Fukui and Tokio, especially Messrs. Iwabuchi, Takakashi, and Idéura, my readers and helpers. To the members of the Mei Roku Sha, who have honored me with membership in their honorable body, I return my best thanks. This club of authors and reformers includes such men as Fukuzawa, Arinori Mōri, Nakamura Masanawo, Kato Hiroyuki, Nishi Shiu, the Mitsukuri brothers, Shuihei and Rinshō, Uchida Masawo, Hatakéyama Yoshinari, and others, all names of fame and honor, and earnest workers in the regeneration of their country. To my former students now in New York, who have kindly assisted me in proof-reading, and last and first of all to Mr. Tosui Imadaté, my friend and constant companion during the last six years, I return my thanks and obligations. I omit in this place the names of high officers in the Japanese Government, because the responsibility for any opinion advanced in this work rests on no native of Japan. That is all my own. To my sister, the companion, during two years, of several of my journeys and visits in the homes of the island empire, I owe many an idea and inspiration to research. To the publishers of the North American Review, Appletons' Journal, and The Independent my thanks are due for permission to print part of certain chapters first published in these periodicals.

I trust the tone of the work will not seem dogmatic. I submit with modesty what I have written on the Ainōs. I am inclined to believe that India is their original home; that the basic stock of the Japanese people is Ainō; and that in this fact lies the root of the marvelous difference in the psychology of the Japanese and their neighbors, the Chinese.

"Can a nation be born at once?" "With God all things are possible."

New York, May 10th, 1876.

W. E. G.