Of Old Japan little more needs to be said.  Without external commerce, there was little need for internal trade; ships were small; roads were footpaths; education was limited to the samurai, or military class, retainers of the daimyo, “feudal lords”; inter-clan travel was limited and discouraged; Confucian ethics was the moral standard.  From the beginning of the seventeenth century Christianity was forbidden by edict, and was popularly known as the “evil way”; Japan was thought to be especially sacred, and the coming of foreigners was supposed to pollute the land and to be the cause of physical evils.  Education, as in China, was limited to the Chinese classics.  Mathematics, general history, and science, in the modern sense, were of course wholly unknown.  Guns and powder were brought from the West in the sixteenth century by Spaniards and Portuguese, but were never improved.  Ship-building was the same in the middle of the nineteenth century as in the middle of the sixteenth, perhaps even less advanced.  Architecture had received its great impulse from the introduction of Buddhism in the ninth and tenth centuries and had made no material improvement thereafter.

But while there was little progress in the external and mechanical elements of civilization, there was progress in other respects.  During the “great peace,” first arose great scholars.  Culture became more general throughout the nation.  Education was esteemed.  The corrupt lives of the priests were condemned and an effort was made to reform life through the revival of a certain school of Confucian teachers known as “Shin-Gaku”—­“Heart-Knowledge.”  Art also made progress, both pictorial and manual.  It would almost seem as if modern artificers and painters had lost the skill of their forefathers of one or two hundred years ago.

Many reasons explain the continuance of the old political and social order:  the lack of a foreign foe to compel abandonment of the tribal organisation; the mountainous nature of the country with its slow, primitive means of intercommunication; the absence of all idea of a completely centralized nation.  Furthermore, the principle of complete subordination to superiors and ancestors had become so strong that individual innovations were practically impossible.  Japan thus lacked the indispensable key to further progress, the principle of individualism.  The final step in the development of her nationality has been taken, therefore, only in our own time.

Old Japan seemed absolutely committed to a thorough-going antagonism to everything foreign.  New Japan seems committed to the opposite policy.  What are the steps by which she has effected this apparent national reversal of attitude?