In the interpretation of this sudden and startling development most European writers and critics show themselves seriously at fault.  Even some of the more intelligent among them find the solution of this portentous enigma in the very superficial and facile formula of “imitation.”  But the Japanese still retain their own unit of social organization, which is not the individual, as with us, but the family.  Furthermore, the resemblance of the Japanese administrative system, both central and local, to certain European systems is not the result of imitation, or borrowing, or adaptation.  Such resemblance is merely an odd and fortuitous resemblance.  When the statesmen who overthrew the Tokugawa regime in 1868, and abolished the feudal system in 1871, were called upon to provide the nation with a new equipment of administrative machinery, they did not go to Europe for their models.  They simply harked back for some eleven or twelve centuries in their own history and resuscitated the administrative machinery that had first been installed in Japan by the genius of Fujiwara Kamatari and his coadjutors in 645 A.D., and more fully supplemented and organized in the succeeding fifty or sixty years.  The present Imperial Cabinet of ten Ministers, with their departments and departmental staff of officials, is a modified revival of the Eight Boards adapted from China and established in the seventh century....  The present administrative system is indeed of alien provenance; but it was neither borrowed nor adapted a generation ago, nor borrowed nor adapted from Europe.  It was really a system of hoary antiquity that was revived to cope with pressing modern exigencies.

The outcome was that the clans of Satsuma and Choshu acquired control of the Mikado, made his exaltation the symbol of resistance to the foreigner (with whom the Shogun had concluded unpopular treaties), and secured the support of the country by being the champions of nationalism.  Under extraordinarily able leaders, a policy was adopted which has been pursued consistently ever since, and has raised Japan from being the helpless victim of Western greed to being one of the greatest Powers in the world.  Feudalisim was abolished, the Central Government was made omnipotent, a powerful army and navy were created, China and Russia were successively defeated, Korea was annexed and a protectorate established over Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, industry and commerce were developed, universal compulsory education instituted; and worship of the Mikado firmly established by teaching in the schools and by professorial patronage of historical myths.  The artificial creation of Mikado-worship is one of the most interesting features of modern Japan, and a model to all other States as regards the method of preventing the growth of rationalism.  There is a very instructive little pamphlet by Professor B.H.  Chamberlain, who was Professor of Japanese and philosophy at Tokyo, and had a knowledge of Japanese which few Europeans had