part of Hondo, the main island, the Yamato tribe dominated, its chief being styled Sumeru-mikoto, or Mikado.  To the south and southwest, the Mikado’s power was only more or less felt, for the Yamato men had a long struggle in securing supremacy.  Northward and eastward lay great stretches of land, inhabited by unsubdued and uncivilized native tribes of continental and most probably of Korean origin, and thus more or less closely akin to the Yamato men.  Still northward roamed the Ainos, a race whose ancestral seats may have been in far-off Dravidian India.  Despite the constant conflicts between the Yamato people who had agriculture and the beginnings of government, law and literature, and their less civilized neighbors, the tendency to amalgamation was already strong.  The problem of the statesman, was to extend the sway of the Mikado over the whole Archipelago.

Shint[=o] was, in its formation, made use of as an engine to conquer, unify and civilize all the tribes.  In one sense, this conquest of men having lower forms of faith, by believers in the Kami no Michi, or Way of the Gods, was analogous to the Aryan conquest of India and the Dravidians.  However this may be, the energy and valor displayed in these early ages formed the ideal of Yamato Damashii (The Spirit of unconquerable Japan), which has so powerfully influenced the modern Japanese.  We shall see, also, how grandly Buddhism also came to be a powerful force in the unification of the Japanese people.  At first, the new faith would be rejected as an alien invader, stigmatized as a foreign religion, and, as such, sure to invoke the wrath of the native gods.  Then later, its superiority to the indigenous cult would be seen both by the wise and the practically minded, and it would be welcomed and enjoyed.

The Inviting Field.

Never had a new religion a more inviting field or one more sure of success, than had Buddhism on stepping from the Land of Morning Dawn to the Land of the Rising Sun.  Coming as a gorgeous, dazzling and disciplined array of all that could touch the imagination, stimulate the intellect and move the heart of the Japanese, it was irresistible.  For the making of a nation, Shint[=o] was as a donkey engine, compared to the system of furnaces, boilers, shaft and propeller of a ten-thousand-ton steel cruiser, moved by the energies of a million years of sunbeam force condensed into coal and released again through transmigration by fire.

All accounts in the vernacular Japanese agree, that their Butsu-d[=o] or Buddhism was imported from Korea.  In the sixteenth year of Keitai, the twenty-seventh Mikado (of the list made centuries after, and the eleventh after the impossible line of the long-lived or mythical Mikados), A.D. 534, it is said that a man from China brought with him an image of Buddha into Yamato, and setting it up in a thatched cottage worshipped it.  The people called it “foreign-country god.”  Visitors discussed with him the religion