Whatever be the theological or political opinions of the observer who looks into the history of Japan at about the year 1540, he will acknowledge that this point of time was a very dark moment in her known history.  Columbus, who was familiar with the descriptions of Marco Polo, steered his caravels westward with the idea of finding Xipangu, with its abundance of gold and precious gems; but the Genoese did not and could not know the real state of affairs existing in Dai Nippon at this time.  Let us glance at this.

The duarchy of Throne and Camp, with the Mikado in Ki[=o]to and the Sh[=o]gun at Kamakura, with the elaborate feudalism under it, had fallen into decay.  The whole country was split up into a thousand warring fragments.  To these convulsions of society, in which only the priest and the soldier were in comfort, while the mass of the people were little better than serfs, must be added the frequent violent earthquakes, drought and failure of crops, with famine and pestilence.  There was little in religion to uplift and cheer.  Shint[=o] had sunk into the shadow of a myth.  Buddhism had become outwardly a system of political gambling rather than the ordered expression of faith.  Large numbers of the priests were like the mercenaries of Italy, who sold their influence and even their swords or those of their followers, to the highest bidder.  Besides being themselves luxurious and dissolute, their monasteries were fortresses, in which only the great political gamblers, and not the oppressed people, found comfort and help.  Millions of once fertile acres had been abandoned or left waste.  The destruction of libraries, books and records is something awful to contemplate; and “the times of Ashikaga” make a wilderness for the scapegoat of chronology.  Ki[=o]to, the sacred capital, had been again and again plundered and burnt.  Those who might be tempted to live in the city amid the ruins, ran the risk of fire, murder, or starvation.  Kamakura, once the Sh[=o]-gun’s seat of authority, was, a level waste of ashes.

Even China, Annam and Korea suffered from the practical dissolution of society in the island empire; for Japanese pirates ravaged their coasts to steal, burn and kill.  Even as for centuries in Europe, Christian churches echoed with that prayer in the litanies:  “From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us,” so, along large parts of the deserted coasts of Chinese Asia, the wretched inhabitants besought their gods to avenge them against the “Wojen.”  To this day in parts of Honan in China, mothers frighten their children and warn them to sleep by the fearful words “The Japanese are coming.”

First Coming of Europeans.

This time, then, was that of darkest Japan.  Yet the people who lived in darkness saw great light, and to them that dwelt in the shadow of death, light sprang up.