several translations, but none of them was satisfactory, to my mind, some being absolutely erroneous, while others were paraphrases rather than translations, therefore conveying sometimes more, sometimes less, than the original. I mention this because some of you may have seen these translations. So I attempted a new translation myself, which I published in papers and magazines, inviting criticisms and even asking for new translations. I also got Mr. Makino, the present Minister of Education, to interest himself in the matter; meetings were held in his official residence of those interested in the matter, amongst whom the names of Barons Suyematsu and Kaneko, Professors Inouye, Nitobe, Takakusu, and Kanda may be known to you. After a long and warm discussion a draft was made, of which I took charge, and after consulting some English and American professors a final draft was obtained. I have here a copy which came from the printers just the day before my departure from Japan. Mr. Makino told me that he was going to present a copy to his Majesty the Emperor at the earliest opportunity. So this may be said to be almost an official translation. It is as follows:

THE IMPERIAL RESCRIPT ON EDUCATION. Know ye, Our subjects:

Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education. Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.

The Way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by Our Imperial Ancestors, to be observed alike by Their Descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true

in all places. It is Our wish to lay it to heart in all reverence, in common with you, Our subjects, that we may all thus attain to the same virtue.

The 30th day of the 10th month of the 23rd year of Meiji.

(The 30th of October, 1890.)

(Imperial Sign Manual. Imperial Seal.)

I fear that, however we may translate it, the translation will not convey the same message to you that the original does to a Japanese; in fact, it may be said that our whole moral and civic education consists in so imbuing our children with the spirit of the Rescript that it forms a part of our national life. The cardinal virtues which are pre-eminently put forward are loyalty to the Emperor, with which is identified patriotism to the State, and filial piety, including therein not only duties due to one's parents, but to ancestors in general; all the rest may be said to be regarded as an outcome of these two. The Rescript admonishes us to certain rules of conduct, that we may 'thereby guard and maintain the prosperity of the Imperial throne,' for we shall thus not only be good and faithful subjects of the Emperor, but render illustrious the best traditions of our forefathers'-i.e. we shall so fulfil duties that we owe to the Emperor and the State and to one's parents and ancestors, for, according to Confucius, 'to keep whole the body that you have received from your parents is the beginning of filial piety; to attain fame and make known your parents is the end of it.' Indeed, I think you must have noticed the repeated references to the Imperial ancestors and to the forefathers, thus: 'Our Imperial ancestors have founded the Empire on a basis broad and everlasting'; 'Our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof'; and again, 'The Way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by our Imperial ancestors,' and so on. This repeated reference to ancestors is characteristic of our nationality; indeed, it is so stated explicitly in the Rescript itself: Our Imperial ancestors have founded This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education.'

The relation between the Imperial House and the people, intimately connected with the ancestor worship or the reverence for ancestors, is, indeed, the basis of our education. The very way in which this Rescript has been at once received as the true and adequate basis of our moral education, and the reverence in which it is held, show sufficiently clearly the special nature of this relation, which has existed without interruption for over twenty-five centuries, according to our historical records, although our chronology for the

first ten centuries can scarcely be regarded as authentic. Our two oldest historical works extant are the Kojiki, or Records of Ancient Matters, completed in A.D. 712, and the Nihongi, or Chronicles of Japan, completed eight years later, both being compiled by the Imperial order from the traditions and materials then extant, the older parts being, of course, entirely traditional. Both begin with mythological accounts of the separation of the heaven and the earth, the first coming down to A.D. 628, and the other to 697. According to these traditions, the goddess Ama-Terasu-O-Mi-Kami (literally Heaven-shining-GreatDeity or, we may say, Great Goddess of Celestial Light), who reigned in the Taka-Ma-ga-Hara (literally Plain of High Heaven), sent down her grandson (Ni-Ni-Gi-no-Mikoto) to rule over the Land-of-LuxuriantRice-Ears, i.e. Japan, with these words: This is the land of which my descendants shall be the lords. Do thou proceed thither, and govern the land. Go! The prosperity of thy dynasty shall be coeval with heaven and earth.' I wish to call your attention specially to these last words. You remember that they are quoted in the Rescript; they are words ever present to the minds of a Japanese and continually occurring in our literature. She also gave him a jewel, a sword, and a mirror, which form the three divine treasures of the Empire. Of the mirror in particular she said: 'Regard this mirror exactly as if it were my spirit, and reverence (or worship) it as if reverencing me.' This mirror is now enshrined in the Temple at Ise, whereunto tens of thousands of pilgrims flock every year from every part of the country, and to which on every occasion of great national importance the Emperor either goes himself or sends a special messenger to announce the event. In the Imperial palace in Tōkyō, also, there is a shrine, called the Kashikodokoro, or the Sanctuary, where is deposited a facsimile of the sacred mirror, made in the reign of the Emperor Sujin, B.C. 92, when the original mirror was first moved into a separate shrine, lest its sanctity should be diminished by being kept in the same building as the living. Here on festival days the Emperor and the Empress, the Imperial family and high officials do worship to the spirit of the first of the Imperial ancestors. When an official is sent on a mission abroad, he will, after the farewell audience of the Emperor, be made to do reverence here. Again, in every ordinary Japanese household there is a Kami-dana, or god-shelf, in the centre of which is placed a Taima, which is a part of the offerings made at the Shrine of Ise, and which is distributed thence to every household in the Empire at the end of each year. On this altar are also placed, besides the Taima representing the shrine at Ise, representations of local tutelary deities and other special Shinto shrines, and offerings of rice and saké are placed and lights lighted every evening. Thus Ama-Terasu-O-Mi-Kami, the first Imperial ancestor, is worshipped throughout the whole Empire.

Well, to return to her grandson, sent to rule over Japan, he is said

to have settled in the present province of Hyuga, in the island of Kyūshū, whence his two great-grandsons sallied forth on an expedition to subjugate the whole land. After several years of hard fighting, during which the elder was killed, the younger succeeded in establishing his authority over a district in the neighbourhood of the modern province of Yamato, and ascended the throne in B.C. 660, according to the Nihongi, although, as I said before, the chronology cannot be relied upon. Such is the account handed down to us by the traditions; ethnological investigations alone can determine where the High Heavenly Plain was, whence we Japanese have

come.

From this first Emperor, now known as Emperor Jimmu, there has been an unbroken line of descent to the present reigning Emperor. This unique character of our Imperial dynasty, and the fact that we regard all Japanese, with the exception of some few naturalised Coreans and Chinese and subjugated Ainos, as descended either from the Imperial House or from those who came over with it from the High Heavenly Plain, may be considered as constituting the special character of our nationality; our nation is, as it were, one family, of which the Emperor is the head or patriarch, and it has been so since the first foundation of the Empire. Never, during the whole course of our history, has there been a single serious instance of a subject presuming to attempt to place himself on the throne, and never during that time have we been conquered by a foreign foe. The single occasion on which we were seriously threatened by a foreign invasion, previously to the Meiji era, was towards the latter part of the thirteenth century, when Kublai Khan, having conquered China, sent embassy after embassy for several years to induce the Japanese to accept his suzerainty. But no reply was sent to these messages, which were regarded as insults. On one occasion a large fleet of 150 vessels was sent, and there was a great fighting, in which the invaders by their guns and by their superior tactics caused great havoc among the Japanese army; but the Chinese general was wounded, and a heavy gale arising the invaders could not follow up their advantages. Taught by experience, the Japanese spent a few years of respite they had in building a line of fortresses along the coast of Kyūshū for some hundred miles; and when, in 1281, Kublai, exasperated by the stubborn attitude of the Japanese and bent seriously on conquering them by force, sent a large force of 100,000 soldiers, together with a contingent of 10,000 Coreans, they could not effect a landing on the mainland for more than sixty days-that being the tactics adopted by the Japanese—until finally, a heavy autumnal gale arising, the whole Chinese fleet was scattered, and those who survived the tempest were killed by the Japanese, so that it is said that only three men out of 100,000 escaped to carry the tale back to China. This is spoken of popularly as Ise-no-Kami-Kaze, or the divine gale of Ise, it being supposed that

the goddess sent the tempest to protect the land governed by her descendants.

Among the 122 Emperors from Jimmu to the present sovereign there have been many specially distinguished for their prominent virtues, for their good administration, for their military prowess, for their literary taste, and so on; but we may say that there was none who was not animated by a high sense of responsibility as the ruler of the land and by love of the people entrusted to their care. And the people have always regarded them with peculiar feelings of reverence and loyalty. It is true that their power was usurped sometimes by the Court nobles, and afterwards, during the last 700 years previous to the restoration of Meiji, by the military class, who practically ruled the land. Certainly, Samurais owed their loyalty in the first instance to their chiefs, and so, also, common people to the lords of the land; but even during this period the Imperial House, devoid of any real power as it was, never failed to receive reverence and veneration, not only from the people in general, but from the military chiefs themselves. Only the Emperor could bestow Court ranks or official titles, which, though nominal, were much coveted; many circumstances could be cited to show this attitude towards the Imperial House.

This reverence of the Imperial House is intimately connected with the ancestor worship. Our primitive Shintoism, before the introduction of Buddhism and Chinese philosophy, so far as can be gathered from the above-mentioned Kojiki and Nihongi, was preeminently worship of ancestors, together with some admixture of nature worship; already in the fifth and sixth centuries the great shrines at Ise, Izumo, Atsuta, etc., erected for the worship of deified ancestors, were in existence. These gods were supposed to be guardians of the land, and on important state occasions they were consulted or their protection was specially asked for. Towards the end of the sixth century Buddhism and Chinese civilisation began to be introduced, at first through Corea, and then directly from China. It was not the common people who became first converts to the new religion, but the Imperial Court; and there ensued a fierce struggle between the conservative party, who maintained that the worship of foreign gods would anger the old gods of Japan and bring calamities on the land, and the party of reform, who were for adopting the new and, as they thought, superior civilisation. This was not a religious struggle in the sense that would be usually understood by the term; it was rather a political struggle between two powerful Court parties, one progressive and the other conservative. Finally the Buddhist party was victorious, owing to the aid of the famous Shōtoku Taishi, the regent and heir-presumptive to the throne, a great Chinese scholar, deeply imbued with the spirit of Buddhism, who saw in it and in Confucian ethics the best means of elevating the moral condition of the 3 U

VOL. LXI- No. 364