Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/199

 close of the eighth century and the beginning of the twelfth; and politically in the sense of the era during which the Fujiwara family administered the national affairs through the Court in Kyōtō.

There are, in fact, six great divisions of Japanese history: first, the patriarchal age when the sovereign was only the head of a group of tribal chiefs, each possessing a hereditary share of the governing power; secondly, a brief period, from the middle of the seventh to the early part of the eighth century, when the tribal chiefs had disappeared and the Throne was approximately autocratic; thirdly, an interval of some eighty years, called the Nara epoch, during which the propagandism of Buddhism, and the development of the material and artistic civilisation that came in that religion's train, engrossed the attention of the nation; fourthly, the Heian epoch, a period of three centuries, when the Court in Kyōtō ruled vicariously through the Fujiwara family; fifthly, the age of military feudalism, from the beginning of the twelfth to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the administrative power was grasped by soldier nobles; and sixthly, the present, or Meiji, epoch of constitutional monarchy. Among these six eras, the Nara and Heian were richest in religious influences; the Meiji is poorest.

It has been shown already that the supernatural had a large place in the thoughts of the early