Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/198

 and that, in addressing the Throne, he obeyed a genuine sentiment of loyalty. Other accounts attribute his action to the advice of his ministers, especially that of the Prince of Mito. Whatever the truth may be as to the motive of the step, it presented itself to the people in the light of an official recognition of the new Imperialism. The "pure Shintō creed" which had hitherto been only academical, now assumed a practically political character, and men's eyes turned to the Court in Kyōtō as the real centre of national authority.

Another sentiment also was called into active existence at this crisis, the sentiment of patriotism. During many hundreds of years there had been no such thing as country in the moral vista of the educated Japanese. His loyalty did not look beyond the limits of fief or family. Even the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century failed to strike a universal chord of patriotism: the brave soldiers that repelled the attack achieved local rather than national renown. But the incidents culminating in the expulsion of Christians and the closing of the country in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the inflexible enforcement of a policy of national isolation throughout the Tokugawa era, insensibly taught men to think of Japan as an entity, and their perception, greatly quickened by the Shintō revivalists' doctrine of the "land of the gods," was now suddenly stirred into almost passionate activ-