Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/118

 Such a state of affairs in the early years of the Meiji era was partially extenuated by the fact that the Government had to find employment for many impecunious samurai, victims of vicissitudes for which they were not themselves responsible. But that excuse has lost all validity and yet the abuse continues. The party politicians inveighed strongly against it during the epoch when every stick served them to beat the "clan" dog. But when they themselves arrived within reach of administrative power, their conception of its perquisites proved to be still more elastic than that of their predecessors.

For purposes of local administration the whole Empire (with the exception of Hokkaido, which has a special form of government) is divided into 47 prefectures (ken), 653 counties (gun), 48 towns (shi), and 14,734 districts (cho or son). The three metropolitan prefectures of Tōkyō, Ōsaka, and Kyōtō are called fu, and the districts are divided into "urban" (cho) and "rural" (son), according to the number of houses they contain. The prefectures are named after their chief towns.

In the system of local administration full effect is given to the principle of popular representation. Each prefecture (urban or rural), each county, each town and each district (urban or rural), has its local assembly, the number of members being fixed in proportion to the population. There is no superior limit of number in the case of a