Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/31

 teenth, and sixteenth centuries, increasing importance was attached to trade with China so as to defray the costs of the interminable civil wars. The Ming dynasty, when its capital was at Nanking, was induced, although Japanese piracy was constant, to grant commercial passage ports to facilitate this intercourse, Japanese sword-blades significantly forming the principal carticle in the Japanese export trade. It was at the end of the fourteenth century, when relations had been reopened, after a formal protest by China at the continued piracy practised, that there occurred that remarkable event, the investiture of the Shogun Yoshi-mitsu by a Chinese envoy with a royal diploma and a crown. No event in Japanese history has attracted more attention than this. That the Shogun, who in point of dynastic law was simply the emperor's 'protector', performed this act mainly to consolidate his own usurpation seems to-day clear; but the minute and careful regulations which the Ming emperors issued regarding the tribute vessels from Japan—to prevent armed conspiracies—prove that on the Chinese side there was no doubt about Japanese vassalage. Certain it is that, as the years passed, relations between China and Japan steadily diminished in cor-