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Rh compelled them to pass every alternate year at Yedo, which he had chosen for his capital in 1590, and to establish their wives and families permanently there as hostages. What Ieyasu sketched out, the third Shōgun of his line, Iemitsu, perfected. From that time forward, "Old Japan," as we know it from the Dutch accounts, from art, from the stage, was crystallised for two hundred and fifty years,—the Old Japan of isolation (for Iemitsu shut the country up, to prevent complications with the Spaniards and Portuguese), the Old Japan of picturesque feudalism, of harakiri, of a society ranged in castes and officered by spies and censors, the Old Japan of an ever-increasing skill in lacquer and porcelain, of aristocratic punctilio, of supremely exquisite taste.

Unchangeable to the outward eye of contemporaries, Japan had not passed a hundred years under the Tokugawa regime before the seeds of the disease which finally killed that regime were sown. Strangely enough, the instrument of destruction was historical research. Ieyasu himself had been a great patron of literature. His grandson, the second Prince of Mito, inherited his taste. Under the auspices of this Japanese Maecenas a school of literati arose, to whom the antiquities of their country were all in all,—Japanese poetry and romance, as against the Chinese Classics; the native religion, Shintō, as against the foreign religion, Buddhism; hence, by an inevitable extension, the ancient legitimate dynasty of the Mikados, as against the upstart Shōguns. Of course this political portion of the doctrine of the literary party was kept in the background at first; for those were not days when opposition to the existing government could be expressed or even hinted at without danger. Nevertheless it gradually grew in importance, so that, when Commodore Perry came with his big guns (A.D. 1853—4), he found a government already tottering to its fall, many who cared little for the Mikado's abstract rights caring a great deal for the chance of aggrandising their own families at the Shōgun's expense.

The Shōgun yielded to the demands of Pery and of the representatives of the other foreign powers—England, France,