By the Japanese calendar, the year 1801 was the first of the Kyōwa Era, a short and uneventful period; but the year 1901 was the thirty-fourth of the Meiji Era, or Period of Enlightened Rule,—a most appropriate name for the first era of the New Empire. The Emperor in 1801 had been known before his ascension of the throne as Prince Kanin Kanehito (from whom the present Prince Kanin has descended); but he is now known by his posthumous title of Kōkaku. He is said to have been “a sovereign of great sagacity”; but he was, as we know, only a nominal ruler, like the fainéant kings of France, while the actual authority was held, and the real power was exercised, by a Mayor of the Palace, a Shōgun of the Tokugawa family. The Emperor was “powerless and lived in splendid poverty.” The Imperial Court was organized in Kyōto “with all pomp and circumstance; it had its Ministers, Vice-Ministers, and subordinate officials; it had its five principal, as well as more than a hundred ordinary, Court nobles; but the sovereign’s actual power did not extend beyond the direction of matters relating to rank and etiquette, the classification of shrine-keepers, priests and priestesses, and professionals of various kinds,—in a word, actual functions of no material importance whatever.” In an absolute empire Kōkaku was Emperor in name and fame only. “He was practically confined in sacred seclusion; his person must neither touch the earth nor be polluted by contact with common mortals. The most scrupulous care was exercised about his dress, food, even the very dishes themselves; he was, to the common people, a real invisible deity. It is reported that the Emperors of the olden days must sit motionless upon the throne for a certain number of hours each day, in order that the empire might have peace. Their persons were sacred, so that nobody was permitted to lay hands thereon; therefore their hair and nails might have grown to an unseemly length, had they not been clandestinely trimmed during sleeping hours. The dishes from which they had partaken of food were forthwith dashed in pieces, in order that nobody else might ever use them. And the very rice that they ate was picked over kernel by kernel, in order that no broken or imperfect grain might find lodgment in the Imperial stomach.” It is also said that no one was allowed to speak the name of the Emperor or to write in full the characters of his name; in the latter case, for clearness, at least one stroke must be omitted from each character.