All these wanderers served not only to transmit to distant provincial towns the culture engendered and nourished in the metropolis, but also to make the intercourse between the minor cultural centres more intimate than before, so as to spread a civilisation of a uniform standard and nature throughout the whole of the empire. Japan was thus for the first time unified in her civilisation in order to prepare herself for a solid political unification. Let me repeat that Japan of the Ashikaga age had within herself no constant political boundaries nor any other artificial barriers to impede the people of one province nor of the territory of one _daimyo_ from going to another province or the territory of another _daimyo_, and this, in a great measure, facilitated communications between the inhabitants of different provinces. The fact that the college at Ashikaga in eastern Japan was, notwithstanding its insufficient accommodation, thronged with pupils from various parts of the country, even from a province so far off from Kyoto as Satsuma, proves that bad roads and poor means of conveyance did not obstruct the Japanese of that time from traversing great distances in order to get a liberal education, and such activity and lively traffic would naturally tend to the formation of big emporiums here and there within the empire. Unfortunately the geographical features of our country did not allow it to see a great number of such large commercial cities formed within it, as the Hanseatic towns had been formed in medieval Germany, although we find very close resemblances between Germany of the twelfth and of the thirteenth century and Japan under the Ashikaga regime as regards their political conditions. The only one of the Japanese cities which had ever attained such a height of prosperity as to be fairly matched with the free cities of the Hansa was Sakai in the province of Idzumi.