The delicacy of the aesthetic sense in indoor-life was moreover enhanced by the laborious etiquette of fashionable tea-parties held by aristocrats and bourgeois alike. The tea-plant itself is said to have been introduced from China into our country in the reign of the Emperor Saga, that is to say, at the beginning of the ninth century. Its use, however, as the daily beverage was of a far later date. Yosai, the founder of the Zen sect in Japan, wrote in the early Kamakura period a commendation on tea as the healthiest drink of all. Still, for a long while after him, tea seems to have been used exclusively by Buddhists as a tonic. It was in the Ashikaga age that tea came first into general use among the well-to-do classes of the people. As the production of it was, however, not so abundant as now, it was not used daily as at present, but occasionally, with an etiquette conducted with exquisitely refined taste, both hosts and guests rivalling one another in displaying their artistic acquirements by delivering extempore speeches in criticism of the various articles of art exhibited, or in amusing themselves with mystic dialogues of the Zen creed, or the lively exchange of witty repartees. After all, the tendency of the culture of the later Ashikaga period was in the main humanistic. There was no political authority so firmly constituted, nor were conventional morals of the time so rigorous, as to be able to put an effective check on any liberal thinker, nor to intervene in the daily life of the people. Thought and action in Japan has never been more free than in that age. That Christianity could find innumerable converts from one end of the empire to the other within half a century after its introduction, may be accounted for by supposing that the ground for it had been prepared long before by this exceedingly humanistic culture. In this respect we see the dawn of modern Japan already in the later Ashikaga age. What a striking similarity to the Italian renaissance! Japan was now in the throes of travail--the time for a new birth was fast approaching. Conditions on the whole were favourable. All that was wanted for this were the moral regeneration of the people and the political reconstruction of the Empire. CHAPTER X THE TRANSITION FROM MEDIAEVAL TO MODERN JAPAN