The history of Japan under this Shogunate shows that throughout the whole epoch our country had not yet been entirely stripped of her medieval garments, but it is absurd at the same time to designate the period as essentially not modern. For long years we have been on our forward march, always dragging along with us the ever-accumulating residue of the civilisation of the past. If any one, however, should venture to judge us by the enormous heaps of these souvenirs of a by-gone civilisation overburdening us, and should say that the Japanese had been standing still these two centuries and a half, then he would be entirely mistaken. The overestimation of Japan of the Meidji era by a great many foreigners is, though seconded by not a few Japanese, a fault which had its origin in this misapprehension about our country under the Tokugawa regime. The attention of these observers was engrossed, when they took their first views of the land and people, by those things which seemed to them strange and curious, being quite different from what they themselves possessed at home, or which were thought by them anachronistic, on account of having been abandoned by them long ago, though once they had them also in their own countries. As regards what they had been accustomed to at home, they took very little notice of it in Japan, and considered the existence of such things in our country as a matter of course, if they happened to come across them. Most of them came over to Japan, prepossessed already by their expectations of finding here a unique country, and were thus unconsciously led, after their view of the country itself, to depict it in a very quaint light, as something entirely different from anything they had ever experienced anywhere; an error which even the most studious and acute observer, such as Engelhardt Kaempfer, was not able to escape. No need to mention the rest, especially those missionaries who wished to extol their own merits at the expense of the Japanese. We are still suffering from misconceptions about our country on the part of Europeans,--misconceptions which are the legacy of the misrepresentation of Japan by those early observers. By no means, however, do I presume to try to exhibit Japan only in her brightest colours. Far from it, and what I ask foreign readers not to forget is that the history of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the period which was essentially modern, should not be superficially judged by its abundance of feudal trammels fondly described by contemporary Europeans. In this chapter, I shall first make manifest which were the things medieval retained in the time of the Tokugawa, and then treat about the essential character of the age which should be called all but modern.