After having seen that our history is not totally unlike that of the nations of Europe in its most essential trait, it is not strange that the history of Japan should contain many other things, besides feudalism, which can be reckoned as the typical items necessary to make up the history of any civilised nation, that is to say, as the chief ingredients not to be dispensed with in the world's history,--viz., various religious movements keeping pace with the social development at large, economic evolution conditioning and conditioned by the changes of other factors constituting civilisation in general, etc. As the foreign influences can be traced comparatively distinctly, the history of Japan can, to a large extent, be subjected to a scientific analysis. So if we look for the history of a nation, which is fit to represent the gradual evolution of national progress in general, Japanese history must be a select one. It is in this respect that I said that the history of our country is a miniature of the world's history. After all the history of Japan is not so simple and naive as to be either an easy topic for amateur historians, or a suitable theme for ordinary anthropologists, ethnographers, or philologists, who are not specially qualified to deal with histories of civilised times. Those whom I should heartily welcome as the investigators of the history of our country, are those historians in Europe and America, who, more than amply qualified to write the history of their own countries, have continued to disdain extending their field of investigation to the corners of the world, thought by them not civilised enough to be worthy of their labour. If they care to peep into the history of our country, perhaps the result will not be so barren as to disappoint them utterly. The greatest misfortune to our country at the present day is that her history has been written by very few first-rate historians of Europe and America, those who have written upon it being mostly of the second or third rank. Nay, there are many who cannot be called historians at all. The best qualifications they have are that, by some means or other, they can write a book, or that they were once residents of Japan, and if they venture to write a history about a country outside of their own, Japan seems to them to be the easiest subject, the greater part of their compatriots being quite ignorant of it.