At the time when Chinese legislation was first implanted in Japanese soil, there were still minute restrictions concerning interclass-marriages in the Statutes of the Taiho. Though mesalliances were not forbidden by any explicit law, the offspring of such marriages between freemen and slaves were to follow in class the parent of inferior rank. It is evident, therefore, that such an alliance was stigmatised and severely checked. As to the intermarriages between different classes of freemen, there had been no such restraint, even with respect to the status of their children. That the custom, however, of choosing the empress from members of the Imperial family only, to the exclusion of all vassal families, became gradually confirmed, and that the same custom continued intact until the beginning of the eighth century, shows how such mesalliances had been discouraged in the ancient days of our history. The crowning of a daughter of the Fujiwara as the consort of the Emperor Shomu was the first violation of the long-kept traditional usage regarding the Imperial marriage; and since that time marriages had become very irregular, not only among the members of the Imperial family, but also among the courtiers. The social status of a father was considered sufficient by itself to determine that of his children. No legal scrutiny was thought necessary as to what kind of a woman their mother was, though it was self-evident that the higher the social position of the family from which she sprang, the more the children she gave birth to would be honoured. The establishment of the military regime could effect but very slight change in this domain of social usage, until the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It must be attributed to this neglect of the maternal lineage in the consideration of pedigrees, that in the most genealogical records of Japan the names of wives, mothers, and daughters are generally omitted, notwithstanding that we are able to trace the names of the male ancestors, sometimes for more than ten centuries backward with tolerable certainty and exactitude.