It seems that there are not a few foreign publicists who suppose that Japan is not yet sufficiently advanced in her civilisation to require long years of study to understand her. This is why there is such a number of tourist-writers, who skip over the whole country in a few weeks, and are presuming enough to make sweeping assertions about all sorts and conditions of things Japanese with which they come into touch at haphazard. Again, there is another class of writers, who would like to rate the Japanese nation and its history much higher than the above-mentioned do, and who know that it is not such a very easy matter to understand them. Unluckily, however, they are generally of the opinion that it is only they, and not the Japanese, who are competent to take up the task of interpretation, if those things are to be understood at all. Standing upon this point of view, they would gladly accept any kind of materials furnished by the Japanese, but flatly refuse to listen to any theories or arguments devised by Japanese scholars, and systematically repudiate almost all conclusions arrived at by the latter. Writers of such a type think that the intellectual capacity of the Japanese as a nation is not yet so high as to be able to elaborate logical argumentations. These two sets of foreign writers mentioned above sometimes praise us _sans phrase_, it is true. They are not, however, with their eulogistic and gracious verdict, the sort of champions to dispel the misrepresentations and misunderstandings under which we suffer.