The new quarter selected was Saruwaka-cho in Asakusa, the most thickly populated district of modern Tokyo, where the lurid pictures outlined by electric light of kinema houses, second-rate theatres, and many other places of entertainment are now to be found. This district is still called theatre street, although Tokyo’s leading playhouses are scattered throughout the capital. Mizuno’s attempt to check the evils of society were all in vain. Soon after his time, Meiji era dawned with the restoration of the Emperor to power, and the lives of the people began to flow in new and unexpected channels. The thoughts of those in power were too much engrossed with the opening of their country to trade and outside influences to trouble about the shaving of the actors’ heads, and the innumerable and wellnigh insupportable restrictions that had so long been endured gradually became null and void. For 244 years, from the prohibition of the Women’s Stage to the Restoration, or from 1624 to 1868, interference with the theatre had continued without relaxation in the three towns—the regulations in Yedo, which form the subject of Ihara Seiseiin’s painstaking researches in his _History of the Japanese Stage_, applying in a greater or lesser degree to the shibai conditions of Osaka and Kyoto. One of the most deplorable results was the relegation of the actor and playwright to the lower strata of society. The repetition of the rules and regulations against the theatre as a nest of iniquity that had no right to existence caused the people to grow indifferent towards the actors and playwrights. They undervalued them personally, although they enjoyed their art. Yet had their genius attained a much higher level than it did, there would have been no recognition for them in the scheme of things made possible by the shogunate, since the spiritual products of the people counted for nothing. The venerable and eloquent Marquis Okuma, addressing a gathering of literary men and women at his residence, admitted literature’s place in Japan. His past career, he said, had been taken up with politics, diplomacy, religion, and economics; but he had given no consideration to literature. He confessed that he now realised for the first time, after a long life of eighty years, that literature was necessary in the building up of a new civilisation and the reconstruction of a new society for human beings, just as the different branches of science were necessary. As he had been born into the serious Saga clan, which had no idea of pleasure, he had never once in his earlier career witnessed a theatrical performance. He had no taste for music, and was taught to look down upon literature.