It may be useful here to explain that the title of Mikado by which his Majesty is perhaps best known to Europeans, although undeniably an appellation of great antiquity and in no degree derogatory, is in little use in Japan itself. Literally it signifies the “honourable gateway” or “entrance,” and though in ancient times the designation, when applied to a ruler who dispensed justice from a seat at the entrance to his pavilion, may have been more or less an appropriate title, it may be also that as years went by the preference of the people for some term that should more definitely convey the idea of the sovereign’s supremely exalted origin, according to then popular belief, led to the gradual adoption, in official documents, of the title of Tenno, and in common conversation of that of Ten-shi, terms which are in general use at the present day. The perpetuation of the term Mikado among foreigners, though almost obsolete among the inhabitants of the Ten-shi’s realms, is on a par with the retention of the name “Japan” as that of the country itself, it being a survival of the “Jipangu” of Marco Polo, who thus alluded to it in writing an account of his travels. Marco Polo’s book was prepared in 1299 at Genoa, and Jipangu was doubtless the traveller’s rendering of the Ji-pên-kwoh of the Chinese, the name by which Japan is known to that nation to-day, and by which Marco Polo heard the island Empire spoken of some 600 years ago. To the Ten-shi’s subjects their land is Ni-hon-koku, or Sun-origin Land, a term that is fairly translated, perhaps, as the Land of Sunrise. Ji-pên-kwoh, in Chinese, has precisely the same meaning, and the three ideographs employed are identical in Chinese and Japanese, the difference being one of pronunciation only. Though the dwellers in Nihon know as a rule by this time what is meant by Japan they always speak of their land as Nihon or Nipon, and though they know to whom strangers allude as the Mikado, they refer to his Majesty as the Ten-shi or Tenno. Nevertheless, the terms in use abroad, though they have less to recommend them on the score of accuracy, either for country or ruler, bid fair to survive for generations.