The names and titles which now desolated the air and suffered phonetic wreck in collision with the vocal organs to which they were so strange, furnish not only an interesting linguistic study, but were a mirror of native history. The uncouth forms which they took upon the lips of the latest visiting foreigners are hardly worse in the scholar’s eyes, than the deviations which the Japanese themselves made from the Aino aboriginal or imported Chinese forms. In its vocabulary the Japanese is a very mixed language, and the majority of its so called elegant terms of speech is but mispronounced Chinese. To the Americans, the name of one of the interpreters seemed “compounded of two sneezes and a cough,” though when analyzed into its component elements, it reflects the changes in Japanese history as surely as fossils in the rocks reveal the characteristics of bygone geological ages. In the old days of the Mikado’s supremacy, in fact as well as in law, when he led his troops in war, instead of being exiled in a palace; that is, before the thirteenth century, both military and civil titles had a meaning. Names had a reality behind them, and were symbols of a fact. A man with _kami_ (lord) after his name was an actual governor of a province; one with _mon_ terminating his patronymic was a member of the imperial guard, a soldier or sentinel at the _Sayé mon_ (left gate) or _Uyé mon_ (right gate) of the palace; a _Hei_ was a real soldier with a sword or arrow, spear or armor. A _suké_ or a _jō a marō_ or a _himé_, a _kamon_ or a _tono_ was a real deputy or superior, a prince or princess, a palace functionary or a palace occupant of imperial blood. All this was changed when, in the twelfth century, the authority was divided into civil and military, and two capitals and centers of government, typified by the Throne and the Camp, sprang up. The Mikado kept his seat, the prestige of antiquity and divinity, and the fountain of authority at Kiōto, while the Shō-gun or usurping general held the purse and the sword at Kamakura. Gradually the Shō-gun (army-commander, general) usurped more and more power, claiming it as necessary, and invariably obtaining new leases of power until little was left to the Mikado but the shadow of authority. The title of Tai-kun (“Tycoon”) meaning Great Prince, and the equivalent of a former title of the Mikado was assumed. Next the military rulers at Kamakura, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century and in Yedo from the seventeenth century, controlled the appointments of their nominees to office, and even compelled the Emperor to make certain of them hereditary in elect families. The multitude of imperial titles, once carrying with their conferment actual duties and incomes, and theoretically functional in Kiōto became, as reality decayed, in the higher grades empty honorifics of the Tycoon’s minions, and in the lower were degraded to ordinary personal names of the agricultural gentry or even common people.