It became splendid and, next only to Pekin, was known as the second official city in the empire.
While the world has long been familiar with China and its civilization, Japan and Korea have only recently come out from their Oriental seclusion.

In looking into the past of the former, in vain do we seek for any adequate explanation, anything which will reasonably account for that phenomenally endowed race which occupies the centre of the stage to-day; which, knowing absolutely nothing of our civilization forty years ago, has so digested and assimilated its methods and essential principles that it is beating us at our own game.
From its earliest period this country was under a feudal system of government, with the Mikado as its supreme and sacred head.

The Divine nature of this being separated him from the temporal affairs of the nation, which were in the hands of the Shogun, who represented the strong arm of the state.

Next below the Shogun were the Daimios, the feudal or military chiefs; these in turn being the rulers of bands of military retainers which constituted the aristocratic class, and were called the Samurai.
Shintoism, a form of ancestral worship and sacrifice to dead heroes, which was the primitive cult of Japan, was in 600 A.D.superseded, or rather absorbed, by Buddhism, which for a thousand years has prevailed.
And although Shintoism to some extent still lingers, and although Confucianism with its philosophical and abstract principles has always had its followers, still Japanese civilization is the child of Gautama.
The dual sovereignty of the Mikado and the Shogun, like that existing in the Holy Roman Empire, made a great deal of history in Japan.

The things representing the real power in a state were in the hands of the Shogun.