furnished
resources for long campaigns, against hunters and fishermen. They had
improved artillery and used iron against stone. Yet they conquered and
pacified not only by superior strategy, tactics, weapons and valor, but
also by advanced fetiches and dogma. They captured the religion of their
enemies as well as their bodies, lands and resources. They claimed that
their ancestors were from Heaven, that the Sun was their kinswoman and
that their chief, or Mikado, was vicegerent of the Heavenly gods, but
that those whom they conquered were earth-born or sprung from the
terrestrial divinities.

Mikadoism the Heart of Shint[=o].

As success came to their arms and their chief's power was made more
sure, they developed further the dogma of the Mikado's divinity and made
worship centre in him as the earthly representative of the Sun and
Heaven. His fellow-conquerors and ministers, as fast as they were put in
lordship over conquered provinces, or indigenous chieftains who
submitted obediently to his sway or yielded graciously to his prowess,
were named as founders of temples and in later generations worshipped
and became gods.[10] One of the motives for, and one of the guiding
principles in the selections of the floating myths, was that the
ancestry of the chieftains loyal to the Mikado might be shown to be from
the heavenly gods. Both the narratives of the "Kojiki" and the liturgies
show this clearly.

The nature-worship, which was probably practised throughout the whole
archipelago, became part of the system as government and society were
made uniform on the Yamato model. It seems at least possible, if
Buddhism had not come in so soon, that the ordinary features of a
religion, dogmatic and ethical codes, would have been developed. In a
word, the Kami no Michi, or religion of the islanders in prehistoric
times before the rise of Mikadoism, must be carefully distinguished from
the politico-ecclesiasticism which the system called Shint[=o] reveals
and demands. The early religion, first in the hands of politicians and
later under the pens and voices of writers and teachers at the Imperial
Court, became something very different from its original form. As surely
as K[=o]b[=o] later captured Shint[=o], making material for Buddhism out
of it and overlaying it in Riy[=o]bu, so the Yamato men made political
capital out of their own religion and that of the subject tribes. The
divine sovereign of Japan and his political church