descendants of the
Kami.

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

No mention is made of such a thing as currency in prehistoric Japan.
Commerce appears to have been conducted by barter only. In order to
procure funds for administrative and religious purposes, officers in
command of forces were despatched to various regions, and the
inhabitants were required to contribute certain quantities of local
produce. Steps were also taken to cultivate useful plants and cereals
and to promote manufactures. The Kogo-shui states that a certain
mikoto inaugurated the fashioning of gems in Izumo, and that his
descendants continued the work from generation to generation, sending
annual tribute of articles to the Court every year. Another mikoto
was sent to plant paper-mulberry and hemp in the province of Awa (awa
signifies "hemp"), and a similar record is found in the same book
with regard to the provinces of Kazusa and Shimosa, which were then
comprised in a region named Fusa-kuni. Other places owed their names
to similar causes.

It is plain that, whatever may have been the case at the outset, this
assignment of whole regions to the control of officials whose
responsibility was limited to the collection of taxes for the uses of
the Court, could not but tend to create a provincial nobility and
thus lay the foundations of a feudal system. The mythological
accounts of meetings of the Kami for purposes of consultation suggest
a kind of commonwealth, and recall "the village assemblies of
primitive times in many parts of the world, where the cleverness of
one and the general willingness to follow his suggestions fill the
place of the more definite organization of later times."* But though
that may be true of the Yamato race in the region of its origin, the
conditions found by it in Japan were not consistent with such a
system, for Chinese history shows that at about the beginning of the
Christian era the Island Empire was in a very uncentralized state and
that the sway of the Yamato was still far from receiving general
recognition. A great Japanese scholar** has contended that the
centralization which prevailed in later ages was wholly an imitation
of Chinese bureaucracy, and that organized feudalism was the original
form of government in Japan. The annals appear to support that view
to a limited extent, but the subject will presently be discussed at
greater length.

*B. H. Chamberlain.

**Hirata Atsutane.

RAIMENT

In the use of clothing