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Updated: June 6, 2025
It remained a loose agglomerate of clan-groups, or tribes, each religiously and administratively independent of the rest; and this huge agglomerate was kept together, not by voluntary cooperation, but by strong compulsion. Down to the period of Meiji, and even for some time afterward, it was liable to split and fall asunder at any moment that the central coercive power showed signs of weakness.
In later times the vassal was certainly attached to the cult of the lord. But it is difficult as yet to venture any general statement as to the earliest phase of the communal cult in Japan; for the history of the Japanese nation is not that of a single people of one blood, but a history of many clan-groups, of different origin, gradually brought together to form one huge patriarchal society.
Of course such a society had nothing in common with any modern form of Occidental civilization. It was a huge mass of clan-groups, loosely united under a duarchy, in which the military head was omnipotent, and the religious head only an object of worship, the living symbol of a cult.
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