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Throughout the centuries including the present era of Meiji, it is the Shinto religion that has provided and that still provides religious sanctions for the social order even for the new social order that has come in from the West.
In Japan, until the Meiji era, human life was cheap. For criminals of the military classes, suicide was the honorable method of leaving this world; the lower orders of society suffered loss of life at the hands of the military class without redress.
But it yet remains to be seen what rights were left him by the central authority ruling his district, which authority represented a third form of religious despotism from which there was no appeal in ordinary cases. Material for the study of the old laws and customs have not yet been collected in sufficient quantity to yield us full information as to the conditions of all classes before Meiji.
The elongated barrels with iron hoops, or the riveted boiler-plate and stove-pipe pattern, in this era of Meiji is a still more radical and even scandalous innovation. The very knowledge even of the ancient traditions was lost in the Buddhaized forms in which the old stories were cast, or in the omnipresent ritual of the Buddhist tera.
Meanwhile great changes had taken place in Japan. The restoration of the Meiji had ended the age of feudalism, at least on the surface. Japan rapidly became Westernized, and at the same time entered on an imperialist policy.
But all these pessimistic views were contradicted by results. There was no reaction, and the memory of the apprehensions then freely uttered finds nothing but ridicule to-day. One of the chief difficulties with which the Meiji statesmen had to contend was finance.
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 many respects their civilization has been fully the equal of that of any other nation; yet in this respect it is true that they resembled and still do resemble semi-civilized peoples. In response to this foreign criticism, however, a law was passed, early in the Meiji era, prohibiting nudity in cities.
The patriots of the period immediately preceding the Meiji era, known as the "Kinnoka," some of whom lost their lives because of their devotion to the cause of their then impotent Emperor, are accorded the highest honor the nation can give.
Fashions and formalities, house-interiors and street-vistas, habits and methods, and all the outer aspects of life are changed; but the old regimentation of society persists under all these surface-shiftings; and the national character remains little affected by all the transformations of Meiji.
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