solution of this portentous enigma in the very superficial and
facile formula of "imitation." But the Japanese still retain
their own unit of social organization, which is not the
individual, as with us, but the _family_. Furthermore, the
resemblance of the Japanese administrative system, both central
and local, to certain European systems is not the result of
imitation, or borrowing, or adaptation. Such resemblance is
merely an odd and fortuitous resemblance. When the statesmen who
overthrew the Tokugawa régime in 1868, and abolished the feudal
system in 1871, were called upon to provide the nation with a new
equipment of administrative machinery, they did not go to Europe
for their models. They simply harked back for some eleven or
twelve centuries in their own history and resuscitated the
administrative machinery that had first been installed in Japan
by the genius of Fujiwara Kamatari and his coadjutors in 645
A.D., and more fully supplemented and organized in the succeeding
fifty or sixty years. The present Imperial Cabinet of ten
Ministers, with their departments and departmental staff of
officials, is a modified revival of the Eight Boards adapted from
China and established in the seventh century.... The present
administrative system is indeed of alien provenance; but it was
neither borrowed nor adapted a generation ago, nor borrowed nor
adapted from Europe. It was really a system of hoary antiquity
that was revived to cope with pressing modern exigencies.

The outcome was that the clans of Satsuma and Choshu acquired control of
the Mikado, made his exaltation the symbol of resistance to the
foreigner (with whom the Shogun had concluded unpopular treaties), and
secured the support of the country by being the champions of
nationalism. Under extraordinarily able leaders, a policy was adopted