LATER PERIOD
definitely excluded the Kyōtō Court from the sphere of national affairs, and all his successors, with one exception, had governed in obedience to that principle. But now the Shōgun Iyeyoshi seemed to place himself under the shadow of the Imperial Court at the very moment when his urgent duty, according to popular conception, was to interpose between the Throne and the danger menacing it from abroad.
The consequences of this step were even more far-reaching than those that attended the Shogunate's recourse to a council of feudatories. For the renaissance of the literature and traditions of ancient Japan, inaugurated by Mito students in the second half of the seventeenth century, had been carried to its culminating point by a remarkable triad of scholars, Mabuchi, Motoori, and Hirata, who worked with singular assiduity and wrote voluminously throughout a great part of the eighteenth century down to the middle of the nineteenth,[1] and the doctrines enunciated by this remarkable school of thinkers had now sunk deep into the hearts of a large section of the people. Belief in the divine origin of the Emperor had become a living faith instead of a moribund tradition, and many were beginning to regard the administration of the Shōgun as a sacrilegious invasion of the Mikado's heaven-descended prerogatives. It is asserted that the Shōgun Iyeyoshi himself was more or less swayed by these theories,
- ↑ See Appendix, note 27.
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