several dozen more. Because of these homophones, many, if not most, modern scientific terms, to be understood, must be seen as they are written in characters. Consequently, the dropping of Chinese characters from modern written Japanese would entail a wholesale modification of the technical and scientific vocabulary. Thousands of Chinese type words would have to be dropped, and new ones based on native Japanese roots or on words from Western languages would have to be substituted for them. It would be a tremendous undertaking, but in the long run probably well worth the attempt.
Although the appearance by the tenth and eleventh centuries of a new and distinctive Japanese culture was perhaps best seen in the literature of the time, it was evident in other fields also. The arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture all showed definite and sometimes marked signs of Japanese characteristics quite distinct from the original Chinese patterns, and political and social institutions changed so radically as to bear little resemblance to the Chinese prototypes.
The key figure of the Chinese political system was the bureaucrat, the scholar-civil servant who operated the complicated central government and went out to the provinces to collect taxes and maintain order. Thousands of these bureaucrats were required, and the recruiting of wise and capable men for the higher posts was a matter of crucial importance to the whole state. For this purpose, the Chinese had developed a system of civil service examinations. It centered around the great central university at Ch’ang-an where periodic examinations were given on classical subjects. Candi-