fundamental unwillingness to accept certain key features of the Chinese system.
China in the eighth century was developing a fairly egalitarian social system and was perfecting techniques of civil service examinations whereby talent could be recruited for high government office from a rather broad segment of society. The early Japanese, on the other hand, were an aristocratic, tribal people with strong concepts of hereditary rights, and these they held on to even after borrowing the Chinese machinery of government. The two could not be successfully fused into a stable compound.
Japan, however, did not revert to its earlier tribal type of organization. Instead, the Chinese political and landowning system degenerated into feudalism, in which the complex concepts of legal rights and organization derived from the Chinese system merged with the old native emphasis on hereditary authority and the acceptance of the leadership of the local military aristocrat.
What I have just said is a vast oversimplification of this very complicated development, and many might be inclined to dispute my interpretation. I hope, however, that you will accept it simply for purposes of illustration. Assuming that this is a correct picture of the origins of Japanese feudalism, we can then turn our attention to the origins of Western feudalism to see what we may find there that may be similar.
In Europe the tribal Germans became mixed up with the sophisticated political and economic institutions of Rome, not by attempting to borrow them, but in the less commendable process of destroying them. If the Japanese example is valid, the collapsing legal institutions of Rome offer the one necessary ingredient for feudalism, and the aristocratic tribal organization of the Germanic peoples the other. We have already noted how similar were the historical experiences of Rome and the Han Empire; and the early tribal cultures of the northern part of the whole Eurasian land mass, from the Germanic tribes in the West to the early Koreans and Japanese in the Far East, seem to have been very much alike in their aristocratic organization as effective warrior bands. The parallels seem valid enough to deserve careful study.
We might next turn to other parts of the world where aristocratically organized, tribal groups have become involved in one way or another with sophisticated, centralized political and economic institutions. Tribally organized Turkish, Mongol, and Tungusic peoples, for example, repeatedly conquered part or all of China. During the most serious of the barbarian invasions, following the collapse of the Han Empire, the resulting mixture
