last ready for a clear and unbiased reappraisal of the meaning of our own historical experience. Perhaps a good starting point for such fresh thoughts would be whatever non-European experience of feudalism we can find. Our task is made easy by the paucity of examples. Feudalism has indeed been a very unusual human phenomenon. Japan offers the only clear example outside of Europe itself. Fortunately it is an example that is entirely independent of the European experience. Japan lies at the opposite end of the Old World from Europe, and there was not even any remote influence of the feudalism of either of these areas on the other.
We obviously do not have time for a detailed discussion of Japanese feudalism, still less for a consideration of other Asian historical experiences, which would be necessary to prove how unique Japanese feudalism was in Asia and how much closer it was to the experience of medieval Europe than to any phase of Asian history outside of Japan. All I can do is to point out that most of the basic features of European feudalism were present in Japan and they followed each other in somewhat the same sequence. As in Europe, status and function in Japan’s feudal society and government were determined largely by heredity and were closely linked to the individual’s rights in connection with specific pieces of land—as hereditary cultivator, hereditary controller, or hereditary domanial lord. Relations between different levels of society were hierarchic and personal, depending on individual bonds of loyalty and legal concepts of vassalage. Both society and government were dominated by a virtual caste of hereditary military aristocrats, who made their ethical values and attitudes the norms of society.
One could go on, almost ad infinitum, citing parallels between feudal Europe and Japan that contrast sharply with most of the other social, economic and political systems that have been known in either East or West. The parallels could descend to seemingly unimportant details, or they could rise to somewhat dizzy philosophical heights that seem far removed from the more prosaic economic and social foundations of feudalism. One wonders, for example, why the feudal periods of both Europe and Japan should also have been their greatest ages of religious fervor. One also wonders why the religious interests and attitudes in feudal Europe and Japan should have been basically so much alike, even though they were derived from two radically different religions—Christianity and Buddhism—and are bracketed in time by periods in which European and Japanese religious attitudes were quite dissimilar.
It is undoubtedly significant that European and Japanese feudalism occurred at periods of comparable technological achievements. They also came at roughly the same time,
