THE AWAKENING OF JAPAN
beauty, or like the glorious sea which forever washes our shore.
We must remember, however, that the political significance of the Mikado has not always been the same. As we are often unconscious of the every-day facts of nature, because of their unquestioned existence, so we became unconscious of the Mikado, and basked in the daylight, unmindful of the sun above. Clouds of successive usurpations long obscured the heavens, so that devotion to the Solar Throne became a distant though never entirely forgotten homage. By the sixteenth century, when Iyeyasu assumed the shogunate and became in reality absolute monarch of Japan, all memory of the personal rule of the Mikado had been lost for four long centuries. The Mikado’s court at Kioto, the former capital of
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