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which at one stage went so far that there were serious proposals to replace the Japanese language by English and the native religions by Christianity.

Following 1868 every effort was made to adopt the techniques and culture of the West. Japan, which for two hundred and fifty years had to a large extent been isolated from the main stream of Western development, tried in the period of a few decades to absorb everything from the outside that would turn her into a modern nineteenth century state; such a state might be able to deal with foreign nations on a basis of equality and, above all, avoid the fate that had overtaken other materially backward Asian countries. By the last decade of the century the Meiji oligarchy had succeeded in forging a modern military establishment which enabled the country to defeat China in 1895 and, one decade later, to win the war against Russia, thus establishing Japan as one of the Great Powers.

The cumulative effect on the country’s literature of all these immense changes can hardly be overestimated. None the less, the destruction of the old and the adoption of the new was not immediately reflected in Japanese writing. The original aim of the oligarchy was to import the techniques of the West while preserving the Japanese ‘spirit’ intact. Chimerical as this ideal eventually proved, it caused the emphasis to be placed at first on the material aspects of Westernization. There was a cultural lag of some fifteen years during which literature continued on its course, relatively unaffected by Western influences. This literature, it should be noted, had sunk to a remarkably low level. The prose fiction of the late Tokugawa Period was in a groove of mediocrity, having largely lost the power and originality that animated the work of the great prose writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Saikaku, Kiseki and Akinari. Frivolous tales about courtesans, banal stories of licentiousness in the gay quarters and prolix works of a didactic nature were the stock-in-trade of the early nineteenth century prose writers with only two or three notable exceptions.