bers, and today, after about a century of existence, the thirteen chief Shinto sects count over 17,000,000 adherents.
The interest of historians and Shinto scholars in the early days of Japanese history naturally revealed the high place the imperial family had held in Japan, and nationalists tended to emphasize the divine ancestry of an unbroken imperial line as one of the unique virtues which accounted for Japan’s supposed superiority to other lands. The people in general again became aware that there was an emperor in Kyoto, and that in theory he was the supreme ruler of the land. In the late sixteenth century there had been signs of increasing interest in the imperial family, and this interest was fostered by the Tokugawa historians and Shinto scholars. In the eighteenth century, a certain scholar at Kyoto so boldly expounded the right of the emperor to rule that Edo was forced to take disciplinary action against him and his courtier pupils. The emperor and his court of course remained politically impotent, but the imperial line emerged again from obscurity; and the emperor again became a figure of such nationwide importance that many people began to wonder why a Shogun was actually ruling.
During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, Tokugawa rule continued serene and unchallenged, but beneath an unchanging surface, forces were at work remaking the foundations of the nation. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Tokugawa were able to preserve an antiquated political system and an absurdly outdated political and social philosophy. However, rapid economic growth