the same time the all-powerful secular ruler of Chinese tradition.
Possibly also under the influence of Chinese social concepts and of the Chinese prejudice against ruling empresses, the ancient custom of rule by women came to a definite end in Japan in the first half of the eighth century, after an unfortunate incident between a ruling empress and a Buddhist priest. Only many centuries later, long after the imperial line had become politically insignificant, did women again appear on the throne. Japanese women, who in the earliest times had enjoyed a position of social and political dominance over men, gradually sank to a status of complete subservience to them. Their rights and influence in early feudal society seem still to have been considerable, but in time even these rights were lost, as the women of Japan became socially and intellectually mere handmaids of the dominant male population.
Below the emperor the Japanese created a complex central government patterned after the tremendous centralized administration of T’ang China, one of the most highly developed and complex governments the world has ever seen. Under a Supreme Council of State, with its Prime Minister and Ministers of the Left and Right, were eight ministries, in concept not unlike the departments of our own government. Under the ministries in turn came scores of bureaus and other offices.
This organization was fantastically over developed for the needs of a small and loosely organized state, still close to a primitive clan society. Naturally much of the central government was little more than a paper organization which functioned, if at all, far differently