marked the commencement of 700 years of unbroken rule by warrior aristocrats. Small wonder that the impress of feudalism lies so heavily upon the nation and that the attitudes and ideals of the feudal warriors have sunk so deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese people. Accustomed for so long to rule by wearers of the sword, even in recent times the Japanese have looked instinctively to their military men for leadership and have been prone to assume that military men per se were always honest and sincere. Seven centuries of domination by the feudal military class has left patterns of thought and behavior which have not been easy to discard in recent times and which will not be easily erased even today.
Accompanying the political transformation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a great religious awakening. Significant new currents appeared in Japanese Buddhism, and these currents became the main flow of Buddhism as it has existed in Japan ever since. The appearance of new trends in religion at this time was unquestionably connected with the increasing spread of culture and knowledge to classes outside of the old court aristocracy—to the provincial gentry, the townspeople, and even to the peasantry; and the rapid triumph of the new Buddhism over older forms of the religion was certainly in part the result of the rise of new classes to prominence in national life.
The Buddhist awakening of early feudal times was also partly the outgrowth of new influences from China, as contacts with the continent, fostered by a growing international trade in Far Eastern waters, became more frequent and increasingly significant. Bud-