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issolute, their monasteries were fortresses, in which only the great political gamblers, and not the oppressed people, found comfort and help. Millions of once fertile acres had been abandoned or left waste. The destruction of libraries, books and records is something awful to contemplate; and "the times of Ashikaga" make a wilderness for the scapegoat of chronology. Ki[=o]to, the sacred capital, had been again and again plundered and burnt. Those who might be tempted to live in the city amid the ruins, ran the risk of fire, murder, or starvation. Kamakura, once the Sh[=o]-gun's seat of authority, was, a level waste of ashes. Even China, Annam and Korea suffered from the practical dissolution of society in the island empire; for Japanese pirates ravaged their coasts to steal, burn and kill. Even as for centuries in Europe, Christian churches echoed with that prayer in the litanies: "From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us," so, along large parts of the deserted coasts of Chinese Asia, the wretched inhabitants besought their gods to avenge them against the "Wojen." To this day in parts of Honan in China, mothers frighten their children and warn them to sleep by the fearful words "The Japanese are coming." First Coming of Europeans. This time, then, was that of darkest Japan. Yet the people who lived in darkness saw great light, and to them that dwelt in the shadow of death, light sprang up. When Pope Alexander VI. bisected the known world, assigning the western half, including America to Spain, and the eastern half, including Asia and its outlying archipelagos to the Portuguese, the latter sailed and fought their way around Africa to India, and past the golden Chersonese. In 1542, exactly fifty years after the discovery of America, Dai Nippon was reached. Mendez Pinto, on a Chinese pirate junk which had been driven by a storm away from her companions, set foot upon an island called Tanegashima. This name among the country folks is still synonymous with guns and pistols, for Pinto introduced fire-arms, and powder.[3] During six months spent by the "mendacious" Pinto on the island, the imitative people made no fewer than six hundred match-locks or arquebuses. Clearing twelve hundred per cent. on their cargo, the three Portuguese loaded with presents, returned to China. Their countrymen quickly flocked to this new market, and soon the beginnings of regular trade with Portugal were inaugurated. On
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