iterature became the essential culture of the active
minds of Japan.

Shotoku Taishi died A.D. 622, having been the principal officer of the
government for twenty-nine years.

The impulse which Shotoku had given to Buddhism did not subside. In the
year following his death officers were appointed to govern the growing
religious communities, called Sosho and Sozu, which in dignity and power
corresponded to archbishops and bishops in Christian nomenclature. The
first archbishop was Kwankin, a priest from Kudara, and the first bishop
was Tokuseki of Kurabe. These officials examined every priest and nun and
made a register of them. A census of Buddhism is also given which belongs
to this same period. According to this there were forty-six Buddhist
temples and 1385 priests and nuns.

In the year A.D. 626, Soga-no-Umako the _daijin_ and a life-long friend
and promoter of Buddhism died, and two years later the Empress Suiko died.
So nearly all the prominent participants in the events which had taken
place since the first entrance of Buddhism into Japan, had disappeared. In
the meantime a religion had taken possession of a field in which it was
destined to exert a wide influence and undergo a national development.

Along with this religion had come a literature and a culture, which when
absorbed into the life of this people gave them the permanent
characteristics which we now recognize as the Japanese civilization. The
freer and more frequent intercourse with China and Korea brought with it
not only a knowledge of books and writing, but many improvements in arts
and many new arts and agricultural industries. When the forces of the
Empress Jingo returned from Korea they brought with them persons skilled
in many industrial occupations. It is a tradition that a descendant of the
Kan dynasty in China had fled to Korea on the fall of that dynasty, and in
the twentieth year of the Emperor Ojin (A.D. 290) had migrated to Japan
with a colony who were familiar with weaving and sewing. In the
thirty-seventh year of the same emperor an officer was sent to China to
obtain more weavers and sewers. The cultivation of the mulberry tree and
the breeding of silk-worms(87) was introduced from China in A.D. 457, and
in order to encourage this industry the empress herself engaged in it. At
this early period this important industry was begun, or at least received
an impulse which has been continued down to the present time.

With these industria