GEOGRAPHICAL AND STATISTICAL.
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Each of the great territorial magnates above enumerated is absolute lord within his own territory, and has power of life and death over all his subjects and dependents. Certain districts only are under the immediate control of the central Government, and their revenues are assigned to the maintenance of the first dignitaries of the state, the Mikado and the Tycoon. The real authority of the realm, however, is in the hands of the Daimios, who form a federal aristrocracy, not dissimilar to that of Europe in the early middle ages.
Army and Population.
The armed force of Japan is composed of two distinct elements:-1. The troops maintained by the Daimios, and destined for the defence of their domains. 2. The troops kept by the Tycoon, and constituting the imperial army. The number of Daimios who have troops in their service amounts to 200, and they together keep up an effective of 370,000 infantry, and 40,000 cavalry, forming the Federal army, and placed at the orders of the Tycoon when the independence of the country is threatened. The imperial ariny, kept up by the Tycoon himself, reaches the nominal figure of 100,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry, but its actual force does not exceed half of that amount. The present Tycoon reorganised the force in 1865-66. Henceforth it will comprise 80,000 men, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers. The infantry is formed into regiments, manoeuvring like the French soldiers, and armed on the same model. A number of Japanese officers and sub-officers were instructed by French military men at Yokohama in 1866.
The total area of Japan is estimated at 156,604 square miles, with a population of 35,000,000, or 229 per square mile.
The number of foreigners settled in Japan is as yet very small. At the end of the year 1862, the foreign community at Kanagawa, the principal of the three ports of Japan open to aliens, consisted of fifty-five natives of Great Britain; thirty-eight Americans; twenty Dutch; eleven French; and two Portuguese; and in the latter part of 1864 the permanent foreign residents at Kanagawa had increased to 300, not counting soldiers, of which number 140 were British subjects, and about 80 Americans, and 40 Dutch. At Nagasaki, the second port of Japan thrown open to foreign trade by the government, the number of alien settlers was as follows on the 1st of January, 1866:-
British subjects... American citizens.
70 Portugues...... 32 Swiss...
3
2
Dutch
26
Prussian...
French....
19
Total......... 166
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A third port opened to European and American traders, that of Hakodadi, in the north of Japan, was deserted, after a lengthened trial, by nearly all the foreign merchants settled there, it having been found impossible to establish any satisfactory intercourse with the natives. Hakodadi is situated on an islaud, where there is little or no cultivation, separated from the continent of Niphon by the Sangar Straits. No Japanese can enter Hakodadi, or have commercial intercourse with any foreigner, without permission from the officials, who claim a large percentage on the business transacted.
There is an edict of 1637 still in force in the whole of Japan, which makes it a capital offence for natives to travel into other countries. Japanese seamen, even when accidentally cast on foreign shores, are on their return subjected to a rigorous examination, and sometimes imprisonment, to purify them from the supposed pollu- tion contracted abroad. The laws of Japan are severe, vintictive, and sanguinary. Fines are seldom imposed; banishment to the mines, imprisonment, torture, death by decapitation, poison, and impaling on a cross, are ordinary penalties of crime, the shades of which are little distinguished. It frequently happens, also, that the courts