The most serious threat to the Dutch monopoly of Japanese trade came from the English during the wars of Napoleon. As early as 1794 Holland was overrun by French forces, and French propaganda transformed the Dutch East Indies into a Batavian Republic allied to France. Grave complications immediately arose with Great Britain who was at war with France. The situation became even more acute when in 1801 Napoleon gave to Holland a new constitution and demanded a more enthusiastic cooperation with his policies.

In Japan, as in the West, the novelist has become his own favorite character. But the Japanese novelist (or short-story writer) seems less anxious to conceal his predilection than to flaunt it, so many frank self-portraits are there in the gallery of sbōsetsu. He appears in his fiction as a writer. We see him at work—pressed to meet a deadline, interrupted by the visits of literary friends, smoking and sipping tea over a hibachi, or at a desk cluttered with books, papers, pens and pencils, brushes and inkstone. We go with him on a holiday or to a rendezvous; we follow, in quotidian detail, his ordinary monotonous routine. Novels, stories, and sketches elaborate this rather seedy character, which the reader is allowed—sometimes encouraged—to accept as autobiographical.

The present analysis presupposes that in the flow of history there is recognizable societal structure (cultural type) and recognizable societal change (development). It also recognizes the theoretical and practical significance of major societal types, societies—operational units whose peculiarity is determined by the interaction of a number of essential technical, organizational, and social elements. Some of these essential elements are not necessarily specific: they may be compatible with several types of society. But they may become specific through their magnitude or the institutional setting in which they function. For instance, though slaves were present in many societies, in only a few did the institution of slavery become an essential feature. And serfs (peasants attached to the soil or to the village) were present in several societies: they appeared in oriental civilizations long before they were conspicuous in Greek antiquity or in the European and Japanese Middle Ages. But they were essential mainly in feudal societies and in the “helotage” society of Sparta. Similar diversities in compatability characterize corvee labor, irrigation economy, and commercial and industrial capitalism.

The author reconstructs the religious idea and ritual that lie behind the “Songs of the Dead.” The three songs attributed to Empress Saimei in the Nihonshoki (nos. 119–121) are interpreted as sung by a dead person's spirit sailing to the nether world. They must have been handed down by the Asobi-be—shamans who appeased dead emperors' spirits—because these and other funeral songs in the Kojiki use similar verse forms. The Ryō no Shūge says that the Asobi-be's services involved two persons called Negi and Yoshi. Negi appeased the spirit who possessed Yoshi; the empress's songs must originally have been sung by Yoshi. The ritual behind the “Songs of the Dead” also helps us to understand the origins of Nō, especially of mugen nō, and to perceive the connection between Nō and the development of Kabuki in the early seventeenth century.