] r l -ISTORY CONVENIENTLY supplied materials for the architects of modern Japanese ideology. At the Meiji Restoration in 1868 there existed a sovereign imperial house equipped with a complete theoretical foundation and an overpowering historical justification, and it was necessary only to develop the idea that the imperial institution was somehow synonymous with the essential nature of the modernizing nation. The education system proved to be a most efficient machine for this task, making the emperor-centered nation into an orthodoxy of uncritical and nearly universal acceptance. The government used the emperor system to secure the obedience of the people; and as government projects became more critical and more precarious in the twentieth century, advancing from domestic modernization to overseas expansion, resistance was made a crime. Moreover, so powerful was the ideology that it has been said that 'those who promoted them [the national myths] for the sake of expediency ceased to be able to question them.'1 The survival to modern times of the imperial institution with its attendant myths owes less to metaphysical necessity associated with its inherent qualities than to the combinations of circumstances of historical development which apply to all countries. Indeed, the survival of the Japanese imperial institution is one of the more unlikely phenomena of history, for it was threatened many times by superior forces, and historical example suggests that it should have disappeared. The imperial institution, which provided the framework for the life of the quiet, peaceful court nobles of antiquity, was menaced by the emergence of the samurai, whose growth caused profound changes in all aspects of Japanese culture. The imperial system was buffeted repeatedly by forces in samurai society from the twelfth through the seventeenth century. Major threats occurred with the establishment of the Kamakura Bakufu in 1180-92; theJokyu! Incident2 in 1221 when