Naturally the empresses became energetic and powerful rulers; the divinity of their lords and masters seems to have stimulated rather than to have blunted their zeal in promoting the material prosperity of their country. These royal women superintended the building of cities, bridges, temples, ships and harbors; they reformed the ancient laws, started agricultural industries, patronized the manufacture of silk, cotton and fine crepe stuffs, and even caused good roads to be laid out where the foot of man had never trodden.
In the first century of our era the Japanese empress had her first-born son instructed in all civil and military exercises. When he had finished his schools, she placed him at the head of a large body of trained men and sent him to the north, commanding him not to return until he had subjugated the rebellious Ainos, who had taken up arms against the Japanese government. Yamato Dhake, as brave a man as he was an obedient son, carried out the queen-mothers instructions, and having subdued the rebels, acted with such good judgment and clemency that he induced the Ainos chiefs to acknowledge the supremacy of his enshrined father, the Mikado Keiko, and was himself so loved and reverenced that he is to this day worshiped as a pure deity by the simple-hearted Ainos.
Two centuries later another Japanese empress, the beautiful Jeengho, exasperated by the ravages on her country of vast bodies of Korean pirates, placed herself and her son, the Prince Ohjeeu, at the head of an army, sailed across the straits of Korea, invaded that exclusive land, reduced to submission its king and returned home triumphant, bringing back with her from the Chosen Land the first books ever seen in Japan; but the crowning act of her life was her conversion to Buddhism and the encouragement she gave to Buddhist missionaries to teach the humanizing religion of the Indian saint.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
