 One striking exception to the adoption of the standard Confucian political philosophy was that the Japanese ignored the principle of the mandate of heaven (tianming in Chinese) that was central to the Chinese Confucian ideology of the state. In China the authority of the emperor flowed from a celestial entitlement or command, a mandate that could be withdrawn if the emperor no longer acted in accord with the Way (dao) or cosmic pattern (tianli). By contrast, following their proto-Shintō sensitivities, the Japanese understood imperial authority to derive primarily from the field that included the internal relations among heaven and earth or the deities and the people, with the emperor’s being considered a direct descendant of the celestial sun kami, Amaterasu. Indeed, proto-Shintō considered the relation between the celestial kami, the emperor, and the people to be familial and in no way either contractual or transcendent. Like a blood connection, all Japanese and the kami were, through the emperor, internally related with each other such that the connections among them could not be nullified.