An Introduction to the History of Japan

CHAPTER VI

CULMINATION OF THE NEW RÉGIME; STAGNATION; RISE OF THE MILITARY RÉGIME

Whatever be the merit or the demerit of the reform of the Taikwa, it was after all an honour to the Japanese nation that our ancestors ever undertook this reform. Not only because they were able to provide thereby for the needs of the state of that time, but because they were bold enough, temerarious almost, to aspire to imitate the elaborate system of the highly civilised T'ang. When an uncivilised people comes into contact with one highly civilised, it is needless to say that the former is generally induced to imitate the latter. This imitation is sometimes of a low order, that is to say, it often verges on mimicry, and not infrequently results in the dwindling of racial energy on the part of the imitator. Very seldom does the imitation go so far as to adopt the political institutions of the superior. If they, however, had ventured impetuously to do so, the result would have been still worse, while in the case of Japan as the imitator of China, it was quite otherwise. At first sight, as China of the T'ang was so incomparably far ahead of Japan of that time, it might seem rather foolish of our forefathers to try straightway to imitate her. Moreover, on the whole, the imitation ended in a failure indeed, as should have been expected. But the original institutions of the T'ang itself proved a failure in their own home; hence, had the imitation of those institutions resulted in a success with us, it would have aroused a great astonishment. The very fact that our forefathers dared to imitate China, and did not thereby end in losing spirit and energy, is in itself a great credit to the reputation of the Japanese as a nation, for it testifies that they have been from the first a very aspiring nation, unwitting how to shirk a difficulty. If it be an honour to the Germans not to have withered before the high civilisation of the Romans, the same glory may be accorded to the Japanese also.

This aspiring spirit of the nation not only made itself felt in the importation of Chinese legislation, but also in adopting her arts and literature. As to arts, it is difficult to ascertain to what degree of accomplishment our forefathers had already attained before they came under continental influence. Most probably it was limited to some simple designs drawn on household utensils, haniwa or terracotta-making, and to an orchestra of rudimentary instruments. In what may be regarded as literature, there were ballads, some of which are cited in the Nihongi. Tales of heroic deeds, however, used to be transmitted from generation to generation, not in the form of poetry, that is, not in epic, but in oral prose narrations. In this respect the ancient Japanese fell far short of the Ainu, who had developed a highly epic talent very early. To summarise, the ancient Japanese apparently showed very few indications of excelling other peoples in the same stage of civilisation as regards arts and literature.

In the history of Japanese art, the introduction of Buddhism is a noteworthy event. For, along with it, works of Chinese painting and sculpture, both pertaining mainly to Buddhist worship, were sent as presents to our imperial court by rulers of the peninsular states. Not only articles of virtu, but also artists themselves, were sent over to this country from the continent, who displayed their skill in building temples, making images, decorating shrines with fresco paintings, and so forth. Instructed by them, some gifted Japanese, too, became enabled to develop themselves in several branches of art and artistic industry. Among the plastic arts, painting was very slow in making progress, though a few examples of that age which have remained to this day are very similar in style to those pictures and frescoes recently excavated out of the desert in northwestern China, and have a high historical value, giving us a glimpse of the T'ang painting. Architecture was perhaps the art most patronised by the court. We can see it in the construction of numerous palaces. It is a well known fact that before the Empress Gemmyo, who was one of the daughters of the Emperor Tenchi and ascended the throne next after the Emperor Mommu, each successive emperor established his court at the place he liked, and the residence of the previous emperor was generally abandoned by the next-comer. From this fact we can imagine that all imperial palaces of those times, if they could be named palaces at all, must have been very simply built and not very imposing. The locality, too, where the residence was established, was hardly apt to be called a metropolitan city, although it might have served sufficiently as a political centre of the time. It was in the third year of the said empress, 710 A. D. , that Nara was first selected as the new capital which was to be established in permanence, contrary to the hitherto accepted usage, and in fact it remained the country's chief city for more than eighty years. For the first time a plan of the city was drawn, a plan very much like a checkerboard, having been modelled after the contemporary Chinese metropolis. The architectural style of the new palaces was also an imitation of that which then prevailed in China. The only difference was that wood was widely used here instead of brick, which was already the chief building material in China. Nobles were encouraged by the court to build tiled houses in place of thatched. Tiles began to come into use about that time, and not for roofing only, but for flooring also, though the checkerboard plan of the metropolitan city of Nara might never have been realised in full detail, and though among those palaces once built very few could escape the frequent fires and gradual decay, yet judging from those very few which have fortunately survived to this day, we may fairly imagine that they must have been grandiose in proportion to the general condition of the age. What gives the best clue to the social life of the higher classes of that time is the famous imperial treasury, Shô-sô-in, at Nara, now opened to a few specially honoured persons every autumn, when the air is very agreeably dry in Japan. The treasury contains various articles of daily and ceremonial use bequeathed by the Emperor Shômu, who was the eldest son of the Emperor Mommu and died in 749 A. D. after a reign of twenty-five years. Being so multifarious in their kinds, and having been wonderfully well preserved in a wooden storehouse, these imperial treasures, if taken together with numerous contemporary documents extant today, enable us to give a clear and accurate picture of the social life of that time.

As tatami matting was not yet known, and the houses occupied by men of high circles had their floors generally tiled, it may be naturally supposed that the indoor life of that time might have been nearer to that of the Chinese or the European than to that of the modern Japanese. Accordingly their outdoor life, too, must have been far different from that of the present day. For example, modern Japanese are fond of trimming or arranging flowers, putting two or three twigs into a small vase or a short bamboo tube, by methods which, however dainty, are very conventional after all. What they rejoice in thus is to produce a distorted semblance in miniature as tiny as possible of a certain aspect of nature. In the age of the Nara emperors, on the contrary, large bunches of flowers must have been used profusely in decorating rooms and tables, and perhaps to strew on the ground. A great many flower baskets, which are kept in the said treasury, and are of a kind to the use of which the modern Japanese are not accustomed, prove the above assertion. Again, while modern Japanese ladies play exclusively on the koto, a stringed musical instrument laid flat on the tatami when played, Nara musicians seem to have played on harps, too, one of which also is extant in the treasury. Carpets seem to have been used not only in covering the floor, but were put down on the ground on occasions of some ceremonial processions. Hunting, rowing, and horsemanship were then the most favourite pastimes of the nobles. Unlike modern Japanese ladies, women of that time were not behind men in riding. This one fact will perhaps suffice to attest the jovial and sprightly character of the social life of the Nara age.

If we turn to the literature of the time, the progress was remarkable, more easily perceivable than in any other department. We had now not only ballads as before, but short epics also. Such a change must of course be attributed to the influence of the Chinese literature assiduously cultivated. In the year 751 a collection of 120 select poems in Chinese, composed by the 64 Nara courtiers since the reign of the Emperor Tenchi, was compiled and named the Kwai-fû-sô. These poems are quite Chinese in their diction, rhetoric, and strain, resembling in every way those by first rate Chinese poets, and may fairly take rank among them without betraying any sign of imitation or pasticcio. If we consider that no kind of Japanese literature in its own mother tongue could be committed to writing, save only in Chinese ideographs, the influence of the Chinese literature, which flourished so rampantly at that time in Japan, cannot be estimated too highly. No wonder that, parallel to the compilation of the Chinese poems, a collection of Japanese poems, beginning with that of the Emperor Yûryaku in the latter half of the fifth century, was also undertaken. This collection is the celebrated Man-yô-shû. The long and short poems selected, however, were not restricted, as in the case of the Kwai-fû-sô, to those by courtiers only. On the contrary, it contained many poems sung by the common people, into which no whit of Chinese civilisation could have penetrated. The Man-yô-shû, therefore, is held by Japanese historians to be a very useful source-book as regards the social history of the time.

It is hardly to be denied that some of the Japanese poems of that age were evidently composed and committed to writing with the object of being read and not sung, as almost all modern Japanese poems are accustomed to be. There were still many others at the same time which must have been composed from the first in order only to be sung. Men of the age, of high as well as of low rank, were singularly fond of singing, generally accompanied by dancing. Many pathetic love stories are told about those gatherings of singers and dancers, the utagaki, which literally means the singing hedge or ring. This kind of gleeful gathering used to take place on a street, in an open field, or on a hill-top. In one of the utagaki held in the city of Nara, it is said that members of the imperial family took part too, shoulder to shoulder with citizens and denizens of very modest standing. As to dances of the time there might have been some styles original to the Japanese themselves. At the same time there were to be found many dances of foreign origin, imported, together with their musical accompaniments, from China and the peninsular states. These dances have long ago been entirely lost in their original homes, so that they can be witnessed only in our country now. A strange survival of ancient culture indeed! Of course even in our country those exotic and antiquated dances do not conform to the modern taste, and on that account are not frequently performed. They have been handed down through many generations, however, by the band of court musicians, and at present these dances, dating back to the T'ang dynasty, are performed only at certain archaic court ceremonies.

From what has been stated above, one can well imagine that, in certain respects, Japan of the Nara age had much in common with Greece just about the time of the Persian invasion. In both it was an age in which a vigorous race reached the first flourishing stage of civilisation, when the national energy began to be devoted to æsthetic pursuits, but was nevertheless not yet enervated by over-enlightenment. Whatever those Japanese set their minds on doing, they set about it very briskly and cheerfully, nor was their enthusiasm dampened by any fear of probable mishap. Being naïve, and therefore ignorant of obstacles inevitable to the progress of a nation, they always soared higher and higher, full of resplendent hope. How eager they were to essay at great things may be conjectured from the size of the Daibutsu, the colossal statue of Buddha, in the temple of the Tôdaiji at Nara. The statue, more than fifty-three feet in height, was finished in 749 A. D. after several successive failures encountered and overcome during four years, and is the largest that was ever made in Japan. That such a great statue was not only designed, but was executed by Japanese sculptors, whether their origin be of immigrant stock or not, should be considered a great credit to the enterprising spirit and the artistic acquirements of the Japanese of that epoch.

Such a stride in the national progress, however, was only attained at the expense of other quarters not at all insignificant. On the one hand, it is true that Japan benefited immensely by having had as her neighbor such a highly civilised country as China of the T'ang. On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that it was a great misfortune to us that we had such an over-shadowingly influential neighbour. China of that time was a nation too far in advance of us to encourage us to venture to compete with her. She left us no choice but to imitate her. Who can blame the Japanese of the Nara age if they thought it the most urgent business to run after China, and try to overtake her in the same track down which they knew the Chinese had progressed a long way already? The glory and splendour of the Chinese civilisation of the T'ang was too enticing for them to turn their eyes aside and seek a yet untrodden route. That they strove simply to imitate and rejoiced in behaving as though they were real Chinese should not be a matter for astonishment in the least. Perhaps it may be said to their credit that the imitation was exquisite and the resemblance accurate. One of the brilliant students then sent abroad remained there for eighteen years, and after his return to this country he eventually became a prominent minister of the Japanese government, notwithstanding his humble origin, a promotion very rare in those days. Certain branches of Chinese literature, many refined ceremonies, various kinds of Chinese pastimes, many things Chinese, useful and beneficial to our people, to be found in Japan even to this day have been attributed to his importation. Another scholar who was obliged to stay in China for more than fifty years, distinguished himself in the literary circles of the Chinese metropolis, was taken into the service of a T'ang emperor as a very high official under a Chinese name, and at last died there with a life-long yearning for his native country.

Such an imitation, however useful it might have proved in behalf of our country at large, could not fail to exact from the nation still young, as Japan was at that time, a tremendous overexertion of their mental faculties. Having been strained to the last extremity of tension, the Japanese became naturally exceedingly nervous. From a lack of patience to observe quietly the maturing of the effect of a stack of laws and regulations already enacted, they hastily repudiated some of them as if they were of no use, and replaced them by new laws quite as confounding as the previous ones, and thus legislations contradictory in principle rapidly succeeded one another, none of them having had time enough to be experimented with exhaustively. Although along with this rage for imitation there was a strong countercurrent, very conservative, which struggled incessantly to preserve what was original and at the same time precious, yet to determine which was worthy of preservation was a matter of bewilderment to the contemporaries, for they were averse from coming into any collision with things Chinese to which they were not at all loth. Excitement and irritation, the natural result of this topsyturvy state of things, can best be estimated by the belief in ridiculous auspices. The discovery of a certain plant or animal, of rare colour or of unusual shape, generally caused by deformities, was enthusiastically welcomed as an augury of a long and peaceful reign, and was wont to call forth some lengthy imperial proclamation in praise of the government. Bounties were munificently distributed to commemorate the happy occasion, discoverers of these rarities were amply rewarded, criminals were released or had the hardships of their servitude ameliorated. Naturally, many of these auguries proved vain, and only served as a prop to sustain the self-conceit of responsible ministers, or as a means of soothing general discontent, if such discontent could ever be manifested in those "good old times." The greatest evil of this fatuous hankering for sources of self-satisfaction was the throng of rogues and sycophants thereby produced who vied with one another in contriving false or specious rarities and begging imperial favour for them. Superstitions of this kind would have suited well enough a people quite uncivilised, or too civilised to care for rational things. As for the Japanese, a people already on the way of youthful progress, radiant with hope, belief in auspices was but an intolerable fetter. If viewed from this single point, therefore, the régime ought to have been reformed by any means.

Another and still greater evil of the age was the clashing of interests between the different classes of people. Chinese civilisation could permeate only the powerful, the higher classes. Though the chieftains and lords, who had been mighty in the former régime, were bereft of their power by the appropriation of their lands and people, a new class of nobles soon arose in place of them, and among the latter the descendants of Nakatomi-no-Kamatari were the most prominent. This sagacious minister, of whom I have already spoken in the foregoing chapters, was rewarded, in consideration of his meritorious services in the destruction of the Soga, as well as in the execution of the most radical reform Japan has ever known, with the office of the most intimate advisory minister of the Emperor, and was granted the honourable family appellation of Fujiwara. His descendants, who have ramified into innumerable branches and include more than half of the court-nobles of the present day, enjoyed ever-increasing imperial favour generation after generation. What marked especially the sudden growth of the family position was the elevation of one of the grand-daughters of the minister to be the imperial consort of the Emperor Shômu. For several centuries prior to this, it had been the custom to choose the empress from the daughters of the families of the blood imperial. An offspring of a subject, however high her father's rank might be, was not recognised as qualified to that distinction. The privilege, which the Fujiwara family was now exceptionally honoured with, meant that only this family should have hereafter its place next to the imperial, so that none other would be allowed to vie with it any more. The Fujiwara became thus associated with the imperial family more and more closely, and affairs of state gradually came to be transacted as if they were the family business of the Fujiwara. The worst evil of this aggrandisement was only prevented by the incessant and inveterate internecine feuds within the clan itself, which eventually served to put a bridle on the audacity and ambition of any one of the members.

This influential family of the Fujiwara, together with a few other nobles of different lineage, including scions of the imperial family, monopolised almost all the wealth and power in the country. They kept a great number of slaves in their households, and held vast tracts of private estates, too. As to the land, they developed and cultivated the fields by the hands of their slaves or leased them for rent. Besides, they turned into private properties those lands of which they were legally allowed only the usufruct. By the reform legislation, the usufruct of a public land was granted to one who did much service to the state, but the duration of the right was limited to his life or at most to that of his grand-children. None was permitted to hold the public land as a hereditary possession without time limit. It was by the infringement of these regulations that arbitrary occupation was realised.

Another means of the aggrandisement of the estates of the nobles was a fraudulent practice on the part of the common people. Those who were independent landowners or legal leaseholders of public lands were liable to taxation, as may be supposed, and as the taxes and imposts of that time were pretty heavy, those landholders thought it wiser to alienate the land formally by presenting it to some influential nobles or some Buddhist temples, which came to be privileged, or asserted the right to be exempted from the burden of taxation. In reality, of course, those people continued to hold the land as before, and were very glad to see their burden much alleviated, for the tribute which they were obliged to pay to the nominal landlord by the transaction must have been less than the regular taxes which they owed to the government. Moreover, by this presentation they could enter under the protection of those nobles or temples, which was useful for them in defying the law, should need arise. The number of independent landholders thus gradually diminished by the renunciation of the legal right and duty on the part of the holders, and consequently the amount of the levied tax grew less and less. The state, however, could not curtail the necessary amount of the expenditure on that account. The dignity of the court had to be upheld higher and higher, state ceremonies performed regularly, and the national defence was not to be neglected for a moment. All these were causes which necessitated a continual increase of revenue. In order to fill up the deficit, the burden was transferred, doubled or trebled, to those who remained longer honest, so that it soon became quite unbearable for them also. The hardships borne by the law-abiding people of that time could be compared to those of the Huguenots who, faithful to their confession, were impoverished by the dragonnade. In this way, more and more people were induced to give up their independent stand and take shelter under the shield of mighty protectors. Military service, too, was another grievance for the common people. They had to serve in the western islands against continental invaders, or on the northern frontier against the Ainu. Not only did they thereby risk their lives, but sometimes they were obliged to procure their provisions at their own cost, for the government could not afford it. If those people would once renounce their right of independence and turn voluntary vagabonds, then they could at once elude the military duty and the tax. No wonder this was possible since it was an age in which the national consciousness was not yet developed enough to teach them implicitly that it was their duty to be ready to expose themselves to any peril for the sake of the state. This underhand transaction is one exceedingly analogous to the process in which Frankish allod-holders gradually turned their lands into fiefs, in order to escape taxation and at the same time obtain protection from influential persons. If one should think that the census, which was ordained in the reform law to take place periodically, would prove efficient to check the increase of these outcasts, it would be a great mistake in forming a just conception of these ages. Soon after the enactment of the census law, it ceased to be regularly executed, and even while the law was observed with punctuality, the extent to which it was applied must have been very limited. It was at such a time that the great statue of Buddha was completed in the city of Nara, and ten thousand priests were invited to take part in a grand ceremony of rejoicing.

The palaces and temples in Nara, as well as the imperial mansions and the abodes of nobles scattered about the country, seem in a great measure to have been solidly and magnificently built, with their roofs covered with tiles as beforementioned. The nobles who had no permanent residence in the city, had as their bounden duty to pay certain duty visits, as it were, to the imperial court, and learn there how to refine their country life by adopting the metropolitan ways of living. Some of the household furniture used by the nobles and members of the imperial family was bought in China. The education of the higher classes enabled them not only to read and write the literary Chinese with ease and fluency, but to behave correctly according to Chinese etiquette, as if they were themselves genuine Chinese. These are the bright aspects of the history of the Nara age. Around the metropolitan city, however, and those aristocratic abodes in the country, swarmed the impoverished people, utterly uneducated, receiving no benefit whatever from the imported Chinese civilisation. Here one might perhaps ask, could not Buddhism give them any solace at all? Not in the least. The shrewd Buddhists, having seen that Shintoism had been strangely tenacious in resisting the propagation of their creed notwithstanding its lack of system and dogma, wisely invented a clever method to keep a firm hold even on the conservative mind by identifying the patron deities of Buddhism with the national gods of our country. It resembles in some ways the device of the early Christian missionaries in northern Europe, who tried to blend Teutonic mythology with Christian legend. The only difference between them is that those missionaries did not go so far as our Buddhist priests did. This device of the Buddhists was crowned with complete success. By this identification Buddhism became a religion which could be embraced without any palpable contradiction to Shintoism, in other words, with no risk of injuring the national traditions. Nay, it came to be considered that Shintoism was not only compatible with Buddhism, but also subservient to its real interests. Thus we find almost everywhere a Shinto shrine standing within the same precincts as a Buddhist temple, the Shinto deity being regarded as the patron of the Buddhist creed and its place of worship. This strange combination continued to be looked upon as a matter of course until the Restoration of Meidji, when the revival of the imperial prerogative was accompanied by a reaction against Buddhism, and the purification of Shintoism from its Buddhistic admixture was enthusiastically undertaken. On account of the dubiosity of their religious character, many finely built temples and images of exquisite art were ruthlessly demolished, much to the regret of art connoisseurs.

In the year 794, the Emperor Kwammu transferred his capital to the province of Yamashiro, and gave it the felicitous appellation of Hei-an, which means peace and tranquility. The place, however, has been commonly designated by the name of Kyoto, which means literally the capital, and continued henceforth to be the centre of Japan for more than one thousand years. There might have been several motives which caused the capital to be removed from Nara. The valley, in which the old capital was situated, might have been too narrow to allow free expansion, or it might have been found inconveniently situated as regards communications. Party strife among the nobles might have been another reason. At any rate the choice of the new site cannot be regarded as a mistake. Kyoto is better connected with Naniwa, Ôsaka of the present day, than Nara was at that time. From Kyoto one was able to reach the port within a few hours, by going down the river Yodo by boat. There is no natural hindrance on the way like the mountain chain which divides the two provinces of Yamato and Settsu. At the same time, Kyoto is quite near to Ohtsu, the gate toward the eastern provinces, and those selfsame provinces were the regions which had for long been engrossing the attention of far-sighted contemporary statesmen.

The energetic Emperor Kwammu undertook the conquest of the Ainu with a renewed vigour. That part of the Ainu country which faced the Sea of Japan was already made a province before the accession of that sovereign. In the Emperor's reign the success of the Japanese arms was carried far into the Ainu land by the victorious general Sakanouye-no-Tamuramaro. The boundary of the province of Mutsu, the region facing the Pacific, was pushed northward into the middle of the present province of Rikuchû. Enterprising Japanese settled in those lands or travelled to and fro in quest of trade. The Ainu, however, was not completely subjugated, nor was he easily driven away out of the main island. Beyond Shirakawa, the place which had for a long time been considered the northernmost limit of civilised Japan, numerous hordes of half-domesticated Ainu continued to reside as before. As the result of the constant contact with the Japanese, they were slowly influenced by the civilisation which the latter had already acquired. They could consolidate their forces under the leadership of some valiant chiefs, and frequently dared to rise against oppressive governors sent from Kyoto. In short, they proved to be intractable as ever, so that more than three centuries were still necessary to put their land in the same status as the ordinary Japanese province. The interminable wars and skirmishes waged thenceforth between the two races were one of the principal causes of the financial embarrassment of the government at Kyoto, and finally undermined its power.

The imperial family and the nobles lived their lives at Kyoto, largely as they were wont to do at the old capital of Nara. The family of the Fujiwara was ever as ascendant as before. Abundant court intrigues were now not the outcome of the antagonism between the different great families, but of the internal quarrels within the single family of the Fujiwara, not infrequently intermingled with disputes concerning the imperial succession. All the high and lucrative offices were monopolised by the members of that able and ambitious family. Most of the empresses of the successive sovereigns were their daughters. The regency became the hereditary function of the family, and they filled the office one after another without any regard to the age or health conditions of the reigning emperor. It was very rare indeed for members of families other than the Fujiwara to be promoted to one of the three great ministerships. Even scions of the imperial family had to yield to them in power and position.

Their literary attainments were generally high, being but little inferior to those of the professional literati, who formed a class of secondary courtiers, and proceeded generally from the families of the Sugawara, Kiyowara, and so forth.Ships with ambassadors, students, and priests were sent by them to China of the T'ang as before.For they still burned with an ardent desire to get more and more knowledge about things Chinese.Their Sinicomania was carried indeed to such an excess that the physiognomical type of the Chinese came to be regarded as the finest ideal of mankind, and any Japanese who was of that type was adored as having the ideal features.

The despatch of the official ships continued as in the days of Nara, not at regular intervals, but generally once during the reign of every Japanese emperor. The impetuous imitation of Chinese legislation slackened in fact, for in that respect we had already borrowed enough. The connection of our country with China began to take the form of ordinary international intercourse, with due reciprocation of courtesies. There remained, however, some need of keeping pace with the political changes in China, and we could not make up our minds to refrain altogether from peeping into the land which we held to be far above our country in civilisation. The last of such an embassy was that sent in the year 843. Half a century afterwards another squadron was ordered to be despatched, and Sugawara-no-Michizane was appointed ambassador. But the squadron was never really sent. For at that time the long dynasty of the T'ang was just drawing near to its end, and the civil war of a century's duration was beginning. There was no more any stable government in China with which we could communicate. Moreover, there was danger to be feared that we might be somehow embroiled in the anarchical disturbances in the Middle Kingdom. The ambassador, Michizane himself, was also of the opinion that little was to be gained by the despatch of the intended squadron, and dissuaded the government from sending it.

Japan now entered into the stage of the assimilation of the alien culture already imported in full. Hitherto we had been too busy to make discrimination among those things Chinese which we had engulfed at random. Now we had to make clear which of them was suited, and how others were to be modified in order to make them useful to our country. In short, we had to digest; or to speak by the book, we had to ruminate on what we had already taken. After all it must have been a wise policy to put a stop to the state of national nervousness caused by the incessant introduction of foreign laws, manners, customs, things. The infiltration, however superficial it might have been, left an ineradicable influence owing to the continual process of several centuries. The spirit of the culture of the dominant class became essentially Chinese. Though the saying, "Japanese spirit and Chinese erudition" was henceforth fondly spoken of, the Japanese spirit itself was not yet clearly defined, and did not enter into the full consciousness of the nation. What the ruling nobles, who had imbibed the Chinese spirit already too deeply, could do was only to discard things which became superannuated and untenable.

The characteristics of the age of rumination may be discerned in the history of our literature from the latter half of the ninth century to the beginning of the eleventh. At first, while literary works were still being written almost exclusively in Chinese, we begin to find in their style traces of Japanisation, becoming more and more marked as time goes on. Along with works in Chinese, those in our own language began to appear, though very sparsely at first. Then gradually these attempts in the vernacular increased, so that eventually the end of the tenth century became the culminating period of the classical Japanese literature. Religious and scholastic works were written in Chinese as before. August and ceremonial documents continued to be composed in the same language. Chinese poetry was as much in vogue among the courtiers as ever. At the same time, however, numerous works in Japanese now appeared in the form of chronicles, diaries, short stories, novels, satirical sketches, and poems. What was most remarkable, however, is that the greater part of those works was written not by men, but by court ladies. Among the ladies, who by their wit and literary genius brightened the court of the Emperor Ichijô, stood at the forefront Murasaki-shikibu, the author of the Genji-monogatari, and Sei-Shônagon, the author of Makura-no-sôshi

That these intelligent and talented court ladies were versed in Chinese literature can be perceived in what they wrote in Japanese. In other words, the culture, essentially Chinese, of the high circles of society was not monopolised by the men only, but shared by the women. And these court ladies were fairly emancipated, and far from being subject to the caprices of men. It is often argued that the progress of a country can be measured rightly by the social status of the women in it. If that be true, Japan at the beginning of the eleventh century must have been very highly civilised. And it was really so in a certain sense. This civilised Japan, however, was confined to the very narrow circle in Kyoto, and for that very circle the Chinese enlightenment penetrated too deep. The great nobles of the Fujiwara family were too refined, too effeminate for holders of the helm of the state, the young state in which there was still much to be done vigorously.

The Ainu on the north were menacing as ever. For though they had lost in extent of territory, they had gained in civilisation. The demand of the state was for energetic ministers as well as for valiant warriors. The high-class nobles became unfitted for both, and especially for the rough life of the latter. As generals, therefore, not to speak of officers, were employed men of comparatively low rank among the courtiers. In this way military affairs became the hereditary profession of certain families which happened to be engaged in them most frequently, and were at last monopolised by them. As the government, however, could not and did not care to provide these generals with a sufficiency of soldiers, provisions, and armaments, they were obliged to help themselves to those necessaries, just like the leaders of the landsknechts in Europe. The intimate relation of vassalage, not legally recognised of course, thus arose between those generals and their private soldiers, and as this condition lasted for a considerable time, the relationship became hereditary. Needless to say that such a condition of affairs was naturally set up in the provinces, where the Ainu was still powerful enough to raise frequent disturbances. On account of the fact that these generals and their relatives were often appointed to the governorship of distant provinces, where the influence of the Kyoto government was too weak to check their arbitrary conduct, the same connection of vassalage was formed there also between them and the provincials who were in need of their protection. Not only did they thus become masters of bands of strong and warlike people, but they also appropriated to themselves by sundry means vast tracts of land, and fattened their purses thereby. That they did not venture at once to overthrow the political régime upheld by the nobles of the Fujiwara family may be accounted for by the time-honoured prestige of the latter. For a long while those warriors went even so far as to do homage to this or that noble of the Fujiwara as his vassals, and served as tools to this or that party in court intrigues. The courtiers, who employed them as their instruments, had no apprehension that those military men, subservient for the moment to their needs, would one day turn into rivals, powerful enough in the long run to overturn them, and flattered themselves that they would remain as their cat's-paws forever. An exact analogy of this in the history of Rome may be found in the shortsightedness of the senate, which complacently believed that the Scipios and the Caesars would for ever remain obedient to their order. It would be a fatal mistake to think that a cat's-paw would always remain docile and faithful to its employer. Especially when it is frequently used and abused it becomes conscious of its own usefulness and real strength; and self-assertion is born. The next step for it must be the sounding of the strength of its master, then the desire awakens to take the place of the master, when it is found that he is not so strong as he looks to be.

Moreover in any country, in whatever condition, war cannot be carried on without a great number of participants, while it must be directed by a single head.War, therefore, tends on the one hand to create a dictator, and on the other hand to precipitate the democratisation of a country.None would be so ignorant for long as to discharge gladly an imposed duty without enjoying their right to compensation for service rendered.The time must come when these military leaders should supersede the ultracivilised Kyoto nobles, and hold the reins of government themselves.The transference of political power from the higher to the lower stratum was unavoidable.These generals, howsoever inferior they might be in rank compared with the court nobles of the Fujiwara, were still to be classed among the nobles, and it was yet a very far cry to the time when the common people could have some share in the politics of their own country.

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CHAPTER VII

THE MILITARY RÉGIME; THE TAIRA AND THE MINAMOTO; THE SHOGUNATE OF KAMAKURA

For some time the military class had been rocking the prestige of the court nobles, and at last superseded them by overturning their rotten edifice. It was first by the wars of the so-called "Nine Years" and "Three Years," both waged in northern Japan in the latter half of the eleventh century by Yoriyoshi and Yoshiiye, the famous generals of the Minamoto family, that the military class began to grow markedly powerful and independent. Nearly a century passed, and then Yoritomo, one of the great-great-grandsons of Yoshiiye, was able to set up his military government, the Shogunate, at Kamakura in the province of Sagami. Previous to the Kamakura Shogunate, there was an interim between it and the old régime, the semi-military government of the Taira family. The family of the Taira sprang, like that of the Minamoto, from a scion of the imperial family, and, like the latter, had been engaged from the first in the craft of war. Of the two, the Taira first succeeded in courting the favour of the Fujiwara nobles, and the members of the former family were appointed to less dangerous and more lucrative posts than the Minamoto. As Japan at that time kept on gravitating toward the west of Kyoto, it was natural that the influence of the Taira should have been extended in the western provinces. Some of the noted warriors belonging to this clan were now and then charged with the governorship of the eastern provinces, and therefore their descendants were widely scattered in those quarters also. In the east, however, the influence of the Minamoto family was paramount, for noted warriors of this family were more frequently employed than the Taira in the region against the Ainu. In both of these families, the moral link between several branches within the family was very loose, perhaps much weaker than in the Highland clans in Scotland. Such dissension should be attributed to the fact that those who passed under the same family name of the Minamoto or the Taira became soon too numerous to present a united front always, whenever a conflict with the rival family arose. At any rate the feud between the respective main branches of the two families was very bitter and inveterate, covering many generations. Of the two, the Minamoto, hardened by constant warfare with the still savage tribes in the north, and trained by the privations unavoidable in wars, surpassed the Taira in robustness and bravery. The Taira became, on the contrary, as the result of close contact with the courtiers at Kyoto, more refined than the Minamoto. Though alternately employed as generals in war as well as instruments in intrigues, the Taira were thought by the Fujiwara to be more docile, and therefore were more trusted than the Minamoto. This is why the former were able to seize possession of the government earlier than the latter. Kiyomori, the first and the last of the Taira, who was made the highest minister of the crown, as if he were himself one of the Fujiwara nobles, was able to reach that goal of the ambition of courtiers, by intruding himself among them, intermingling his sons and grandsons with the flower of the Fujiwara, and at last he made one of his daughters the consort of the Emperor Takakura. His only distinction as compared with the old nobles was that his personal character was too rough and soldier-like, and the means he resorted to were too drastic and forcible, for the over-refined members of the Fujiwara. Kiyomori had in his quality too much of the real statesman to be an idle player in the pageants and ceremonies of the court, and it is said that he often committed blunders through his unseemly deportment as courtier, and became, on that account, the laughing-stock of the Fujiwara. Nevertheless he, like the most of the Fujiwara, could not rid himself of the mistaken idea, that the statesman and the courtier were the same thing, so that none could be the one without being the other. The younger members of the family were reared up rather as courtiers than as soldiers, trained more in playing on musical instruments, in dancing, and in witty versification of short poems than in the use of weapons.

The most memorable deed achieved by Kiyomori was the change of the capital from Kyoto to Fukuwara, a part of the present city of Kobe. Till then Kyoto had been continuously the capital of the empire for three and a half centuries. To remove the centre of the government from that sacrosanctity must have been a great surprise to the metropolitans. As to the interpretation of the motives for this change, historians differ. It is ascribed by some to Kiyomori's abhorrence of the conventionalism which obtained in the old capital, and which was so deeply rooted as not to be eradicated very easily so long as he stayed there, or else to his anxious desire to get rid of the pernicious meddling of the audacious priests of the temple Yenryakuji, on mount Hiyei, the source of great annoyance to the government of Kyoto. By other historians the change is said to have originated in Kiyomori's farsightedness in having set his mind on the profit of the trade with China, the trade from which his family had already reaped a huge profit, and which could be carried on more actively by shifting the capital from Kyoto to the important port of the Inland Sea. That he earnestly desired the facilitation of navigation in the Inland Sea need not be doubted, for the cutting of the strait of Ondo, the improvement of the harbour of Hyogo, as the port of Kobe was called at that time, and many other works pertaining to the navigation of the sea were undertaken at his orders. It is not certain, however, whether any of the above mentioned motives sufficed alone to induce him to forsake the historical metropolis. Whatever the reason the change was a failure. It was very unpopular in the circle of the Fujiwara nobles, who longed ardently to return to their old nests, and baffled by the passive resistance of these nobles in whatever he tried to do, Kiyomori could not achieve anything worthy of mention during the remainder of his life.

The brief period of the Taira ascendancy thus passed away very swiftly. It was since 1156 A. D. , the year in which the war of the Hogen took place, that the military-men had begun to discern that they they were strong enough to displace the Fujiwara nobles. Only three years after that, the destiny of the two rival families was for a time decided. The Taira remained on the field, and the vanquished, that is to say, the members of the chief branch of the Minamoto, were either killed or deported, the rest having been scattered and rendered powerless to resist. Yoritomo, one of these exiles, was taken into the custody of an overseer of the province of Idzu, in the vicinity of which were settled the descendants of the faithful followers of his forefathers. When an opportunity came, therefore, he was able to muster without difficulty those hereditary vassals, and overran, first the eastern provinces, and then, with the assistance of one of his younger brothers, Yoshitsune, who had taken refuge with Hidehira, the hybrid generalissimo of the half independent province of Mutsu, he drove the Taira party out of Kyoto, whither the capital had been transferred again a short time before, soon after the death of Kiyomori. What remained to be done was consummated by the tact and bravery of Yoshitsune. The partisans of the Taira family fought very valiantly on the coast of the Inland Sea, but always succumbed in the end to adverse destiny. In the last battle which was fought on the sea near the strait of Shimonoseki, some of the Taira were taken prisoners, and then decapitated. Many, however, died in the battle, or drowned themselves, for to be killed in cold blood by an enemy has ever been thought the most ignominious fate for a warrior of Japan. In thus presenting a united front to the last in adversity, the kernel of the Taira family, though much enervated by their court life, proved themselves true sons of the chivalrous warriors of old Japan. This catastrophe took place in the year 1185.

The flourishing period of the Taira family was of the short duration of thirty years only. As the rise of the family was very sudden, its downfall was equally abrupt. It was like a meteor traversing a corner of the long history of Japan, leaving, however, an indelible memory to posterity. The peculiar charm of the culture of the age represented by the elite of the family during its ascendency, and its chivalrous end, embellish the history of our country with a number of pathetic episodes which provided abundant themes for poems, tales, and dramas of the after-age. The most famous among this literature is a narration called the Heike-monogatari, Heike in Chinese characters meaning "the family of Taira." Whether the monogatari or tale was first composed for the purpose of being read or recited is a question. It is certain, however, that when the story became widely known, called by the more simplified name of "the Heike," it was generally recited as a chant, resembling the melody of Buddhist hymns, accompanied by the playing the biwa, a stringed instrument the shape of which has given its name to the largest lake in Japan. This recitation is the precursor of the utai, which was a kind of recitation fashionable in the next age. The origin of the more modern jôruri recitation accompanied by the shamisen may be traced to the Heike also. What pleased the audiences most in the Heike were the sad vicissitudes of the family and the gallant chivalry manifested in its downfall. The former, preaching the uncertainty of human life, was sufficient to touch the courtiers with keen pathos, courtiers who had lived out their time, and having been taught by Buddhism to look on every thing pessimistically, were glad to sympathise with whatever was on the wane. Differently from them, warriors were also fond of hearing the rehearsal of the Heike with thrills piercing the heart, by putting themselves in the place of some gallant Taira cavalier, who had fought to the last with undaunted courage and met his death with calmness more than mortal.

It is not only because the Taira family was in general more refined than the Minamoto, and gave an impulse to the literature of Japan by its enlightened chivalry, that the period forms an important turning-point in the history of the civilisation of our country. Almost all the essential traits of our civilisation during the whole military régime can be said to have been initiated in this brief Taira epoch. As an inheritor of the borrowed civilisation, the Taira warriors were not so much saturated with the alien refinement as the Fujiwara nobles were, and therefore, when they came nearer the throne, the aspect of the court was not a little vulgarised, but instead there was a freshness in those warriors which was found wanting among the Fujiwara, already overwrought and exhausted by too much Chinese civilisation. This freshness may be considered an index of the revival of the conservative spirit, which had been long lurking in the lower strata of the nation. Conservatism in such a phase of history is generally on the side of strength and energy. It is true that Kiyomori, his sons, and grandsons endeavoured rather to go up the ladder of the courtiers higher and higher, in order to soar 'above the cloud.' In other words, it was not their first ambition to lead the people in the lower strata against the higher; they were not revolutionists at all. But whatever might have been their real intention, they could not ward off those followers who had a common interest with them. There was no doubt that the lower class of people sympathised with the military-men, whether they were of the Taira or of the Minamoto family, far more deeply than with the Fujiwara nobles. The ascendency, therefore, of the Taira stirred the long latent spirit of the majority of the nation, and this re-awakening of the Japanese, if we may call it so, gave life to every fibre of the social structure, urging the nation to energetic movement.

The most tangible evidence of this resuscitation of Japan can be obtained in the sculpture of the age. The first flourishing period of Japanese sculpture anterior to this is the era of the Tempyô, that is to say, during the reign of the Emperor Shômu. After that the art fell gradually into decadence, and no period could compete with the Tempyô era except the Taira age. The works of Unkei and Tankei, representative masters who made their names at this time, though lagging far behind those of Tempyô sculptors in exquisite softness and serenity, yet surpassed the latter in vigour and strength. What they liked to represent most were statues of deities rather than Buddha himself, and of the deities they preferred those of martial character. Comparing them with the Tempyô sculptures, in which the subject is not so narrowly circumscribed, we can observe the change of the national spirit very clearly.

In painting also, the most important progress of the age is the change in subjects of this art, or rather the increase in varieties of subjects to be painted. Before this time what the artists generally liked to paint were the images of Buddha, Buddhist deities, scenes in Buddhist history, and portraits of celebrated priests. Landscapes were put on canvas, too, though not so frequently as those subjects pertaining to Buddhism. Since then portraits, not only of priests, but also of laymen, such as courtiers and generals, have been treated by our painters. Some masterpieces of the new portraiture, by the brush of Takanobu, are extant to this day. This development of portrait-painting may be interpreted as a symptom of the newly-budding individualism on the nation. As to scroll paintings, formerly we had pictures of consecutive scenes in Buddhist history painted in that manner, but scenes from secular history or genre pictures were rare. From this time onward we have scrolls of a character not purely religious, though Buddhist stories are still used as subjects for painting as before. Moreover, in earlier scrolls the best attention was paid to painting Buddha or deities, and not to delineating the auxiliaries, such as landscapes, buildings, worshipping multitudes of various professions, and so forth, while in the new kinds of scrolls more stress was laid on depicting those auxiliaries rather than the pious personages themselves. Battle scenes in the provinces of Mutsu and Dewa, or those between the Taira and the Minamoto in the streets of Kyoto, were also painted on scrolls. Another and quite novel kind extant of the scroll pictures of this age is the satirical delineation of the manners and customs of the time by the brush of the painter-priest Toba-sôjô. In the famous scroll certain animals familiar to the daily life, such as foxes, rabbits, frogs, and so forth are depicted allegorically, each suggesting certain notorious personages of various callings in the contemporary society.

As to literature, a difference similar in nature to those characteristics of the literature of the preceding age can be observed very distinctly. In the former period, though the essence of the literature in Japanese was profoundly influenced by the Chinese spirit, Chinese vocabularies and phrases rarely entered into sentences without being translated into Japanese. That is to say, the Japanese literature remained pure as to language, and went on side by side with the literature in Chinese. Now the combination of the two kinds began to take form. Chinese words, phrases, and several rhetorical figures began to be poured into the midst of sentences, the structure remaining Japanese as before, so that those sentences may be considered as forming a kind of hybrid Chinese, with words juxtaposed in a Japanese style, and connected by Japanese participles. This change resulted in making a great many Japanese words obsolete, and it has since become necessary for the Japanese constantly to resort to the Chinese vocabulary in writing as well as in speaking. The growth of Japanese as an independent language was thus regrettably retarded. At the same time Japanese literature reaped an immense benefit from this adoption of the Chinese vocabulary, for by it we became enabled to express our thoughts concisely, forcibly, and when necessary in a very highflown style, things not utterly impossible but exceedingly difficult for Japanese pure in form. The use of Chinese ideographs thus increased from generation to generation, until now it has become too late to try to eradicate them. All that which the Japanese nation has achieved in the past, its history, nay, its whole civilisation, has been handed to us, recorded in the language, which is woven of Chinese vocabularies and Japanese syntax, and denoted by symbols which are nothing but Chinese ideographs and their abbreviations, the Kana. A movement to supersede the Chinese ideographs by the exclusive use of the kana, which are very simple abbreviations of those ideographs, was initiated at the beginning of the Meidji era, but was dropped soon afterwards. Another radical movement to substitute the Roman alphabet for the Chinese ideographs and the kana in writing Japanese, was started nearly at the same time, and still continues to have a certain number of zealous advocates. The success of such a movement, however, depends on the value of the civilisation already acquired by the Japanese. If that amounts to nothing, and can be cast aside without any regret, in other words, if the history of Japan counts for nothing for the present and the future of the country, then the movement would have some chance of success; otherwise the attainment of the object is a dream of the millenium.

The manifestation of the new spirit of the new age in the sphere of religion is not less remarkable than in that of art or of literature. Since its introduction into our country, Buddhism had been very singular in its position as regards the social life of the nation. Though the imperial family and the higher nobles earnestly embraced the new creed, and worshipped the "gods of the barbarians," this acceptance of Buddhism cannot be called a conversion, because their religious thoughts were never engrossed by it. They continued to pay a very sincere respect to the old deities of Japan as before, while they were adoring Buddha enthusiastically. Shintoism was, if not a religion, something very much like a religion, more than anything else. So long as Shintoism remained as influential as of yore, the Japanese could not be said to have been converted to Buddhism. The Buddhist priests, having perceived this, tried not to supersede but to incorporate Shintoism into their own creed, as I have explained before, and succeeded in it, but could not erase the independence of Shintoism entirely out of the spiritual life of the Japanese. It cannot be doubted that Buddhism was made secure as regards its position in Japan by this incorporation, but in general it gained not much. Assimilation, generally speaking, has as its object, to destroy the independent existence of the things to be assimilated, and at the same time the assimilator must run the risk of causing a condition of heterogeneity on account of the addition of the new element. Buddhism could not destroy the independent existence of Shintoism, and the former became heterogeneous by the assimilation of the latter, so that the raison d'être of Buddhism in Japan was very much weakened by the assimilation. The lower strata of the nation were very slow in being penetrated by Buddhism, notwithstanding the munificent encouragement afforded to it by the government, for example, by appointing preachers not only in the neighbourhood of the capital, but in distant provinces also, or by ordering the erection of one temple in each province at the expense of the government. The common people were in need of salvation indeed, but from the Buddhism which was nationalised, they could not expect to obtain what they were unable to find in Shintoism.

In short, Buddhism, by its transformation and nationalisation, lost universality, its strongest point, and was rendered quite powerless, that is to say, blunted in the edge. Buddhism as a religious philosophy remained of course intact, but the cunning device of priests to make it conformable to our country went too far, and resulted only in weakening its efficiency as a practical religion. There were still to be found some numbers of priests who pursued their study in the intricate philosophy of Buddhism, in cloisters, in the depths of some forest or mountain recesses, but they were almost powerless to act upon society in general. The mass of the people looked on Buddhism only as the worship of an aggregation of deities, not much different from common objects of superstition, or simply as a kind of show very pleasant to see and to enjoy. They were too busy to care for meditation, and too ignorant to venture on philosophising.

Religion as a show! Seemingly what an astounding blasphemy even to entertain such an idea! No foreign reader, however, would be shocked at it, who knows that religious plays made the beginning of the modern stage of Europe, and that in villages in the Alpine valleys there may be found some survivals of them even now. Not only that, the services of the Roman Catholic and of the Greek Orthodox Church contain even to this day not a few theatrical elements. An appeal of this nature to the audience has always the effect of making the religion poetical, and therefore was the method chiefly resorted to by the Church in the Middle Ages throughout all Christendom. The method employed by the Buddhists in our country was just the same. They instituted various ceremonies and processions, each apportioned to a certain definite day of a certain season, and these religious shows served to captivate the minds of the spectators.

Here, however, the difference should be noticed between Christianity and Buddhism. The former as a rule is the religion which finds its foothold first among the lower classes of the people, while the latter, in Japan at least, began its propaganda with the upper circles of the nation, and then proceeded downwards. Though the courtiers could frequently enjoy the gorgeous spectacles carried out by priests clad in rich robes of variegated colours amid heavenly music, such scenes could be witnessed only in and about the metropolis, and were moreover too costly and aristocratic to be enjoyed by the common people. The masses were not only debarred from the salvation of their souls, but from the sight of the pageants, the best pastime which an age devoid of a theatre could afford. Yet those masses were a necessary ingredient of society in Japan, by no means to be neglected. Though very slowly, their eyes were opening, and they were beginning to claim their due. How could this demand, not sufficiently conscious to the claimants themselves, be provided for? Solely by Buddhism, which should have been by whatever means reformed.

Shintoism, though it has had a very tenacious grip on the national spirit of the Japanese, is deficient in certain particulars, and cannot be called a religion in the strict sense, so that it was difficult for it to march with the ever-advancing civilisation of our country. If there was a need, therefore, for something which could not be obtained outside of religion, it was to be sought elsewhere than in Shintoism, that is to say, in Buddhism, which was then the only cult in Japan worthy to be called a religion. To seek from it anything new, which it could not give in the state it had been, means that it ought to have been reformed. It is true that there had been repeated attempts, since the beginning of the tenth century, to make Buddhism accessible and intelligible to all classes of the people, and this kind of movement had become especially active at the end of the eleventh century. What was common to all of these movements was the endeavor to teach the merit of the nem-butsu, that is to say, the belief that anybody who would invoke the help of Buddha by calling repeatedly the name of Amita, one of the manifestations of Buddha, would be assured of the blissful after-life, and that the oftener the invocation was made the surer was the response. Most elaborate among them was an organisation of a religious community resembling in its character a joint-stock company. A member of this community was required to contribute to the accumulation of the blessing by repeating its invocation a certain number of times, like a shareholder of a company paying for his share. This community is in a great measure analogous to those societies of Europe in the later Middle Ages, which tried to accumulate the virtues of the Ave Maria sung by their members. The most striking characteristic of this community was that it extolled its own unique merit which lay in having as its members all the Buddhist deities, whose celestial nem-butsu would be sure to augment the dividends of the earthly shareholders!

To organise such a community was not to undermine the traditional edifice of Buddhism in Japan, but to support it, just as those mendicant orders, Benedictine, Augustine, Franciscan, Dominican, and so forth, were formed but in behalf of the Church of Rome. The intention of those who emphasised the nem-butsu was very far from that of becoming the harbingers of the reform movement of the following generations, though the latter aimed at nearly the same thing as the early promoters of the nem-butsu did. Yeshin, a priest in the temple of Yenryakuji, became the precursor of Hônen, who was born more than one hundred years after the death of his forerunner. The former would not and could not become a reformer, though he was highly adored by the latter for his saintliness, who styled himself the only expounder of the former. The latter, too, was very modest and never ventured to proclaim himself a reformer. Hônen was one of the meekest Buddhists in Japan. Yet he was forced against his will to become the founder of the Jôdo sect, which has continued influential to this day. All the religious reformers of the Kamakura period ran in his wake.

Religion, art, and literature were all thus transforming themselves almost at the same time, and that very time coincided exactly with the moment in which the most important change in the political sphere was taking place. Such a coincidence in the development of the various factors of civilisation cannot be lightly overlooked as a mere chance happening. Surely it must have been actuated by a common impulse, which was nothing but the urgent demand of the Zeitgeist. The régime matured by the Fujiwara nobles at Kyoto had already come to a standstill. Japan had to be pushed on by any means whatever. It is this necessity which allowed the Taira to get the upper hand of the Fujiwara. The rise of this soldier-family cannot be attributed merely to the merit of its representative members. But its fall owed much to their incompetency in not having become conscious of their position in the history of Japan. No sooner had they grasped the reins of the government, than they began to tread the path which their predecessors had trod, the path leading only to the stumbling-block. Too quickly they were transforming themselves into pseudo-courtiers. "The mummy-seekers were about to be turned into mummies," as a Japanese proverb has it. It was just at this juncture, the last phase of the transformation of the Taira warriors, that they were overturned by the Minamoto. In short, the course on which the Taira steered was against the current of the age. If the family had remained in power longer than it actually did, then the just budded spirit of the new age would have dwindled away, and to Japan might have fallen the same lot as befell to other oriental monarchies. For our country it was fortunate that the Taira were no longer able to stay at the helm of the state.

Minamoto-no-Yoritomo preferred, at the establishment of his Shogunate, a course quite different from that of the Taira. Having been brought up during his boyhood at Kyoto, and being therefore acquainted with the realities of the metropolitan modes of life, he might have been, perhaps, averse to the Sybaritism of the court. If, on the other hand, he had been inclined to follow in the footsteps of the Taira, he was not in a position to behave as he would have liked, for it was not by any exertion of his own that he was exalted to the virtual dictatorship of the military government. The Minamoto and the Taira who had settled in the eastern provinces, in spite of the difference of their families, had been accustomed to the same condition of living, and they fought often under the same banner against the Ainu. Though quarrels were not lacking among them, they could not help feeling the warmth of the fraternity of arms toward one another. These "rough riders" had gradually become refined by the education imparted by country priests; terakoya, the "hut in a temple," was the sole substitute for the elementary school at that time.They had, too, occasion to come into contact with the civilised life of the metropolis, for it was their duty to stay there by turns, sometimes for years, as guards of the capital and of the imperial residence.Intelligent warriors among them took to the city life and mastered some of the accomplishments highly prized by courtiers.Most of them, however, looked with scornful smile upon the degenerate courtiers, like the Germans in the Eternal City looking with disgust on the decadent state of Imperial Rome.When Yoritomo entered into their company as an exile from Kyoto, these warriors were very glad to receive him, for he was descended from the family of the generals whom their forefathers had served hereditarily, and whose names they still revered.With this exile as their leader, they rose united against the Taira, the traditional enemy of the family to which he belonged.After the success of their arms they had no desire to have their chief turned into a pseudo-courtier after the example of the Taira soldiers.Kamakura was therefore chosen as the seat of the military government.This was in the year 1183.

In truth, Kamakura cannot be said to be a place strategically impregnable even in those early times. It is too narrow to become the capital of Japan, being closely hemmed in by a chain of hills. Though situated on the sea, its bay is too shallow, not fit for mooring even a small wooden bark. The reason why the place happened to be chosen must be sought, therefore, not in its geographical position, but in that the town was planted nearly in the centre of the region inhabited by the supporters of Yoritomo. That it was also the location of the Shinto shrine, Hachiman of Tsurugaoka, might have had not a little weight in influencing the choice, because it was in this shrine that Yoshiiye, the forefather of Yoritomo and the adored demigod of the warriors of Japan, performed the ceremony of the attainment of his full manhood.

The military government, the Shogunate, set up at Kamakura, was in its nature of quite a different type from that of the Taira at Kyoto. Before entering into details, it is necessary, however, to say something about the change in the signification of government. When the Fujiwara became the real masters of Japan, they tried at first to govern wisely and sincerely. But as time passed their energy and determination gradually relaxed. Their growing wealth obtained by encroachment on public lands tended to mould them as a profligate and indolent folk, so that they became at last wholly unfitted for any serious state affairs. Moreover, from the lack of any event which would have necessitated united action of all the family, a condition which might have been exceedingly difficult to attain even if they had wished it, on account of the multiplication of branches, never-ceasing internal feuds which helped only to weaken the prestige of the family as a whole were perpetually arising. It was at this juncture that the Emperor Go-Sanjô tried to recover the reins once lost to the hands of his ancestors. The task which he left unfinished was achieved by his son and successor, the Emperor Shirakawa. When the power was restored to the emperor, however, it was not in the same condition as when lost. The state business decreased in scope and significance, all that was left being merely the disposal of not very numerous manor lands, which had been left untouched by the greedy Fujiwara, and the policing of the capital. The Emperor Shirakawa did not deem it necessary as reigning Emperor to pay regular attention to them. He abdicated, therefore, in favour of his son, and from his retired position he managed the so-called state affairs. As the result of such an assumption of power, the position of the reigning emperor became very problematic, and irresponsibility prevailed everywhere. The imperial family thus regained some of its historical prestige, and succeeded in curbing the arrogance of the Fujiwara. The latter, however, continued very rich and powerful, though not so politically mighty as before. For a short while the Taira achieved its object in partially supplanting the influence of the Fujiwara, but it could not perceptibly weaken the latter. The downfall of the Taira showed clearly that in such a state of the country mere names and titles meant practically nothing, and that the military power supported by material resources was the thing most worth coveting. The Taira started on this line, but soon collapsed by abandoning it. How could a shrewd politician like Yoritomo be expected to imitate the blunder of his opponent?

The Shogunate set up by Yoritomo at Kamakura was not of the sort which could appropriately be called a regularly organised government. It was modelled after the organisation of a family-business office, which was common to all the noble families of high rank. There were several functionaries in the Shogunate, but they had the character rather of private servants than of state officials. The Shogun's secretaries, body-guards, butlers and so forth served under him not on account of any official regulation connecting them publicly with him, but only as his retainers, and were designated by the name of the go-kenin, which means "the men of the august household." To sum up, the Shogunate was established not for the state but for the family business. Yoritomo had never pretended to take possession of the government of Japan. The fact that at the beginning of the Shogunate its jurisdiction did not extend over the whole of the empire testifies to the same.

In the foregoing chapters I have spoken about the encroachment on public lands by the Fujiwara nobles. The private farms which were called the shô-yen and resembled in their character the manors or great landed estates in England, increased year by year, so that they extended at last to all the distant provinces of the country. Some emperors were resolute enough to try to put a stop to the growth of this onerous infringement of the public property, but the orders issued by them had very little effect. As to the management of these farms, they were not administered directly by those nobles who owned them, and it was not uncommon for many manors lying far apart from one another to belong to the same owner. The proprietors, therefore, generally stationed some of their domestic servants in those manors to act as caretakers, or confided the management to men who were the original reclaimers of those manors or their descendants, from whom the nobles had received the lands as a donation. By this assumption of the duty of management, these servants of these nobles arrogated to themselves the right to govern and command the people living upon the estates, without any appointment from the government itself. It cannot be disputed that it was a kind of usurpation not allowable in the regular state of any organised country. The provincial governors of that time, however, were impotent to put a bridle on those impudent managers, for most of the governors appointed stayed in Kyoto to enjoy the pleasure of city life, and left the business of the province to be administered by their lieutenants. Moreover, some of the manors were evidently exempted from the intervention of the provincial officials by a special order. In other words, most of the manors were communities which were to a great degree autonomous, each under the jurisdiction of a half independent manager, and that manager again standing in a subordinate position to his patron, who resided generally at Kyoto. So far I have spoken only of the manors belonging to the nobles of the higher class, including members of the imperial family. Other manors possessed by Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples were also under a régime not much different from those of the nobles. The Taira, too, at the zenith of their family power, had a great number of such estates and the sons of Kiyomori fought against the Minamoto with forces recruited from the tenants of those manors.

When Yoritomo overcame the Taira, he confiscated all the manors which had formerly been possessed by that family, and appointed one of his retainers to each of these appropriated manors as djito, which literally means a chief of the land. The duty of these djito was to collect for their lord Shogun a certain amount of rice, proportional to the area of the rice fields belonging to the estate. This reserved rice was destined to be used as provision for soldiers, and was in reality the income of the djito, for he was himself the very soldier who would use that rice as provision. Besides the collection of rice, he had to keep in order the manor to which he had been appointed as chief, that is to say, the police of the manor was in his hands. Once appointed, a djito could make his office hereditary, though for this the sanction of the Shogunate was necessary. Yoritomo appointed also a military governor to each of the provinces. The authority of this governor, called the shugo, extended over all the retainers of the Shogun in that province, including the djito. It should be noticed, however, that the shugo was as a rule a warrior, who held the office of djito at the same time, in or out of that province.

As to the manors which were owned by Kyoto nobles, shrines, and temples, and therefore not at the disposal of the Shogun, no djito was appointed to them. Though the disputes about the boundaries, right of inheritance, and various other questions concerning the estates were decided by the legal councillors of the Shogunate, jurisdiction was restricted to those cases in which some retainer of the Shogun was a party. Otherwise, the right of decision was denied by the Shogun. The Shogun never claimed any right over the land which did not stand expressly under his jurisdiction. From this it can be inferred that he did not pretend to take over the civil government of the whole of Japan. By the foundation of the Shogunate, however, Yoritomo became a very powerful military chief, sanctioned by the Emperor with the conferment of the title of "generalissimo to chastise the Ainu", and at need he was able to mobilise a large number of soldiers, by giving orders to djito through the shugo of the provinces. None was able to compete with him in military strength, and the business of the civil government had necessarily to fall into the hands of him who was the strongest in material force.

If such an anomalous state, as we see in the beginning of the Shogunate, had continued very long, the Shogunate would never have become the regular government of the country, and the dismemberment of Japan might have been the ultimate result. But fortunately for the future of our country, it did not remain as it was first established. Those managers of manors not belonging to the Shogun, seeing that they could be better protected from above by turning themselves into retainers of the Shogun, volunteered for his service. Nobles, shrines, and temples possessing these manors complained of course about the enlistment of the manor-managers into the Shogunate service. For by the transformation of the managers, those manors ipso facto came under the military jurisdiction of Kamakura. As those owners, however, could not prevent the transformation, and as the income from those estates did not decrease in any great measure by the extension of the jurisdiction of the Shogun over them, they had nothing to do, but tacitly to acquiesce in the new conditions. The number of retainers thus increased rapidly, and with it the Shogunate's sphere of jurisdiction grew wider and wider, till at last it covered the greater part of the Empire. The Shogunate was then no more a mere business office of a family, but the government de facto recognised by the whole nation. This process was consummated in the middle of the first half of the thirteenth century.

It would be a mistake to suppose that such a momentous change was effected without any disturbance. The Kyoto nobles, who were unable at first to see the political importance of the establishment of the Shogunate in an insignificant provincial village, were gradually awakened to the real loss which they would surely suffer by it, and longed to recover the reins, which they had once forgotten to keep and guard. Besides, there were many malcontent warriors both within and without the Shogunate. For after the death of Yoritomo, though the title of Shogun was inherited by his two sons, one after the other, the real power of the Shogunate fell into the hands of his wife's relations, the family of Hôjô. Warriors of other families were excluded from a share in the military government, and they, dissatisfied on that account, wished for some change in order to overthrow the Hôjô. Needless to say that outside of the Shogunate ambitious men were not lacking, who desired to set up another Shogunate in place of that at Kamakura, if they could. All these discontented soldiery allied themselves with the Kyoto nobles, and caused the civil war of Jôkyu to ensue between them and the Shogunate represented by the Hôjô family. The war ended in the defeat of the former, and the Shogunate emerged out of the war far stronger than before.

Thirteen years after the war, the first compilation of laws of the Shogunate was undertaken by Yasutoki Hôjô. It is called "the compiled laws of the Jôyei," Jôyei being the name of the era in which the compilation was issued. This compilation was not so much a work of elaborate systematisation, nor an imitation of foreign laws, as was the reform legislation of the Taïhô. Rather it should be called a collection of abstracts of particular law cases decided by the judicial staff of the Shogunate. It is therefore an outcome of necessitated experiences like English "case-law", and had not the character of statute laws or provisions deduced from a certain fundamental legal principle in anticipation of all probable occurrences. The object of the compilation is clearly stated in the epilogue written by Yasutoki himself. According to this, it was far from the motive of the compilers to displace the old system of legislation by the promulgation of the new one. Old laws became a dead letter, without being formally abrogated, while the new code was issued only for the practical benefit of the people in charge of various businesses.

Whatever might have been the real motive of Yasutoki and his legal councillors, the very act of the compilation cannot in itself fail to betray the consciousness on the part of the Shogunate that it had already a sufficiency of test cases decided to supply models for the decision of most of the disputes that might be brought before them in the future.Or we might say that the Hôjô became confirmed in their belief that the Shogunate was now so firmly established as not to be easily shaken at its foundation, and that they could henceforth command in the name of a regular government without any fear of serious disturbances.Certainly their victory in the civil war must have rid them of any apprehension of danger from the side of Kyoto.

This compilation was issued in the year 1232, that is to say, about fifty years after the founding of the Kamakura Shogunate. Thus we can see that this half-century had wrought an important change in the history of Japan. During this time the military régime was enabled to strike a firm root deep into the national life of the Japanese. The family of the Minamoto soon became extinct by the death of the second son of Yoritomo, and scions of a Fujiwara noble and then some of the imperial princes were brought from Kyoto one after another as the successors to the Shogunate. Yet they were all but tools in the capable hands of the Hôjô family, which remained the real master of the military government of Kamakura. In course of time, the Hôjô also fell, but other military families successively arose to power, and the military régime was kept up by them in Japan until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that those changes in the headship and in the location of the Shogunate caused as a matter of fact corresponding changes in the nature of the respective military régime. The Shogunate of the Ashikaga family was of a different sort from that of Kamakura, while that of the Tokugawa at Yedo was again of another type than the Ashikaga's at Kyoto. Throughout all these different Shogunates, however, certain common characteristics prevailed, so that a wide gap may be discerned between them as a whole and the government of the Fujiwara courtiers. And those characters indeed have their origin all in this first half century of the Kamakura Shogunate.

What most distinguished the military régime from the preceding government was its being pragmatic and unconventional. It was not on account of noble lineage alone, that Yoritomo was able to establish his Shogunate. He owed a great deal to the willing assistance of the warriors scattered in the eastern provinces, who claimed descent from some illustrious personages in our history, but in fact had forefathers of modest living for many generations, and had maintained very intimate relations with the common people. The Shogunate was bound by this reason not to neglect the interests of those who had thus contributed to its establishment. Moreover, in order to be able to raise a strong army at any time when necessary, the Shogunate was obliged to take minute care of the welfare of the retainers and of the people at large, for the faithfulness of the former and popularity among the latter counted more than other things as props of the régime. The contrast is remarkable when we compare it to the government by the Fujiwara nobles, who made an elaborate legislation, professing to govern uprightly and leniently, and to be beneficial even to the lowest stratum of the people, yet in reality caring very little for the felicity of the governed, looking on them always with contempt, though this lack of sympathy might be attributed more to some old racial relation than to the morality of those nobles. After all, the government of the Shogun, being regulated by a few decrees and guided by practical common sense, operated far better than the Fujiwara's. Where formalism had reigned, reality began now to prevail. The spirit of the age was about to be emancipated from convention. Japan was regenerated.

It was this regeneration of Japan, which kept up and nourished what was initiated in the Taira period. But for the Kamakura Shogunate, however, those germs of the new era might have been blasted forever. One thread of the continuous development from the Taira to the Minamoto period may be clearly discerned in the sphere of religion. In 1212 died Hônen, the reformer of Buddhism, of whom I have already spoken in the preceding chapter, but before his death his teachings had gathered a great many adherents around him, and the sect of the Jôdo became independent of that of the Tendai. It was from this Jôdo sect that the Shinshû or the "orthodox" Jôdo, now one of the most influential Buddhist sects in Japan, sprang up, and became independent also. Shinran, the founder of the latter sect, is said to have been one of the disciples of Hônen, and the tenets of his sect, initiated by Shinran himself and supplemented by his successors, bear striking resemblance to the reform tenets of Luther in laying stress on faith and in denouncing reliance on the merit of good works in order to arrive at salvation. That the priests belonging to this sect have avowedly led a matrimonial life, a custom which was unique to this sect among Japanese Buddhists, is another point of resemblance to Lutheranism. In other respects, for example, in preaching the doctrine of predestination, it can be considered as analogous to Calvinism also.

Another important sect, which branched off from the Tendai, is that of the followers of Nichiren. His sect is called the Hokke, or Nichiren, after the name of the founder himself, and the sect still contains a vast number of devotees. It is the most militant sect of Buddhism in Japan, and that militancy might be traced to the personality of Nichiren, the founder, who was the most energetic and aggressive priest Japanese Buddhism has ever produced. He, too, never claimed to have founded a new sect, and insisted that his doctrine was simply a resuscitated Tendai tenet. We can easily see, however, that in its pervading tendency it approached other reformed sects of the same age rather than the old or orthodox Tendai. Nichiren died in the year 1282, so that his most flourishing period falls in the middle of the thirteenth century.

One more sect I cannot pass without commenting on is the Zen sect. Its founder in Japan is Yôsai, whose time coincided with that of Hônen. Twice he went over to China, which had been for more than two hundred years under the sovereignty of the Sung dynasty, and studied there the doctrine of the Zen sect, which was then prevailing in that country. After his return from abroad, he began to preach first at Hakata, which had long continued the most thriving port for the trade with China. Afterwards he removed to Kyoto and thence to Kamakura, making enthusiasts everywhere, especially among the warriors. Like all other new sects, the teaching of Yôsai was not entirely a novelty, being a development of one of the many elements which constituted old Buddhism. The specialty of the sect was, instead of arriving at salvation by belief in some supernatural being outside and above one's self, to encourage meditation and introspection and its general character tended to be mystic, intuitive, and individualistic. Strong self-reliance and resolute determination, qualities indispensable to warriors, were the natural and necessary outcome of this teaching. It was largely patronised by the Shogunate and the Hôjô on that account. Though Yôsai became the founder of the sect, neither he himself nor his teaching could hardly be called sectarian. To establish an hierarchical community or to organise a systematised doctrine was beyond his purpose, but the result of his preaching was precisely to bring both into being.

Not only the characteristics of these new sects, but the manner of their propagation deserves close attention. Some of them were started in the eastern provinces, and gradually extended their missionary activity toward the west, that is to say, in the direction which is contrary to that of the extension of civilisation in former times. Others, though started in the west or at Kyoto, concentrated their efforts in the eastern provinces with Kamakura as centre of propagation. In short, all the reformed sects turned their attention rather to the eastern than to the western provinces. This preference of the east to the west originated in the circumstance that the less civilised east gave to those missioners a greater prospect of enlisting new adherents, than western Japan, which would of a surety be slow to follow their new teachings, having been already won over by the older cults. It might, however, be added that the preachers of the new doctrines saw, or rather overvalued, the importance of the new political centre as the nucleus of a fresh civilisation which might rapidly develop.

To say sooth, the field of activity of those untiring priests was not restricted to those eastern provinces, which are denoted by the general appellation of "Kwanto", but was extended into the far northern provinces of Mutsu and Dewa. This region at the extremity of Honto was long ago created as provinces, but had lagged far behind the rest of Japan in respect of civilisation. A considerable number of the Ainu were still lingering in the northern part of the two provinces. Fujiwara-no-Hidehira, the generalissimo of the region, who harboured Yoshitsune, the younger brother and victim of Yoritomo, is said to have been of Ainu blood. His sphere of influence reached Shirakawa on the south, which was considered at that time the boundary between civilised and barbarous Japan. The time had arrived, however, when this barrier was at last to be done away with. When a quarrel arose between the two brothers, Yoritomo and Yoshitsune, after the annihilation of the Taira, and the latter sought refuge with Hidehira, Yoritomo thought of marching into Mutsu. This expedition was undertaken in the year 1189, after the death of Hidehira. His sons were easily defeated. The land taken from them was distributed by Yoritomo among his soldiers, who followed him from the Kwanto and fought under his banner. The vast region, by coming thus under the military authority of the Kamakura Shogunate, was for the first time, taken into Japan proper. It was on account of this extension of political Japan over the whole of Honto, that the new sects had a chance to penetrate into those provinces.

We have seen that religion was the first and the most forcible exponent of the new age.If the Shogunate of Kamakura had remained in power longer than it did, other factors of the new civilisation might have developed quite afresh around the Shogunate.Art and literature of another type than that which flourished at Kyoto might have blossomed forth.The time was, however, not yet ripe for the total regeneration of Japan.The conventionalism of the Kyoto civilisation more and more influenced the Shogunate, which was still too young and had nothing solid of its own civilisation capable of resisting the infiltration of the old.Besides, several difficulties which lay in the way of the Shogunate coöperated in bringing about its fall in the year of 1332.Japan had to go on in a half regenerated state for some time.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE WELDING OF THE NATION THE POLITICAL DISINTEGRATION OF THE COUNTRY

A war with a foreign power or powers is generally a very efficient factor in history, conducing to the unification of a nation, especially when that nation is composed of more than one race. The German Empire, which was consolidated mainly by virtue of the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870-1871, is one of the most exemplary instances. Japan, being surrounded by sea on all sides, has had more advantages than any continental country in moulding into one all the racial elements which happened to find their way into the insular pale. These are the very same advantages which Great Britain has enjoyed in Europe. We should have been able, perhaps, without any coercion from without, to become a solid nation by the sole operation of geographical causes. If we had been left, however, to the mercy of influences of those kinds only, then we might have been obliged to wait for long years in order to see the nation welded, for in respect of the complexity of racial composition, Japan cannot be said to be inferior to any national state in either hemisphere. To facilitate the national consolidation, therefore, the force acting from without was most welcome for us.

Of wars serviceable to such an end, however, there had been very scanty chances offered to us.Though the wars against the Ainu had continued much longer than is apt to be imagined by modern Japanese, and had made their influence felt in bringing about the consolidation of the Japanese as a nation, the spasmodic insurrections of the aborigines were but flickerings of cinders about to die out.For several centuries the Ainu had been a race destined only to wane irrevocably more and more, so that no serious danger was to be feared from that quarter.Outside of the Ainu, no other foreign people dared for a long time to invade us on so large a scale as to cause any serious damage.

As regards China, the dynasty of the Sung, which began to reign over the empire in the year 960, had been constantly harassed by the incursions of various northern tribes. After an existence of a century and a half, the greater portion of northern China was bereft of the dynasty by the Chin, a state founded by a Tartar tribe called the Churche. The Chin, however, was in turn overthrown in the year 1234 by the Mongols, another nomadic tribe, which rose in the rear of the latter state. Within a half century from that, the Chinese dynasty of the Sung, which had been long gasping in the south, drew its last breath under pressure of the same Mongols that founded the Empire of the Yuan.

From China, therefore, in the state it had been, we had nothing to fear.As to the Korean peninsula, which had come under the influence of China at the time of the T'ang dynasty, the state founded there by the inhabitants was enabled now to breathe freely on account of the anarchical condition of the suzerain state.Though Kokuri and Kutara had, in spite of our assistance, been both destroyed by the army of the T'ang, Shiragi, which had been left unmolested by the T'ang as a half independent ally, conquered the greater part of the peninsula, and the people of that state frequently pillaged our western coasts.This Shiragi surrendered at the beginning of the tenth century to Korea, a new state which arose in the north of the peninsula.The relations of the new Korea with our country were on the whole very peaceful, except for some interruptions caused by the incursions of the pirates from that country on our coast at the end of the same century.

Besides the Koreans, there were many tribes inhabiting the north and the east of Korea and along the coast of the Sea of Japan, which made themselves independent of China one after the other, though all the states founded by them had but an ephemeral existence. Some of those minor states kept up a very cordial intercourse with our country, while others acted in a contrary way. Among the latter may be counted the pirates from Toi, that is to say, from the region of a Churche tribe, though the real home of this throng of sea-thieves has not yet been identified with any exactness, pirates who devastated the island of Iki and the northern coast of Kyushu with a fleet consisting of more than fifty ships. This took place in the year 1019, and the repulse of this piratical attack was the last military exploit of the Fujiwara nobles.

After that complete tranquillity reigned in our western quarter for more than two centuries and a half until the first Mongolian invasion of 1274. Hitherto, to repel the inroads of pirates, the forces which could be set in motion in the western provinces only, had proved to be more than sufficient for the purpose. Against the first Mongolian invasion also, the retainers of the Shogun in the western provinces only were mobilised as usual by command from Kamakura. The battle scenes of the war were described by one of the warriors who took part in it, and painted by a contemporary master on a scroll, which has come down in good preservation to our day, and now forms one of the imperial treasures to be handed on to prosperity. The expeditionary fleet of the Yuan consisted of more than nine hundred ships, with 15,000 Mongols and Chinese and 8,000 Koreans on board, besides 6,700 of the crews, so that it was too overwhelming in numbers even for our valiant soldiers to fight against with some hope of victory. It was not by the valour of our soldiers alone, therefore, that the invasion was frustrated. The elements, the turbulent wind and wave, did virtually more than mere human efforts could have achieved in destroying the formidable enemy's ships.

Irritated at this failure of the first expedition, Khubilai, the Emperor of Yuan, immediately ordered the preparation of another expedition on a far larger scale.The second invasion of Japan was undertaken at last in the 1281, after an interval of seven years.This time the invading forces far outnumbered those of the first expedition, totalling more than one hundred thousand in all.On the other hand, the forces which the Shogunate could raise in the western provinces only proved this time plainly inadequate.Seeing this, Tokimune Hôjô, who was the virtual master of the Shogunate, mobilised the retainers in the eastern provinces too, and sent them to the battlefield in Kyushu.A fierce battle was fought on the shore near Hakata.Our soldiers made a desperate effort to prevent the landing of the enemy's troops, contending inch by inch against fearful odds, so that the Mongols could not complete their disembarkment, before a hurricane suddenly arose that swept away at least two-thirds of their men and ships.A lasting check was thus put upon the expansion of the triumphant Mongols on the east, just forty years after the battle of Liegnitz in Silesia had been fought successfully by the Teutonic nobles on the west against the same foe.

Though the frustration of the two Mongolian attempts upon our country should rather be attributed to the intervention of elemental forces which worked at very propitious opportunities, than to the bravery of our warriors, it cannot be disputed that they fought to their utmost, so that it would be derogatory to the military honour of our forefathers, if we supposed that nothing worth mentioning was achieved by them at all. In any case, the annihilation of the Mongolian fleet by us is an historical feat which might be considered together with the defeat of the Invincible Armada by the English three centuries later. In both countries the memorable victory was due to the dauntless courage of the warriors engaged in the battle, and the firm attitude of the person who stood then at the helm of the state. In Japan, Tokimune did not lend his ears to the milder counsels of the shrewder diplomatists at the court of Kyoto.

What is more noteworthy, however, than anything else in this war was not the bravery of our forefathers, but the fact that men recruited from the eastern as well as from the western provinces of the empire fought for the first time side by side against the foreign invaders. Such a coöperation of the people from all quarters of Japan in defence of the country was not a sight which could have been witnessed before the establishment of the military régime, for until that time the unification of the Empire had not extended to the northern extremity of Honto, and for ninety years after the inauguration of the Shogunate at Kamakura, there had been no occasion for our warriors to try their fortune in arms against any foreign enemy. Now the Japanese were induced for the first time to feel the necessity for national solidarity, only because enterprising Khubilai dared to attack the island empire, which would have done no harm to him if he had left it unmolested, and would have added very little to his already overgrown empire, if he had succeeded in his adventurous expedition. It may be perhaps exaggerating a little to call this war a national undertaking on our part when we consider the small number of men engaged in it. The retainers of the Shogunate, however, who were the representatives of the Japanese of that time, all hurried to the northern coast of Kyushu, even from the remotest part of the empire, in order to defend their country against their common foe. The peculiar custom of intimidating children to stop their crying, by reminding them of the Mongolian invasion, an obsolescent custom which has existed even in the northernmost region of Honto, shows how thoroughly and deeply the Mongol scare shook the whole empire, and left its indelible impress on the nation as a whole. The first beat of the pulse of a national enthusiasm has thus become audible.

If this feeling of national solidarity had gone deep into the consciousness of the people, and had continued steadily increasing without relaxation, then it might have done considerable good in facilitating the wholesome organisation of our national state. Viewed from this point, it must be considered rather a misfortune to our country that the terrible enemy was too easily put to rout. The pressure once removed, men no more troubled themselves about the need for solidarity. Nay, the war itself sowed the seeds of discontent among the warriors engaged, on account of the incapacity of the Shogunate to recompense them amply for their services. Already after the civil war of the Jôkyu era, the military government of Kamakura had been reduced to a straitened condition, for what it could get by the confiscation of the properties of the vanquished proved insufficient to provide the rewards for the faithful followers of the Shogunate. In the war with the Mongols, there was no enemy within the country from whom land could be confiscated. Nevertheless those warriors had to be rewarded with grants of land only, which the Shogunate could find nowhere. If the private moral bond, which had linked the retainers with the Shogun at the time of Yoritomo, could long continue in the state it had been, the Shogunate could have sometimes expected from them service without recompense. The military government, with the Hôjô family as its real master, however, could not likewise exact gratuitous service from them. The relation between the Shogunate and its retainers became too public and formal for this.

Those who were appointed as djito by Yoritomo at the beginning of the Shogunate had all been retainers of the Minamoto family from the first. Though they discharged the duties of military police within their respective manors as if they were public officials, yet their private character far outweighed their public semblance. As the Shogunate gradually took the form of a regular government, this private and personal bond between the Shogun and his retainers grew weaker, and the public character of the djito began to predominate. This was especially the case after the virtual management of the Shogunate fell into the hands of the Hôjô family. It is true that those retainers still called themselves the go-kenin, or the domestics of the Shogun of Kamakura. The later Shogun, however, sprung from the Fujiwara family or of blood imperial, and could not demand the same obedience which Yoritomo had found easy to obtain from his hereditary vassals. In effect, the Shogunate reserved to the end the right of giving sanction as regards the inheritance of the office of djito, but the exercise of the reserved right was generally nominal. A djito could appoint as his successor either his wife or any of his children, or could divide his official tenure among many inheritors. No Salic law and no law of primogeniture yet existed in Japan of the Kamakura period, so that, besides many djito who were incapable of discharging the military duties in person on account of sex or age, there were to be found eventually a great number of djito, whose official tenure covered a very small patch of ricefield, so small that it was too narrow to exercise any jurisdiction within it! Moreover, men of utterly unwarlike professions like priests, and corporations such as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, were also entitled to succeed to the inheritance of the office of djito, if only it were bequeathed to them by a lawful will. In these cases, where the rightful djito could not officiate in person, a lieutenant, private in character, used to be appointed. Those lieutenants, however, not being publicly responsible to the Shogun, behaved very arbitrarily. That was a breach severely felt in the military system of the Shogunate.

The worst evil of all was that the Shogunate, which should have been an office for household affairs and the camp of the Shogun, was gradually turned into a princely court. Those warriors who did valiant service under Yoritomo in establishing the Shogunate had been in a great measure illiterate, so that only with great difficulty could the Shogun find a secretary among his retainers. As the organisation of the military government approached completion, the need of a literary education on the part of the warriors increased accordingly. Such an education, the source of which, however, was not to be sought at that time out of Kyoto, could hardly be introduced into Kamakura without being accompanied by other elements of the metropolitan civilisation represented by the Fujiwara nobles. The installation of a scion of the Fujiwara and of princes of the blood imperial into the Shogunate facilitated the permeation of the Kyoto culture, which by its nature was too refined to suit congenially men of military profession. The bodyguard of the Shogun began to be chosen from warriors whose demeanor was the most courtier-like, and one of the accomplishments necessary was the ability to compose short poems. Such a condition of the Shogunate could not fail to estrange those retainers who did not live habitually in Kamakura, and were, therefore, not yet tainted with the effeminacy of a courtier's life. The main support, on whom the Shogun should have been able to depend in time of stress, became thus unreliable. At this juncture an Ainu insurrection, which was the last recorded in our history, broke out in the year 1322, and continued till the downfall of the Kamakura Shogunate. It was by this insurrection that the tottering edifice of the military government was finally shaken, instantly leading to its catastrophe.

The force which gave the finishing stroke to the Shogun's power and prestige came, as had long been expected, from Kyoto. Inversely as the warriors of Kamakura had been turned to pseudo-courtiers, the court-nobles of Kyoto had become tainted by the militaristic temperament of the Kamakura warriors. The training in archery, the dog-shooting in an enclosure, which was considered a specially good training for a real battle, and many other martial pastimes became the fashion among the Kyoto nobles, as it had been among warriors. After their defeat in the civil war of the Jôkyu, they felt more keenly than before the magnitude of their power lost to Kamakura, and became the more discontented. Moreover, from the four corners of the empire the malcontents against the Hôjô family flocked to Kyoto, and persuaded the already disaffected courtiers, to attempt the restoration of the real command of the government to themselves. The Shogunate, having been apprised of the plot, tried to suppress it in time by force, but was unable to strike at the root of the evil, for the recalcitrants rose against the Hôjô one after another. On the other hand, those retainers who would have willingly died for a Shogun of the Minamoto family did not like to stake their lives on behalf of the Hôjô. Kamakura was at last taken by a handful of warriors from the neighbouring provinces led by a chieftain of one of the branch families of the Minamoto. The last of the Hôjô committed suicide, and with the downfall of the family, the Shogunate of Kamakura broke down. This happened in the year 1334. The real power of the state was restored to Kyoto in the name of the Emperor Go-Daigo.

The courtiers of Kyoto rejoiced in the thought that they could now conduct themselves as the true masters of Japan, but they were instantly disillusioned. Those warriors who had assisted them in the restoration of their former power, would not allow the courtiers to have the lion's share of the booty. Supported by a multitude of such dissatisfied soldiery, Takauji Ashikaga, another scion of the Minamoto, made himself the real master of the situation, and was appointed Shogun. Though once defeated by the army of his opponents at Kyoto, he was soon enabled to raise a large host in the western provinces, where, since the Mongolian invasion, the majority of the warriors thirsted for the change more than in other provinces, and he captured the metropolis. His opponents, however, continued their resistance in various parts of the empire. The courtiers, too, were divided into two parties, and the majority sided with the stronger, that is to say, with the Ashikaga family. At the same time the imperial family was divided into two. Thus the civil war, which strongly resembled the War of the Roses, ensued and raged all over the provinces for about fifty-six years, until the two parties were reconciled at last in the year 1392. In this way the whole of the empire came again under one military régime, and for about two centuries, the family of the Ashikaga continued at the head of the new Shogunate.

The new Shogunate was established at Kyoto, instead of Kamakura, which became now the seat of a lieutenancy, administered by a branch of the Ashikaga, and therefore reduced in political importance. This change of the seat of the military government is a matter of great moment in the history of our country. One of the several reasons which may be assigned for the change, was that the supporters of the Ashikaga were not limited to the warriors of the eastern provinces, as they had been with the Kamakura Shogunate. Takauji owed his ultimate success rather to the soldiers from the western provinces, so that Kyoto suited far better as the centre of his new military régime than Kamakura.

Another reason which the Ashikaga Shogunate had in view in changing its seat, was that a great apprehension which had been entertained by the former Shogunate, would thereby cease. One of the anxieties which had harassed the government of Kamakura constantly had been the fear that it might one day be overthrown by attack from Kyoto. To provide against the danger a resident lieutenant,—afterwards increased to two,—a member of the family of Hôjô, was stationed at Kyoto. The function of these lieutenants was to look out for the interests of the Shogunate at Kyoto, and at the same time to superintend the retainers in the western provinces. Besides, being two in number, these lieutenants watched each other closely, so that it was impossible for either of them to try to make himself independent of Kamakura. This system worked excellently for a time, but was ultimately unable to save the declining Shogunate. By shifting the seat of the military government to Kyoto itself, this anxiety might now be removed.

The greatest profit, however, which accrued to the Shogunate by the change of its government seat, was that one could facilitate the achievement of the political concentration of the empire, by making it coincide with the centre of civilisation. If the Shogunate of Kamakura could keep, with its political power, its original fresh spirit, which had remained latent during the long régime of the courtiers and begun suddenly to develop itself along with the establishment of the military government, the result would have been not only the prolonging of the duration of the Shogunate, but the full blossoming of a healthy and unenervated culture, and Kamakura might have become the political as well as the cultural centre of the empire. The history of our country, however, was not destined to run in that way. The time-honoured civilisation, which had been nurtured at Kyoto since many centuries, was, though of exotic origin, in itself a highly finished one. Notwithstanding its effeminacy, it had its own peculiar charm, which ranked in perfection far above the naïve culture of Kamakura, the latter being too rough and new, however refreshing. Those Buddhist priests who had once hoped to make Kamakura the centre of their new religious movement, found at last that unless they secured a firm foothold in the old metropolis, nothing permanent could be attained. The missionary campaign of the various reformed sects had been undertaken with renewed vigour at Kyoto since the end of the thirteenth century. In other words, the enervation of the Kamakura Shogunate disappointed those torch-bearers of the new civilisation, who might perhaps have expected too much from the political power of the military government established there. Thus the Shogunate of Kamakura had lost its raison d'être, before other factors of civilisation, such as art and literature, had time to develop themselves there independent of those of Kyoto, so as to suit the new spirit of the new age, that is to say, before the Shogunate could accomplish its cultural mission in the history of Japan.The culture of Kyoto proved itself to be omnipotent as ever.

Regarded in this manner, the return of the governmental seat to Kyoto had a great advantage.The new Shogunate, having located its centre in the same historical place where the classical civilisation of Japan had had its cradle also, its military and political organisation could work hand in hand with the social and cultural movement.The prestige of the Shogun was bedecked with a brighter halo than when Kamakura had been the seat of his government.The change, however, was accompanied with invidious results, ruinous not only to the Shogunate, but to the political integrity of the country at large.

After having experienced the vicissitudes of a long civil war, the courtiers became convinced that they could not overthrow by any means the military régime, which had already taken deep root in the social structure of our country. So they began to think that it was wiser for them to make use of that military power than to try any abortive attempts against it. They heaped, therefore, on the successive Shoguns of the Ashikaga family titles of high-sounding honour, much higher than those with which the Shoguns of Kamakura had been invested. In the imperial palace, too, special deference was paid to the Shogun. Such a rise in the court-rank of the Shogun induced his retainers to vie with one another in obtaining some official rank of distinction in the courtiers' hierarchical scale. Those who belonged to the higher classes among them, though they were mostly the shugo or military governors of one or more provinces, used to spend a greater part of their time at Kyoto, on account of holding some civil office in the government of the Shogun, and lived in a very aristocratic way, which was easy and indolent, that is to say, not much different from that of the courtiers. There were many social meetings, in which both courtiers and warriors participated together, and the object of these meetings mostly consisted in enjoying various kinds of literary pastimes, among which the commonest was a trick in versification called renga, that is to say, the composing by turns of a line of an unfinished poem, which should form a sequence to the preceding and at the same time become the prologue to the next. Through manifold channels of this and the like kinds of amusements, a very intimate relation between the two classes was cemented. The refinement of the courtiers' circle, though somewhat vulgarised compared with that of the previous period, freely penetrated into the families of the rough soldiery. Marriages between members of the two classes also took place frequently, by which the courtiers gained materially, while the soldiers could thereby assuage the uneasiness of their parvenu-consciousness. A new social life thus sprang up.

Among the two parties, which were reconciled in this way, that which profited the more by it, was of course the courtiers. Although the income from their manors, to which they were entitled as proprietors de jure, might have become less in comparison with that of the age anterior to the establishment of the Kamakura Shogunate, yet they were now relieved of all the troubles which might have beset them had they remained holding the real power of the state. Having relinquished their political ambitions and shifted all the cares of the state and military affairs upon the shoulders of the Shogunate, they became utterly irresponsible, could breathe freely and enjoy their idle hours not in the least disturbed. On the other hand, the militarists, having found that it was no longer necessary to circumscribe the privileges of the courtiers still more narrowly than before, forgot that ultimately their interests must necessarily collide in principle with those of the latter. What were contradictory at bottom seemed to them practically reconcilable. The Shogunate thought that it was its duty to uphold the interests of the courtiers by its military power, a task which was soon found to be impossible. On account of the weakness of the central government, disorder ruled in Kyoto and in the provinces as well, and paved the way for the political disintegration of the whole empire. To explain the political phenomena I must turn for a while to the relations between the shugo, the military governors of provinces, and the djito under their protection.

In the time of the Kamakura Shogunate, as aforesaid, each province had a military governor, called the shugo, appointed by the Shogun. The shugo, himself a djito, and a very influential one of that class, served as an intermediate commander in transmitting to the djito under him the military instructions which he had received from Kamakura. He was, therefore, nothing else but a marshal of all the djito within that province. There existed no relation of vassalage between him and the djito under his military jurisdiction. The latter remained to the end the direct vassals of the Shogunate at Kamakura, and only as regards the military organisation were subordinated to the shugo. The office of the shugo was not the hereditary possession of any family, so that the Shogun could nominate any djito to be shugo of any province at his pleasure, without fear of disturbing thereby the personal relation between him and his retainers in that province. In some respects this relation resembled that of the English king and the barons, who swore, besides their oath of fealty to a higher noble as their liege lord, direct allegiance to their king. As long as the line of Yoritomo, therefore, continued as hereditary Shogun, the Shogunate could depend on the fidelity of those djito, who were but the household vassals of the Minamoto family, and by this personal tie keep the political unity of the country infrangible.

After the extinction of the Minamoto family, the Shogun who succeeded one after another had no hereditary nor personal relations with those djito, and could claim no more than the official prestige of the Shogun allowed them to do. As to the Hôjô family, though the real power of the Shogunate was in its hands, originally it was no higher in rank than the djito, and could not, in its own name, command obedience from any of the Shogun's retainers. There is some similarity between the organisation of the time of the Kamakura Shogunate in this second phase and the "Kreis" institution of the German empire in the fifteenth century, which was initiated with the object of political concentration by Maximilian I. , whose real power lay in his being a duke of Austria, and not Emperor of Germany. However admirable as an organisation, such a political status was undoubtedly untenable. No wonder that the military régime of Kamakura gradually collapsed.

The relation of shugo and djito in the time of the Ashikaga was quite of a different sort from that in the former Shogunate. The office of shugo became now the hereditary possession of certain privileged families, which constituted a body of higher warriors, towering above the common djito. The shugo stood in the position of protector to all the djito of the province he governed, and those djito who stood under a shugo were designated his "hikwan" or protégés. The relation of vassalage arose thus between the shugo and the djito in the same province, a legal status which had not existed in the Kamakura period. The direct relation between the common djito and the Shogun, which was the main spring of the political régime of the Kamakura era, was now cut off. No doubt the shugo in the Ashikaga period had in their provinces, besides their suzerainty over the djito, the tenure of certain tracts of land, as in the days of Kamakura. The great difference between them, however, was that in the Kamakura era a retainer of the Shogun was first installed as a djito of a manor, and then appointed shugo, while in the Ashikaga age the land which the shugo held directly was his demesne as shugo and not the land held as a retainer of the Shogun at Kyoto, independent of his office of shugo. To sum up, the shugo of the Ashikaga period was not a mere office, as in the days of Kamakura, but a legal status of the warriors ranking next to the Shogun. As the result of such an organisation each province or group of provinces under a shugo became a political entity, while it had been but a military entity in the Kamakura era. If the Shogun at Kyoto, therefore, had been strong enough to enforce his will over all the shugo of the provinces, then the political unity of the country at large could safely continue in the hands of the Ashikaga.

The Shogunate of the Ashikaga, however, had not been originally so formulated as to enable it to impose implicit obedience on all the higher military officials of the shugo class. For this family, though a branch of the Minamoto, had nothing in its history that could attract, as Yoritomo did, a vast number of willing warriors to serve under its banner. That Takauji was promoted to the headship of the second military government was largely due to the assistance of the warriors from various parts of the empire who were not personally related to his family, but were disaffected at seeing the power of the courtiers restored, neither was it by any means to be attributed to his personal capacity, which was rather mediocre both as general and as statesman. This origin of the Ashikaga family, therefore, made it difficult from the first for the Shogun of the line to curb the arrogance of his influential generals. Insurrection against the Shogunate followed one after another, so that no year passed without some small disturbance somewhere.

This state culminated in the civil war begun in the Ohnin era, that is to say, in 1467. The war had its origin in the quarrel about the succession to the Shogunate between the son and the adopted son, in reality the younger brother, of the Shogun Yoshimasa. This family question of the Ashikaga became mixed up with other quarrels about the succession in two of the influential military families, Shiba and Hatakeyama. Other shugo of various provinces sided with this or that party, brought their liege-men to Kyoto, and turned the streets of the metropolis into a battle-field. Thus the most desultory civil war in our history was waged under the eyes of the Emperor and of the Shogun, neither of whom had any power to stop it. After the burning, plundering, and killing, carried on most ruthlessly for nine years, the street-fighting in Kyoto ceased, leaving almost no trace of the historical city of yore. The scenes of anarchy were then transferred to the provinces, and it took many years before the whole country became pacified. Nay, complete peace was not restored till the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate itself. Such was one phase of the political disintegration of the age, and its result was that Japan was torn asunder into a number of semi-independent bodies, each with a shugo at its head.

If the process of the political decomposition of the state had been limited to what is described above, then peace might have reigned at least within each of those bodies. Unfortunately, however, for the welfare of the people, none of these shugo was strong enough to keep order even within his own sphere of military jurisdiction. Most of them had lost their military character, having become accustomed to life in the capital, as stated above, and they left the care of their respective provinces in the hands of their protégés, men who soon made themselves independent of their patrons, so that there arose a number of minor political bodies in the jurisdiction of each shugoAgain these protégés, that is to say, the heads of the minor political bodies, were put down in turn by their vassals, and so forth.Moreover, some of these minor bodies were further divided into still smaller bodies, while others became aggrandised by annexation by the stronger of neighboring weaker ones.In this way Japan fell into a state of chaos, being an agglomeration of political bodies of various sizes, with masters ever changing, and with frontiers constantly shifting without any reference to the former administrative boundaries.This second phase completed the total disintegration of the empire.

The last of the Shoguns who tried to stem this irresistible tendency to disintegration was Yoshihisa, the son of Yoshimasa. His succession to his father, as has already been described, was the cause of the civil war of the Ohnin era, for which, however, he was not responsible in the least, being only eight years old when he was invested with the Shogunate in the year 1473. He grew up, however, to be the most typical Shogun of all the Ashikaga. Though born in the highest of the military families, he had as his mother a daughter of a court-noble, and was educated in his boyhood by Kanera Ichijô, one of the most learned courtiers of the time. When Yoshihisa reached manhood, therefore, he was a courtier clad in military garments. He thought and acted as if he were a high Fujiwara noble, and even had his household managed by a courtier. Through this confidant, the proprietors de jure of manors, that is to say, courtiers, shrines, and temples, clung to the young Shogun, and pressed him to coerce, on their behalf, those arbitrary shugo and minor captains who dared impudently to appropriate the whole of the revenue from those manors to themselves, so that the share due to these proprietors de jure had been kept in arrears for many years. The Shogun was easily persuaded, and Takayori Sasaki, the shugo of the province of Ohmi, was first chosen as the object of chastisement, for his province was the nearest to Kyoto and abounded in those manors belonging to the courtiers and the like. It was in the year 1487 that Yoshihisa in person led a punitive expedition into Ohmi, crossed lake Biwa, and pitched his camp on its eastern shore. Contemporary chronicles unanimously describe in vivid colours how the gallant and refined young prince, clad in bright military costume, marched out of Kyoto surrounded by a bizarre host of warriors and courtiers. The latter group, however, did not count for aught in warfare, while the former followed the Shogun only halfheartedly. It was especially so with those shugo who were of the same caste and of the same status as the attacked, and therefore did not like to see him crushed in the interest of the de jure but fainéant proprietors. The victory of the army of the Shogun was hopeless from the first. After staying two years in camp Yoshihisa died without being able to see his enemy vanquished. One of his cousins, who succeeded to the Shogunate, renewed the expedition, and at last ousted the disobedient shugo from his province, but the proprietors de jure of the manors could not regain their lost rights, what was due to them having been usurped by other new pretenders, not less arbitrary than their predecessors.

The expedition of Yoshihisa was an epoch-making event in the history of our country. To support by military power the courtiers, whose cup had already begun to run over and whose interests could not be always consistent with the welfare of the Shogunate, was evidently a quixotic attempt. Still it cannot be disputed that Yoshihisa fought at least for an ideal, however unrealisable it might have been. He reminds us of the scions of the Hohenstaufen who fought in Italy for the imperial ideal traditional in their family. The failure of the expedition into Ohmi meant the utter impossibility of the restoration of the courtiers' prestige and the approach of the total disappearance of the manorial system from the islands of Japan. This is a mighty economical change for the empire, the importance of which could not be overvalued. The old régime initiated by the reform of the Taikwa was going down to its grave, and new Japan was beginning to dawn side by side with the momentous political disintegration of the country. We see, indeed, simultaneous with this political and economical change, the transformation of various factors of civilisation, preparing themselves for the coming age. The first turning of the wheel of history, however, depended on the political regeneration of the country by a master-hand.

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CHAPTER IX

END OF MEDIAEVAL JAPAN

In order to see a nation consolidated, it is necessary not only to have a nucleus serving as a centre, towards which the whole nation might converge, but to have at the same time the centralising power of that nucleus strengthened sufficiently to hold the nation solid and compact. Moreover, the constituent parts of that nation ought to have the capacity to respond to the action emanating from that common centre or nucleus towards those parts, and facilitate the reciprocal relation between the centralising and the centralised. More than that. There must be formed strong links between those component parts themselves towards one another. For if each part be linked only to a common centre and estranged from other parts, then there is a great danger of the breaking asunder of the whole, however strong the centralising force of that nucleus might be, and in case of the debilitation of that sole centre, there might remain no other force alive to keep the constituent parts compactly together. To impart, however, the consolidating force to those component parts, they should be instituted each as a separate organism. In other words, unless those parts constitute themselves each in an organic social and political body, provided with the power of acting within and without, they cannot form any close connection among themselves and with the central nucleus; and to be provided with such a power, or to become an organism, each part, too, must have in its turn its own nucleus, around which the rest of that part might converge. To speak summarily, for a strong centralisation there must be, besides one nucleus, or nucleus of the first order, a certain number of nuclei of the second or minor order, and sometimes there must be nuclei of the third and lower orders.

It might be deduced from what is said above that without a sufficient number of local centres, that is to say, without the existence of well-developed minor political organisms, the political centre, however powerful it might be, would not be able to hold a country together, lacking cohesion between those constituent parts. Japan had long been in such a disorderly state which continued until the middle of the Ashikaga period, that is to say, the middle of the fifteenth century. The political influence of Kamakura, though independent of Kyoto, was of very short duration, and Kyoto had continued on the whole as the sole political and social centre. If there had been in the provinces a place worthy to be called a city, besides Kamakura, it could only be sought in Hakata on the northern coast of Kyushu. Other places were hardly to be termed cities, being but little more than sites of periodical fairs at the utmost. The growth of the cities of Sakai and Yamaguchi is of rather later origin, dating from the middle of the Ashikaga age. The Emperor, the Shogun, and one metropolitan city had dominated the whole of the country for a long time, so that, superficially observed, Japan could be said to have been superbly centralised, and therefore excellently unified. In reality, however, the prestige of the Emperor declined, as well as the military power of the Shogunate, and Kyoto, the site of the imperial court and of the military government, lost the political influence it once had possessed. After all, nothing was found influential enough in the earlier Ashikaga age to serve by itself as a means of solidifying the nation, while there had not yet been formed those minor provincial centres around which communities of lesser magnitude might crystallise. Manors, which were the remnants of the former ages, were of course a kind of agricultural communities, and could be considered as social and economical units, but they were politically dependent on their proprietors living in Kyoto or somewhere else outside of those manors, and in cultural respects most of the manors counted almost for nothing. All Japan was thus thrown into a state of chaos, when the military power of the Ashikaga Shogunate was reduced to impotence.

This chaotic period of Japanese history has been generally considered as the retrogressive age of our civilisation, quite in the same sense in which the medieval age in European history has come to be designated as the Dark Ages. It is a great mistake, however, to stigmatise the Ashikaga period as having witnessed no progress in any cultural factor, just as it has been a fatal misconception of early European historians to think that medieval Europe was indeed dark in every cultural respect. Though the classicism of the former ages might seem a civilisation of a far higher stage when compared with the vulgarised culture of the later, or so-called Dark Age, yet the vulgarisation should not be necessarily branded as a backward movement of civilisation. The vulgarisation at least accompanies a wider propagation, a deeper permeation, and the better adaptation to the real social condition of the time, and should not be looked down upon as an absolutely decadent process. In the seemingly anarchical period of the early Ashikaga, Japan had been undergoing, in sooth, an important change in social and cultural respects. Nay, even politically a change of mighty consequence was in course of evolution. Having reached an extreme state of disorder, a germ of fresh order was gradually forming itself out of necessity. That the shugo of this period held sway over a district far more extensive than the land held by any of the shugo of the Kamakura period, is in a sense a remarkable political progress. Yamana, one of the most powerful of the Ashikaga shugo, is said to have possessed about one-sixth of the whole of Japan, and on that account was called Lord One-sixth. Such great feudatories were never possible in the Kamakura period. Most of these grand lords, though living mainly in Kyoto, as was stated in the previous chapter, had their provincial residences, which, too, were not so unpretentious as those of the djito of the Kamakura. Each lord maintained princely state, and around his court, a thriving social life must have grown up, making the beginning of the modern Japanese provincial towns. The governmental sites of the daimyo or feudatories of the Tokugawa period generally find the origin of their urban development in these residences of the shugo of the Ashikaga period.

The trade with China was another cause of the growth of modern Japanese cities, especially of those which are situated by the sea, such as Sakai, Osaka, Nagasaki, and this development of the maritime commercial cities led naturally to the general advancement of the humanistic culture of our country. Our intercourse with China, the fountain-head of the culture of the East, though it had been suspended between the governments since the end of the ninth century, had never been abandoned entirely, and merchant ships had continued to ply between the two countries almost without interruption. During the Kamakura Shogunate too, we have reason to suppose that this steady intercourse livened into considerable activity and bustling profitable to both sides, China, at that epoch of our history, being governed by the Sung and the Yuan dynasties successively. Sanetomo, the second son of Yoritomo and the third Shogun in Kamakura, was said to have built a ship in order to cross over to that country. The port then trading with China was Hakata, and the privileged ships, which were limited in number, must have been under the care and protection of the Shogunate. Those ships carried on board not only commodities of exchange, but passengers also, who were mostly priests. Some of the ships even appear to have been sent solely for trade in behalf of certain Buddhist temples. In this we see again the singular coincidence between the histories of Europe and of Japan. The Levantine trade of the Italian cities in the age of the Crusades counted among its participators many churches and priests also. It is needless to say that those Japanese priests, who went abroad accompanying adventurous merchants and came back loaded with profound religious knowledge, did at the same time conspicuous service in promoting the general culture of our country. What was most remarkable, however, was that there were not a few Chinese Buddhists, who came over to this country and settled here. Their main purpose was of course to propagate the doctrine of the Zen sect, which had got the upper hand in China at that time. They were cordially welcomed by the Shogunate, and later by the Imperial Court too, and were installed in the noted temples of Kamakura and Kyoto as chief priests, and besides their religious activities, these learned men contributed much toward the introduction of contemporary Chinese civilisation in general, in no less degree than did the Japanese priests. Among the various departments of knowledge which these priests imparted to the warriors and courtiers, one of the most important was instruction in the pure Chinese classics and in secular literature. There are still extant in our country not a small number of rare books printed in the Sung and the Yuan dynasty and imported hither at that time, and these manifest how rich in variety were the books then introduced to Japan. The founding of the famous library at Kanazawa near Kamakura, by a learned member of the Hôjô family in a time not far distant from that of the Mongolian invasion, may perhaps be attributed to the influence of some of these priests.

Without doubt the invasion of the Mongolian host put a momentary stop to this mutual intercourse. It seems, however, that the trade with China was revived soon after the war, and continued down to the time of the Ashikaga, without being interrupted materially even by the long civil war. Far from cessation or interruption, the official intercourse between the two states which had been broken off for some years was during this civil war restored to its former amicable condition. It was while the internecine strife was raging over the whole of the island Empire, that a change of dynasty took place in China. The Mongols were driven away to their original abode in the desert, and in their place reigned in China the new dynasty of the Ming, founded by a general of Chinese blood. This founder of the Ming sent an embassy to Japan to announce the inauguration of his line and to secure the coast of his empire from inroads and pillage by Japanese pirates, who, since several centuries, had been ravaging the Korean and then the Chinese coast, and became especially rampant during the civil war, being let loose by the unexampled lawless state of our country. The ambassador of the Chinese emperor, however, could not at once reach Kyoto, which was his destination. For at that time in Kyushu ruled an imperial prince who was a scion of the branch antagonistic to that which reigned in the metropolis supported by the Ashikaga, and the prince-governor, as he was then the master of the historic trading port of Hakata, intercepted the Chinese ambassador on his way, received him, and sent him back. This happened in the year 1369. Seven years afterwards this very prince sent an envoy to the Chinese government, perhaps with the object of obtaining some material assistance from beyond the sea, in order to make himself strong enough to overpower his enemy in Japan, the Ashikaga party. As the sender was a prince of the blood imperial, the envoy sent by him seems to have been regarded as if he were the representative of the real government of Japan, and the intercourse between the two countries thus began to take official form again. When the civil war ended in the ultimate victory of the Ashikaga party and the annihilation of all its opponents, this international relation initiated by the prince of Kyushu was taken up by Yoshimitsu, the third Shogun of the Ashikaga, who sent an embassy to the Chinese government of the Ming in the year 1401. After this we see successive exchanges of embassies between the Chinese government and our Ashikaga Shogunate, the latter vouchsafing the orderliness of our trading people on the Chinese coast and promising to bridle the piratical activities of our adventurers, and the former giving in return munificent presents to the Shogunate. At that time what our forefathers suffered most from was the scarcity of coins, for although the beginning of the coinage in our country is so old that it has been lost in the remotest past, yet for a long period not enough care was exercised to provide the country with sufficient money in coins of different denominations to cover the necessities of the growing industries. No wonder that the presents of copper coins by the emperors of the Ming were gladly received by the Shogunate, and this Chinese money, together with that obtained by sale of our commodities, was in wide circulation throughout Japan, many of them having remained to this day, and served as auxiliary coins. Among other things of Chinese provenance earnestly coveted by us, perhaps the most desired were books. Besides these two articles, copper coins and books, many rarities and useful commodities must have been imported by these ships, which carried the envoys on board, and rendered a not insignificant service in altering for the better the general ways of living of the people of our country.

The chief emporium of the trade with China in the early Ashikaga period was of course Hakata in Kyushu as before. As the family of the Ôuchi, however, held the strait of Shimonoseki, the gateway of the Inland Sea, and as Hakata itself came afterwards under the rule of the same family, the Chinese trade had been for a long time controlled or rather monopolised by this lord of the province of Nagato. The prosperity of the inland city of Yamaguchi, the residential seat of the Ôuchi family, is to be ascribed also to the same circumstance. Moreover, the growth of the port of Sakai in the easternmost recess of the Inland Sea owes its origin to the fact that the city was once under the lordship of the same Ôuchi, and a close historical connection was thereby created between it and the port of Shimonoseki. It was by the co-operation of many other political causes, however, that the centre of the foreign trade was shifted from Hakata to Sakai, and when intercourse with western nations was opened, it was the latter and not the former, which became the staple market of import and export.

The growth of the Japanese cities, actuated by the political and commercial conditions of the country as stated above, is a phenomenon which had much to do with the progress of our civilization in general.Notwithstanding the manifold drawbacks necessarily accompanying urban life, cities have been, since very ancient times, one of the most potent agents in the history of the East as well as of the West, in raising the general standard of culture to a high level.Rural life, whatever sonorous praise be chanted for it, would not have been able by itself to elevate the standard of manners and behaviour much above a blunt rustic naïveté.In this respect we can observe a remarkable difference between the Ashikaga and the preceding ages, a difference quite similar in nature to that which existed between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries in the history of Europe.The sudden increase, in Japan, of printed books in number and variety shows it more than clearly.

The history of printing in Japan goes back to the middle of the eighth century, but at the beginning the matter printed was limited to detached leaflets. What was printed the earliest in the form of a book and is still extant, bears the date of 1088. After that, however, very few books had been printed for a long time. Moreover, those few were exclusively religious. It was in the year 1247 that one of the commentaries on the Lun-yü, the famous work of the teachings of Confucius, was put into a reprint, after the model of a contemporary Chinese edition, that is to say, of the Sung age. That this non-religious or non-Buddhist work was first edited in Japan in the middle of the Kamakura period, proves the enlargement of the circle of readers in Chinese classics by the participation of the warrior-class. Such editing of secular Chinese works, however, was discontinued for three-quarters of a century, and was not resumed until 1322, only ten years before the outbreak of the long civil war. The book printed at the latter date was after one of the Chinese editions of the Shu-king, another piece of Confucian literature. This was followed by the reprinting of many other non-religious Chinese works. The civil war too astonishes us not only in that it did not hinder the continuance of the reprints of useful Chinese originals, but also in that the number of books reprinted has suddenly increased in general since this period. Among the books issued during the war, a commentary on the Lun-yü, of a text different from that above mentioned, and said to have been made at Sakai, was the most remarkable. The edition was dated 1364, and reprinted again and again in several places. In this case the place where the printing was first undertaken demands also our attention. Hitherto almost all the books had been published in Kyoto, except some tomes of Buddhist literature, which occasionally had been edited in the convents at Nara or Kôya. But now printing began to be undertaken not only in these historical and sacred places, but in purely commercial cities of quite recent growth, as Sakai. It is said that about this time several kinds of books of Chinese literature were edited in the city of Hakata, and that it was a naturalised Chinese who had started the undertaking there. Another tradition tells us that two Chinese block-engravers came and settled at Hakata, and engaged in their professional business, which contributed much to the increase of reprinted books. Shortly after the civil war, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, books were printed in other places more remotely situated in the provinces, such as Yamaguchi and Ashikaga. The last-named was the cradle of the Shogunate House of the Ashikaga, and there just at this time a college was founded, or according to some, restored, by Norizane Uyesugi, one of the most influential retainers of the Shogunate in eastern Japan. Thus, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the reprinting of Chinese classics became a fashion throughout the empire. In addition to the ever-increasing number of books reprinted at Kyoto and Sakai, we find now those printed at places as far remote as Kagoshima in the west. In the east there seems to have lived in the neighborhood of Odawara, a new political centre, at least one engraver, engaged in block-cutting for books. Summing up what has been stated above, the increase of the number of book-editing localities meant the increase of minor cultural centres in the provinces, that is to say, the wider diffusion of civilisation in the empire.

Another important fact to be specially noticed is that the varieties of books reprinted became gradually multifarious.Though those books printed in the Ashikaga age were mostly reproductions of Chinese works, and very few purely Japanese books were edited until the end of the age, yet those Chinese works themselves, which were reprinted, became more and more diversified in kind.Not only Buddhist and Confucian classics, and works of purely literary character, especially poetical works and books on versification, but several medical works also were reprinted and issued in the later Ashikaga age.The study of medicine had been revived since the civil war by the intercourse with China, and soon after the war, some Japanese students went abroad to learn the science there.The reprinting of medical books, therefore, was to be considered as a token of the growing necessity for medical students ever increasing in our country, and the beginning of the revival of scientific education.

As to the works of Japanese authors which were put into print, the first publication seems to have been that of religious treatise in Chinese by the priest Hônen, printed at the beginning of the Kamakura period, and the work was many times reprinted afterwards. Another work by the same priest, which was written in Japanese, was issued at the end of the same period. During the civil war numerous works, mostly in Chinese, by the Japanese Zen priests were published, among which the history of Buddhism in Japan, entitled the Genkô-shakusho, was the most noteworthy, and was therefore reprinted over and over again.A chronological table of the history of Japan, and two editions of the Jôyei Laws were subsequently printed.A text-book for children, to train them in the use of Chinese ideographs, was first printed at the close of the Ashikaga period, and the demand for the appearance of such a book proves that the education of children began to arouse the general attention.

From what is said above, we can safely conclude that during the course of the Ashikaga period, the level of civilisation of our country had been raised in a marked degree, and that at the same time there arose one after another numerous cultural centres in the provinces, which were in their main features nothing but Kyoto on a small scale, but nevertheless contributed not the least to the betterment of national civilisation in general owing to their common rivalry. One would perhaps entertain some doubt as to the veracity of the assertion, that in an age such as of the Ashikaga, when political anarchy was in full play, so remarkable an advancement had been steadily achieved by our forefathers. If he would, however, look at the history of the Italian renaissance, then he would not be at a loss to see that political disorder does not necessarily thwart the progress of civilisation, but on the contrary often stimulates it.

The territories owned by great feudatories or daimyo in the Ashikaga age were by no means compact entities definitely bounded. Their frontiers constantly shifted to and fro according to frequently recurring waxings and wanings in strength of this or that daimyo, and these fluctuations depended, in their turn, on the results sometimes of petty skirmishes and sometimes of political intrigues, so that an unwavering steadiness was the least thing to be expected at that time. This politically unsettled condition of Japan, however, was in a certain sense a boon to our country, for it took away all the hindrances which lay in the way of internal communication, and paved the path to the ultimate political unity of the empire. I do not say of course that travelling at that time was quite safe from any kind of molestation, but the main obstacles to communication were rather of a social than of a political nature. In other words, they were of kinds which could not be got rid of in a like stage of civilisation, even if Japan had been politically not dismembered, and adventurous merchants did not shrink from facing such difficulties. No need to speak of those piratical traders, who went out from the western islands and the coastal regions of the Inland Sea on their devastating errands to the Korean and the Chinese coasts. The less warlike merchants ventured to trade with the Ainu, who had retired into the island of Hokkaidô, and had not been heard of since the beginning of the Ashikaga period.

Among the itinerants travelling a long distance may be counted the professional literati also, the experts in the art of composing the renga, the short Japanese poems. They went about throughout the provinces, visiting feudal lords in their castles, teaching them the literary pastimes, thus imparting their first lesson in æsthetic education to those who had never tasted it. Courtiers, too, weakminded as they were, travelled great distances, to call on some rich bourgeois or powerful daimyo, who were thinking of becoming their munificent patrons, and taught them, besides the afore-said art of composing Japanese poems, the sport of kicking leather balls and other leisurely pastimes which had been the favourites among the courtiers in Kyoto, and received in return a generous hospitality and fees for the lessons which they gave. Buddhist priests were the third set of busy travellers of the time. Missionary activities had not much relaxed since the Kamakura period, though no influential sect had been started in this age. Every nook and corner of the island empire had received the footprints of these religious itinerants, and some of the more enterprising priests even crossed the sea to the island of what is now Hokkaidô in order to preach to the Ainu dwelling there. Pilgrims to the shrines of Ise, where the ancestress of the Imperial line was enshrined, may also be counted among the busy interprovincial travellers.

All these wanderers served not only to transmit to distant provincial towns the culture engendered and nourished in the metropolis, but also to make the intercourse between the minor cultural centres more intimate than before, so as to spread a civilisation of a uniform standard and nature throughout the whole of the empire.Japan was thus for the first time unified in her civilisation in order to prepare herself for a solid political unification.

Let me repeat that Japan of the Ashikaga age had within herself no constant political boundaries nor any other artificial barriers to impede the people of one province nor of the territory of one daimyo from going to another province or the territory of another daimyo, and this, in a great measure, facilitated communications between the inhabitants of different provinces. The fact that the college at Ashikaga in eastern Japan was, notwithstanding its insufficient accommodation, thronged with pupils from various parts of the country, even from a province so far off from Kyoto as Satsuma, proves that bad roads and poor means of conveyance did not obstruct the Japanese of that time from traversing great distances in order to get a liberal education, and such activity and lively traffic would naturally tend to the formation of big emporiums here and there within the empire. Unfortunately the geographical features of our country did not allow it to see a great number of such large commercial cities formed within it, as the Hanseatic towns had been formed in medieval Germany, although we find very close resemblances between Germany of the twelfth and of the thirteenth century and Japan under the Ashikaga régime as regards their political conditions. The only one of the Japanese cities which had ever attained such a height of prosperity as to be fairly matched with the free cities of the Hansa was Sakai in the province of Idzumi.

The city of Sakai, as its name, which means in the Japanese tongue "the Boundary," denotes, was situated just on the boundary line of the two adjoining provinces Settsu and Idzumi, and at the quondam estuary of the river Yamato. The frontier-line, however, and the course of the river, were afterwards changed, so that the city is now entirely included within the province of Idzumi, and there is no river running near the city. The fact that it was once a border town shows that it could never have been the seat of the provincial government. Neither had it ever been the residence of any powerful feudal lord during the whole military régime. Moreover, nature has bestowed no special favour on the city. The bay of Sakai is very widely open, affording no protection against the west wind. In addition to that, it has been very shallow since old times. Even in an undeveloped stage of ship-building, the port was unfit for the mooring of vessels of a size as large as the junks trading with China were at that time, so that they had to be equipped somewhere else in a neighbouring harbour, and then brought and anchored far off from the shore in the bay of Sakai. The only geographical advantage of the port lay in the fact that the shortest sea-route to the island of Shikoku started thence. The first impulse to the development of the city seems to have been given during the civil war, for it was the nearest access to the sea for one of the parties which had its stronghold in the mountainous region of the province of Yamato, adjacent to Idzumi. At the end of the war, the port came, as before stated, under the rule of the family of Ôuchi, and from Ôuchi it passed into the hands of the family of Hosokawa, also one of the chief vassals of the Ashikaga Shogunate, holding the north-eastern part of the island of Shikoku, and Sakai serving the family always as the landing-place of its followers, when they were on their way to Kyoto, to pay their respects to the Shogun or to fight there for their own interests. On account of this usefulness the harbour-city of Sakai had been granted privileges by the hereditary chief of the Hosokawa, as a recompense for the assistance given by the merchants of the city, and those same privileges, in extent, amounted to almost as much as the municipal freedom enjoyed by the free cities of Europe. The administration of the city was in the hands of a few wealthy merchants, and was rarely interfered with by its feudal lord. Among the merchants there were ten, at first, who monopolised the municipal government, each of them being very rich as the proprietors of certain storehouses on the beach, the rents of which paid them a good income. In the later Ashikaga age, however, we hear the names of the thirty-six municipal councillors of Sakai. This increase in the number might perhaps have been the result of the growth in opulence of the citizens. In short, though the city had been under the oligarchical rule of the wealthy merchants of the city, like Venice and Florence in medieval Italy, yet it was none the less autonomous, which is quite an exceptional case in the whole course of the history of our country.

The golden age of the city of Sakai dates from the year 1476 or thereabouts, when a squadron trading with China first sailed out from the harbour. Until that time all the vessels plying between this country and China used to set out from Hakata or from Hyogo, which is nearly the same thing as Kobe. Although the adventurous merchants of Sakai carried their trade before this time as far as the islands of Loo-choo, and often participated in the Chinese trade also, yet no vessel had ever started from there for China till then. That Sakai became at this date a chief trading port dealing with China might presumably have been owing to the intercession of its hereditary lord Hosokawa, but the determining cause of this assumption of such an honourable position among the commercial cities of Japan must have been the indisputable superiority of the material strength of the city. Many of the higher vassals of the Shogunate borrowed money from the merchants of Sakai in order to equip their soldiers. Nay, even the Shogunate itself had often to mortgage its landed estates to the merchants of the city in order to save its treasury from running short. The wealth of the citizens enabled them to fortify their city very strongly, by surrounding it with a deep moat, and to enlist into their service a great number of knights-errant, who abounded in Japan at that time. These, together with the consciousness of indispensable assistance rendered to the Shogunate, to various great feudatories and condottieri, emboldened the citizens to defy the otherwise formidable military powers, and those warriors, on the other hand, who owed much to the pecuniary aid of the Sakai merchants, could but treat the latter with great consideration, which was unwonted at that time. Although the citizens of Sakai were not entirely free from the sufferings of the war, for they had often to quarter soldiers in their houses, yet no battle was allowed to be fought within the city, notwithstanding that a most sanguinary war was raging all around in the empire.

It was natural, therefore, that, after the civil war of the Ohnin era, Sakai should be considered safer to live in than Kyoto.Sakai became the asylum for the civilisation of Japan, to save it from utter destruction.Poets, painters, musicians, and singers, who had found living in the turbulent metropolis intolerably hard, sought shelter in Sakai, and there occupied themselves quietly with their own professions.Various handicrafts, such as lacquering, porcelain-making, and weaving were all started there with enormous success.Especially as to the weaving, it is said that this industry, which had once flourished and been afterwards abandoned in Kyoto on account of the political disturbances there, was not only continued at Sakai, but also improved by the Chinese weavers, who repaired to the city and taught the natives the art of making various costly textiles of Chinese invention.In some respects the textiles of the Nishijin, now one of the specialties of Kyoto, may be said to be the continuation of the Sakai looms.

Another kind of industry, which developed in the city in the later Ashikaga period, was the manufacture of fire-arms. Immediately after the introduction of fire-arms by a Portuguese in the year 1541, a merchant of Sakai happened to learn the art of making guns somewhere or other in Kyushu, and after his return to the city he began to practise there the business he had learnt. Sakai thus became the origin of the propagation, in central and eastern Japan, of the use of the new arm.

From what has been described above, the reader would easily understand that the intellectual level of the citizens of Sakai stood much higher than that of the average Japanese of that time.Wit and pleasantry were the accomplishments highly prized there, so that the city produced out of its inhabitants a large number of versatile diplomatists, story-tellers, and buffoons.As their economic conditions were very easy, the social life of the city was polished, enlightened, and even luxurious.The manufacture of saké, the Japanese favourite drink made from rice, was highly developed in the city, and the fame of the Sakai-tub was renowned the country round.To protect the brewers, the Shogunate issued an order forbidding the importation of saké into the city.The tea-ceremony and the flower-trimming, two fashionable pastimes already in vogue at that time, were eagerly practised here by wealthy merchants.Many famous experts in this sort of amusement were found among the inhabitants of the city, and they were generally connoisseurs highly skilled in the fine arts, as Sen-no-Rikyû, for example.Various curios, native and foreign, were bought and sold there at exorbitant high prices.

The prosperous condition of the city induced many Buddhists, especially the priests of the Jôdo-shinshû, the most active sect of Japanese Buddhism at that time, to try their propaganda in the city. They had numerous temples built, and by lending to the merchants their influence at the Shogun's court obtained from it the privilege of trading with China, thus making common cause with the citizens of that port. The earlier Christian missionaries, too, endeavoured to make this city the centre of their movement. It was indeed at the end of the year 1550, that Francis Xavier, who was not only the greatest missionary whom Japan has ever received from the West, but also one of the greatest men in the world too, arrived at the city from Yamaguchi on his way to Kyoto. Though he could achieve nothing noteworthy during his short stay here, on account of illness, yet by him the first seed of Christianity was sown in the central regions of the empire, and ten years later the first Christian hymn was sung in the church founded in the city.

The civilisation of the city of Sakai represented that of the whole empire in the later Ashikaga age, manifested in its most glaring colours. The essential character of the civilisation was not aristocratic, but bourgeois. The lower strata of the people still had nothing to do with it. It is true that we can recognise already at this period the beginning of the proletariat movement. The frequent disturbances raised by apaches in the streets of Kyoto and the insurrections of agricultural workers in the provinces, remind us of the Peasants' War in the time of the Reformation in Europe. Their demands as well as their connection with the religious agitation of the time closely resembled those of the followers of Goetz von Berlichingen. They could not, however, secure any permanent result by their insurrections, so that the character of the civilisation remained essentially bourgeois, not having suffered any marked change from those disturbances.

The civilisation of the bourgeois cannot but be individualistic, and its main difference from that of the aristocracy lies also herein. It has been so in Europe, and it could not have been otherwise in our country. The fact that individualism got the upper hand in the Ashikaga age may be proved by a phenomenon in the history of Japanese art. Portrait-painting had made some progress already in the Kamakura period, as was stated in the foregoing chapter. The artistic development in this branch of painting made it independent of religious pictures. The portrait-paintings of the age, however, even those executed by such eminent masters as Takanobu and Nobuzane, are only images of the typical courtier or warrior, not to mention the stiffness of the style. Very little of the individuality of the persons represented was manifested in them. The scroll-paintings, to which the attention of most of the artists of the age was directed, contained pictures of many persons, but to depict scenes was the chief aim of scroll-paintings, so that no serious pains were taken in the delineation of individuals. That portrait-painting remained thus long in an undeveloped stage cannot be explained away simply by the tardiness of the progress of arts in general. The chief cause must be attributed to the fact that the contemporary civilisation was lacking in individualistic elements. Unless there is a rise of the individualistic spirit in a certain measure, no real progress in portraiture can be expected.

In the Ashikaga period, a large number of scroll-paintings had been produced as before, but they were mostly inferior in quality to those of the preceding age. On the other hand, we notice a vast improvement in the portrait-painting of this period. It may be due to some extent to the influence of the Zen sect, the sect which prevailed among the upper class of that time, for its creed is said to be strongly individualistic. Mainly, however, it must have come from the general spirit of the age, which, though it could not be said to have been free from the influence of the same sect, was induced to become individualistic more by social and economical reasons than by religious ones. By painters of the schools of Tosa and Kano were painted numerous portraits of eminent personages, such as the Shogun, courtiers, great feudatories, priests, especially of the Zen sect, literati, artists, experts in tea-ceremony, and so forth. Their pictures were generally made after death by order of the near relatives, friends, vassals or disciples of the deceased, to be a memorial of the person whom they adored or revered. Not a small number of those paintings are extant to this day, showing vividly the characteristics of those illustrious figures in Japanese history.

The political anarchy combined with the individualistic tendency of the age could not fail to lead to the moral dissolution of the people. To the same effect, too, the literature of the time, which was a revival of that of the Fujiwara period, contributed. The classical authors of Japanese literature at the height of the Fujiwara period were now perused, commented upon, and elucidated with devouring eagerness, the most adored among them being Murasaki-Shikibu, whose famous novel, Genji-monogatari, was regarded mystically and held to be almost divine. The nature of this literature was for the most part realistic, or rather sentimental, verging sometimes on sensuality. It was, however, clad in the exquisitely refined costume of beautiful diction and choice turns of phrase, borrowed or metamorphosed from the inexhaustible stores of Chinese literature. As to the revived form of literature in the Ashikaga period, the difference between it and that of the old time was so remarkable, that it could not be overlooked. Vulgarisation usurping the place of refinement, and coarse sensuality reigning rampant was the outcome of the cultivation of the classical literature. The moral tone of the stories and novels produced in this decadent age unmistakably reflects how low was the ebb of the sense of decency of that period, fostered by the naturalistic tendency manifested in the Fujiwara classics.

These depict the dark side of the age, but in order not to be one-sided in my judgment, let me tell also about its bright side. The culture of the Ashikaga had from the beginning a trend to grow more and more humanistic as it approached the end of the period. One more aspect in the history of Japanese painting proves it to the full. Landscapes and still-life pictures, which had been formerly painted only as the accessories of religious images or as the background in the scroll paintings, before which the main subjects, that is to say, the personages in stories were made to play, began now to form by themselves each a special independent group of subjects for painting. This shows that the people of the time had already entered a cultural stage able to enjoy the arts for art's sake. Many pictures of such a kind by the brush of noted Chinese masters were imported into our country, and several clever Japanese artists also painted after them. Some of our artists, like Sesshû, went over to China to study the art of painting there. The differentiation of the school of Kano from the older Tosa was another result of this development. Most of these pictures were executed in the form of kakemono, or hanging pictures, so called from their being hung in a special niche of a drawing room or a study. Screens, or byobu, mounted with pictures, became also a fashion.In general, the furnishing of a house was now a matter of a certain educated taste, and various systems were devised and formulated by accomplished experts.

The delicacy of the æsthetic sense in indoor-life was moreover enhanced by the laborious etiquette of fashionable tea-parties held by aristocrats and bourgeois alike. The tea-plant itself is said to have been introduced from China into our country in the reign of the Emperor Saga, that is to say, at the beginning of the ninth century. Its use, however, as the daily beverage was of a far later date. Yôsai, the founder of the Zen sect in Japan, wrote in the early Kamakura period a commendation on tea as the healthiest drink of all. Still, for a long while after him, tea seems to have been used exclusively by Buddhists as a tonic. It was in the Ashikaga age that tea came first into general use among the well-to-do classes of the people. As the production of it was, however, not so abundant as now, it was not used daily as at present, but occasionally, with an etiquette conducted with exquisitely refined taste, both hosts and guests rivalling one another in displaying their artistic acquirements by delivering extempore speeches in criticism of the various articles of art exhibited, or in amusing themselves with mystic dialogues of the Zen creed, or the lively exchange of witty repartees.

After all, the tendency of the culture of the later Ashikaga period was in the main humanistic.There was no political authority so firmly constituted, nor were conventional morals of the time so rigorous, as to be able to put an effective check on any liberal thinker, nor to intervene in the daily life of the people.Thought and action in Japan has never been more free than in that age.That Christianity could find innumerable converts from one end of the empire to the other within half a century after its introduction, may be accounted for by supposing that the ground for it had been prepared long before by this exceedingly humanistic culture.In this respect we see the dawn of modern Japan already in the later Ashikaga age.What a striking similarity to the Italian renaissance!Japan was now in the throes of travail—the time for a new birth was fast approaching.Conditions on the whole were favourable.All that was wanted for this were the moral regeneration of the people and the political reconstruction of the Empire.

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CHAPTER X

THE TRANSITION FROM MEDIAEVAL TO MODERN JAPAN

Anarchy engendered peace at least. At the end of the Ashikaga Shogunate the minor territorial lords, who had sprung up out of the impotency of the Shogun, were swallowed up one after another by the more powerful ones. The rights of manorial holders, that is to say, of court-nobles, shrines, and temples, over estates legally their own, though long since fallen into a condition of semi-desuetude, were active, sensitive, yet powerful enough in the middle of the period to withstand the attempted encroachments of those territorial lords, who were de jure only managers of the estates entrusted to their care; but those rights began in course of time to lose their enforcing power, and were finally set at naught by the all-powerful military magnates. The link between the estates and their proprietors was thus virtually cut off, and each territory, which was in truth an agglomeration of several estates, came to stand as one body under the rule of a military lord, without any reservation to his right. In other words, each territory became a domain of a lord pure and simple, and it may be best explained by imagining a quasi-sovereign state in Europe formed by joining together a certain number of ecclesiastical domains, the lands of which were contiguous. It is true that the size of such territories varied, ranging from one so big as to contain several provinces down to petty ones comprising only a few villages; their boundaries, too, shifted from time to time. Notwithstanding this diversity in size and the inconstancy of the frontier-lines, these territories were similar to one another in their main nature, no more complicated by intricate manorial systems. If, therefore, there appeared at once some irresistible necessity for national unification or some great historical figure, whose ability was equal to the task of achieving the work, Japan could now be made a solid national state far more easily than at any earlier period.

Besides this facilitation of the political unity, what most contributed to the settling of the general order was the resuscitation of the moral sense of the nation. The highly advanced Chinese civilisation introduced into our country at a time when it was comparatively naïve, had an effect which could not be termed exactly in all respects wholesome. The morals of the people, whose mode of life was simplicity itself, not having yet tasted the sumptuousness of civilised life, excelled those of higher civilised nations in veracity, soberness, and courage. Lacking, however, in the firm consciousness which must accompany any virtue of a standard worthy of sincere admiration, these attributes of the ancient Japanese, though laudable in themselves, could have no high intrinsic value, and were inadequate to stem the enervating influence of the elegantly developed alien civilisation introduced later on into the country. The ethical ties, which are indispensable at any time for maintaining the social order in a healthy condition, were gradually reduced to a state of utter dissolution in the later or over-refined stage of the Fujiwara period, especially among the upper classes. With the attainment of political power by the warrior class in the formation of the Kamakura Shogunate, there shimmered once some hope of the reawakening of the moral spirit, for fidelity and gratitude, which were the cardinal virtues of the Kamakura warriors, were efficient factors in refreshing and invigorating a society which had once fallen into a despicable languor and demoralisation. The ascendency of these bracing forces, however, was but transitory. This disappointment came not only from the shortness of the duration of the genuine military régime at Kamakura, but also from another reason not less probable. The admirable virtues of the warriors were the natural outcome of the peculiar private circumstances created in the fighting bodies of the time, and were on that account essentially domestic in their nature. As long as these warriors remained, therefore, mere professional fighters and tools in the hands of court nobles, the moral ties binding leaders and followers as well as the esprit de corps among these followers themselves had very slight chance of coming into contact with politics. In short, the majority of these warriors were not acquainted with public life at all, so that they were at a loss how to behave themselves as public men when, as the real masters of the country, they found themselves obliged to deal with political affairs. Public affairs are generally prone to induce men even of high probity to put undue importance upon the attainment of end, rather than to make them scrupulous about the means of arriving at that end; and if the moral sense of the people is not developed enough to guard against this injurious infection of private life from the meddling with public affairs, then their inborn and yet untried virtues may often fail to assert themselves against the influence of the depravity which can find its way more easily into public than into private life. Such was the case with the warriors of the Kamakura age. Through their ascendency the martial spirit of the nation, which had languished somewhat under the rule of the Fujiwara nobles, was once more revived, but their descendants at the end of that Shogunate could not be so brave and simple-hearted as their forefathers were. The extinction of the Minamoto family, too, relieved these warriors of their duty as hereditary liegemen of the Shogun, for henceforth both the Shogun, who was now of a different family from that of the Minamoto, and the Hôjô, the real master of the Shogunate, were to them superiors only in official relations. This disappearance of the object on which the fidelity of the warriors used to concentrate, made fidelity itself an empty virtue. At least among the circle of warriors in the age in which fidelity was everything and all other virtues were but ancillary to it, this loss must have been a great drawback to the improvement of the morality of the nation. The demoralisation of the influential class had thus set in since the latter part of the Kamakura age. No wonder that during the civil war which ensued many of the prominent warriors changed sides very frequently, almost without any hesitation, obeying only the dictates and suggestions of their private interests. That this civil war, which ended without any decisive battle being fought, could drag on for nearly a century, may be best understood by taking this recklessness of the participants into consideration. The inconsistency in their attitude or the want of fidelity towards those to whom they ought to be faithful was not restricted to their transactions in public affairs only, but extended also to the recesses of their family life. Parents could no more confide in their own children, nor husband in his wife, and masters had always to be on guard against betrayal by their servants. After the civil war there were many periods of intermittent peace in the first half of the Ashikaga régime, but that was not a result of the firm and strong government of the Shogun. They were rather lulls after storms, brought about by the weariness felt after a long anarchy.

The culmination of this deplorable condition of national demoralisation falls to the epoch of the next civil war, that is to say, of the Ohnin era. It is in this period that we witness a great development of the spy system and of the usage of taking hostages as a security against breach of faith. Even such means, however, proved often inefficient to guard against the unexpected treachery of supposed intimate friends, or a sudden attack from the rear by trusted neighbours. Desertion, though not recommended as a laudable action, was nevertheless not considered a detestable infamy, especially when it was carried out anterior to the pitching of the camps against the enemy, and deserters or betrayers were generally welcomed and loaded with munificent rewards by their new masters. Was it possible that such a ruthless state could continue for long without any counteraction? If any one had once betrayed his first master for the sake of selfish interests, could he claim after that to be a sort of person able to enjoy the implicit confidence of his second master? Examples of repeated breaches of faith abound in the history of the time. It was from the general unreliableness caused by such habitual acts of treachery, that the practice of giving quarter to deserters and facile surrenderers began gradually to diminish. And the result was that the danger of being killed after having surrendered or capitulated became a cause to induce those warriors, who would otherwise have easily given up their master's cause, to remain true to him to the end. This is one of the reasons why, after so long a domination of this miserable demoralisation, we begin frequently to come upon those beautiful episodes which showed the solidarity of clans admirably maintained and the utter loyalty of vassals to their lord, fighting to the death under his banner. The process, however, of ameliorating the morals of the nation should not begin from the relation of master and servant, but slowly start from within families. One could not refrain from feeling the imperative necessity of trustworthy mutual dependence among members connected by ties of blood, amidst the dreary environs in which no hearty confidence could be put in any one with safety. That the Hsiao-king, a Chinese moral book treating of the merits of filial piety, was widely read in educated circles of the time, and that several editions of the same book have been published since the middle of the Ashikaga period, show how great a stress was put on the encouragement of domestic duties. With the family, made a compact body, as the starting point, the reorganisation of social and national morals was thus set on foot. The growth of the tendency of liegemen to share the same fate as their lord is to be looked upon as a kind of extension of this family solidarity, as it came not from the consideration of the mere relation between a master and his servants, but rather from that of the hereditary transmittal of such a relation on both sides, just as it was at the beginning of the Kamakura Shogunate. There was no doubt therefore that the smaller the size of the territory of a lord, the easier the consummation of the process of its compact consolidation, which was necessarily cemented by a close mutual attachment between the lord of that territory and his dependents within and without his family. Not only that. If that territory was small and weak, and in constant danger of being destroyed or annexed by powerful neighbours, then the same process of consolidation was effected very swiftly. The territory in the province of Mikawa, which was owned by the family of the Tokugawa, was one of many such instances. This territory was so small in size, that it did not cover more than a half of the province, and moreover it was surrounded by the domains belonging to the two powerful families of Oda and Imagawa on the west and east, so that the small estate of the Tokugawa family was constantly harassed by them, and maintained as a protectorate now by the one and then by the other of the two. On that account nowhere else was there a stronger demand for a close affinity between a territorial lord and his men, than in this domain of the Tokugawa's. Consequently we see there not only an early progress in territorial consolidation, but along with it the resuscitation of an acute moral sense, especially in the direction necessary and compatible to the maintenance and development of a military state.

The reawakening of the high moral sense in the nation and the formation of compact self-constituted territories, virtually independent but amply liable to the influence of unifying forces, were the phenomena in the latter half of the Ashikaga period. That the country was slow in becoming nationalised and unified must be attributed to the insufficiency of that reawakening and the insolidity of those quasi-independent territories. The general culture of the time, which was humanistic in nature, was powerless for the moment to facilitate this movement which was national and moral at the same time. Humanistic as it was, it was able to pervade the provinces, and gave to Japan a uniform colour of culture. That was already, indeed, a stride forward on the way to national unification. Nay, it may be said that the impulse to that very unification was given by that very culture. Generally, however, the humanistic culture of any form has no particular state of things as its practical goal, and therefore cannot necessarily lead to an improvement in the morals of any particular nation, nor does it always stimulate the desire for the national unification of a certain country. On the contrary, it often counteracts these movements, and seemingly contributes toward accelerating the demoralisation and dismemberment of a nation, for individualism and selfishness get often the upper hand when such a culture becomes ascendant. The fruit which the Renaissance of the Quattrocento bore to Italians was just of this sort, and the direct influence which the humanistic culture of the later Ashikaga produced on Japan was not very much different from that. The culture, which had spread widely all over Japan, rather tended to loosen moral ties, and at least diminished the social stability. Persons, of a character morally most depraved, such as traitors, murderers, and so forth, were not infrequently men of high culture. Most of the rebellious servants of the Ashikaga Shogun were said to have been highly-accomplished literati. Some of them were addicted to the perusal of the sensational novels produced in the golden age of classical literature in Japan, such as the Ise- and the Genji-monogatari, and others were composers of short poems fashionable in those days, rejoicing at their own display of flighty wit, while not a few of them were liberal patronisers of the contemporary art, especially of painting.What a striking parallelism to those Popes and their nephews, in the time of the Renaissance, whose patronising of arts is as renowned as their atrocious vices!

If the culture inborn or borrowed from China was unable to save the country from a moral and political crisis, what was the fruit borne by the seeds of the new exotic culture, that is to say, of Christianity, sown just at this juncture? I will not dilate here on the relation between religion and morality in general. Suffice it to say that religious people are not always virtuous. Bigots are generally men of perverse character, and mostly vicious. This is a truism. It has been so with Buddhism and many other religions. Why should it be otherwise only in the case of Christianity? As regards the general culture of our country, the introduction of Christianity is a very important historical fact, the influence of which can by no means be overlooked. Though the secular culture which was introduced into Japan as the accessory of the Christian propaganda was of a very limited nature, and though the free acceptance of it was cut short soon after its circulation, yet this new element of civilisation brought over by the missionaries was much more than a drop in the ocean. However difficult it be to perceive the traces of the Western culture in the spirit of the age which was to follow, it cannot be denied that it left, after all, some indelible mark on our national history. That it had spread within a few decades all over the contemporary Japan, from the extreme south to the furthest north, should also not be left out of sight. Thenceforth the Fables of Æsop have not ceased to be told in the lamplit hours in the nurseries of Japan. We see Japan, after the first introduction of Christianity, painted in a somewhat different colour, though the difference of tincture may be said to be extremely slight. The knowledge at least that there were outside of China, many people in the far West, civilised enough to teach us in several branches of science and art, opened the eyes of the island nation to a wider field of vision, and began to alter the views which we had entertained about things Chinese. Previously, for anything to become authoritative, it had been enough if the Chinese origin of that thing could be assured. The overshadowing influence which China had wielded over Japan at the time of the Fujiwara régime was revived in different form in the middle Ashikaga period, the former being China of the T'ang, while the latter that of the Sung, Yuan, and Ming. In short, China had long continued as a too brilliant guiding star to the Japanese mind, Korea, by the way, having been regarded only as one of the intermediaries between the "flowery" Empire and our country. It would be, of course, a hasty judgment to conclude that the introduction of Christianity instantly let the scales fall from the eyes of the Japanese as regards China, and aroused thereby a fervent national enthusiasm of the people, but at least it was a strong impetus to the awakening of the national consciousness, and led indirectly to the political unification of the country. In this respect the introduction of the new religion had a salutary effect on our history.

As to the betterment of the individual morals of the contemporary Japanese, however, the influence of Christianity cannot be said to have been wholesome in all ways. It probably did as much mischief as good during its brief prosperity. Any cult, which may be styled a universal religion, contains a strong tincture of individualism in its doctrines, and any creed of which individualism is a main factor often easily tends to encourage, against its original purpose, the pursuit of selfish objects. In this respect even Christianity can offer no exception. What, then, could it preach, at the end of the Ashikaga régime, to the Japanese who were already individualistic enough without the new teaching of the western religion, besides the intensifying of that individualism to make it still more strong and prevalent? Moreover, the very moral doctrine of the Christianity introduced by Francis Xavier and his successors was nothing but the moral of the Jesuits of the sixteenth century, who maintained the unscrupulous teaching that the end justified the means, the moral principle which has been universally adjudged in Europe to be a very dangerous and obnoxious doctrine. Could it have been otherwise only in our country as an exceptional case? But if these missionaries had all been men of truly noble and upright character, they should have been able perhaps to raise the standard of our national morals by personal contact with the Japanese, notwithstanding the moral tenets of their religion. Unfortunately, however, most of them were of debased character, with the exception of St. Francis Xavier and a few others. We need not doubt the ardent desire of these missionaries to save the "souls" of the Japanese, and thus to recover in the East what they had lost in the West. But by whatever motive their pious undertakings may have been prompted, their religious enthusiasm and their dauntless courage do not confute the charge of dishonesty. That the majority of them were grossest liars is evident from their reports addressed to their superiors in Europe, in which the numbers of converts and martyrs in this country were misrepresented and ridiculously exaggerated, in order bombastically to manifest their undue merits, exaggeration which could not be attributed to a lack of precise knowledge about those matters. What could we expect from men of such knavish characters as regards the moral regeneration of the contemporary Japanese?

As these missionaries, however, were at least cunning, if not intelligent in a good sense, it would not have been impossible for them to achieve something in the domain of the moral education of the nation, if they could only have understood the real state of Japan of that time. On the contrary, their comprehension of our country and of our forefathers was far wide of the mark. Most of them had expected to find in Japan an El Dorado inhabited by primitive folks of a very low grade of intelligence, where they could play their parts gloriously as missionaries by preaching the Gospel in the wilderness. They had not dreamt that the culture possessed by the Japanese of that time, though for the most part borrowed from China, was superior to that of some still uncivilised parts of Europe, for the difference in the form of civilisation deceived them in their judgment of the value of Eastern culture. When they set their feet on Japanese soil, therefore, they soon discovered that they had been grossly mistaken, and then running to the opposite extreme they fell into the error of overestimation. Yet they did not stop at this. This first misconception on the part of the missionaries about Japan left in them an ineradicable prejudice. They became very niggards in seeing things Japanese in an impartial light, and constituted themselves consciously or unconsciously fault-finders of the people, and unfortunately the Japan of that time furnished them with much material to corroborate their low opinion. The result was that while on the one hand the Japanese were praised far above their real value, they were stigmatised equally far below their real merits. Regrettable as it was for Japan to have received such reprehensible people as pioneers of Western civilisation, it was also pitiable that Christianity, which had been fervently embraced by a large number of Japanese, was once rooted out chiefly on account of the incredible folly of these missionaries, who fermented trouble and embroiled themselves in numberless intrigues, which were quite useless and unnecessary as regards the cause of Christianity. It would, in good sooth, have been absurd to hope to have the morality of the people improved by the personal influence of such reckless adventurers.

Japan was ready to be transformed into a solid national state, and at the same time to emerge from a chaotic medieval condition to enter the modern status.The cultural milieu, however, though it might have been ripe for change, must have found it difficult to get transformed by itself, and wanted an infusion of some new element to create an opportunity for the change.A new element did come in, but it proved to be unable to effect any wholesome alteration, so that in order to create that opportunity the only possible and promising way was to resort first to the political unification of the country, and thus to start from the political and so to reach social and individual regeneration.And for that political unification the right man was not long wanting.We find him first in Nobunaga Oda, then in Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and lastly in Iyeyasu Tokugawa.

The first task was naturally to break down the authority of numerous traditions and conventions which had kept the nation in fetters for a long time. This task was an appropriate one for such a hero as Nobunaga, who was imperious and intrepid enough to brave every difficulty coming in his way. He was born in a family which had been of the following of the house of Shiba, one of the branches of the Ashikaga, and had continued as the hereditary administrator of Owari, a province which formed part of the domain of its suzerain lord. When the power of the house of Shiba decayed, the Oda family asserted its virtual independence in the very province in which it had been the vicegerent of its lord, and it was after this assertion of independence that our hero was born. Strictly speaking, therefore, his right as a territorial lord was founded on an act of usurpation, that is to say, Nobunaga's claim as the owner of the province had no footing in the old system of the Ashikaga, so that he was destined by his birth to become a creator of the new age, and not the upholder of the ancient régime. The province over which he held sway has been called one of the richest provinces in Japan, and was not far from Kyoto, which was, as often stated before, still by far the most influential among the political and cultural centres of the empire. He and his vassals, therefore, had more opportunities than most of the territorial lords and their vassals living in remote provinces, of getting sundry knowledge useful to make his territory greater and stronger. In the year 1560 he defeated and killed his powerful enemy on the east, Yoshimoto Imagawa, the lord of the two provinces, Tôtômi and Suruga. This was his first acquisition of new territory. Four years after, the province of Mino, lying to the north of Owari, came into his possession. In 1568 he marched his army into Kyoto to avenge the death of the Shogun Yoshiteru, and installed his brother, who was the last of the Ashikaga line, as the new Shogun. Then one territory after another was added to his dominion, so that the Shogun was at last eclipsed in power and influence by Oda, without ever having renounced his hereditary rights. Nobunaga's dominion reached from the Sea of Japan to the Pacific shore, when he met at the height of his career of conquest a premature death by the hand of a traitor.

It is not, however, on account of the magnitude of the territories which he annexed, that Nobunaga figures in the history of Japan, for the land conquered by dint of his arms did not cover more than one-third of the island of Honto. His real historical importance lies not there, but in that he destroyed the old Japan and made himself the harbinger of the new age, though the honour of being creator of modern Japan must be assigned rather to Hideyoshi, his successor. Since the beginning of our history, the Japanese have always been very reluctant, in the cultural respect, to give up what they have possessed from the first, while they have been very eager and keen to take in the new exotic elements which seemed agreeable or useful to them. In other words, the Japanese have been simultaneously conservative and progressive, and immoderately so in both ways. The result of such a conservation and assimilation operating at the same time was that the country has gradually become a depository of a huge mass of things Japanese and Chinese, no matter whether they were desirable or not. If any exotic matter or custom once found its way into this country, it was preserved with tender care and never-relaxing tenacity, as if it were some treasure found or made at home and would prove a credit to our country. In this way we could save from destruction and demolition a great many historical remains, material as well as spiritual, not only of Japanese but also of Chinese origins. There may still be found in our country many things, the histories of which show that they had once their beginnings in China indeed, but the traces of their origins have long been entirely lost there. Needless to say that the religious rites and other traditions of our forefathers in remotest antiquity have been carefully handed down to us. This assiduity for preserving on the part of the Japanese can best be realised by the existence to this day of very old wooden buildings, some of which, in their dates of erection, go back to more than twelve hundred years ago. Besides this conservative propensity of the nation, the history of our country has also been very favourable to the effort of preserving. We have had no chronic change of dynasties as in China, nor have we experienced any violent revolution, shaking the whole structure of the country, as the French people had. Though our history has not lacked in civil wars and political convulsions, their destructive force has been comparatively feeble, and one Imperial house has continued to reign here from the mythic Age of the Gods! With this permanent sovereign family as the point d'appui, it has been easier in Japan than in any other country to preserve things historic. Things thus preserved, however, have not all been worthy of such care. As we have been obliged to march constantly with hurried steps in our course of civilisation, little time has been left to us to pause and discriminate what was good for preservation from what was not. We have betaken ourselves occasionally to the process of rumination, but it did not render us much assistance. Not only rubbish has not been rejected, as it should have been, but the things which proved of good service at one time and subsequently wore out, have been hoarded over-numerously. Think of this immense quantity of the slag, the detritus, of the civilisations of various countries in various ages all dumped into the limited area of our small empire! No people, however vigorous and progressive they may have been, would have been able to go on briskly with such a heavy burden on their backs. The worst evils were to be recognised in the sphere of religious belief and in the transactions of daily official business. Red tape, home-made and that of China of all dynasties, taken in haphazard and fastened together, formed the guiding-lines of the so-called "administrative business" in the time of the court-nobles' régime. The prestige of these conventionalities was so powerful that even after the installation of the Shogunate, that is to say, after the establishment of the government which really meant to govern, the administration, promising to be far more effective than that of the Fujiwara's, had to be varnished with this conventionalism. Kiyomori, the first of the warriors to become the political head of the country, failed, because he was ignorant of this red-tapism. The Shogunate initiated by Yoritomo tried at first to keep itself aloof from this influence, but could succeed only for a short duration. The second Shogunate, the Ashikaga, had been overrun almost from its inception by the red tape of the courtiers' régime, as well as by the routine newly started in Kamakura. The humanistic culture, which glimmered during the latter part of this Shogunate, was by its nature able to find its place only where conventionalism did not reign, but it soon began to give way and be conventionalised also. Until this red-tapism was destroyed, there could have been no possibility of the modernisation of Japan.

Superstitions of all sorts, when fixed in their forms and launched on the stream of time to float down to posterity with authority undiminished by age, make the worst kind of convention. We had a great mass of conventions of this type in our country. Various superstitions, from the primitive forms of worship, such as fetichism, totemism, and so forth, to the highest forms of idolatry, survived notwithstanding the introduction of Buddhism. Buddhism, too, has produced various sects which were rather to be called coarse superstitions. Taoism was also introduced together with the general Chinese culture. Not to mention that Shintoism, which was by its original nature hardly to be called a religion, but only a system or body of rites inseparable from the history of our country, became blended with the Buddhist elements and was preached as a religion of a hybrid character. Thus a concourse of different superstitions of all ages had their common field of action in the spirit of the people, so that it has became exceedingly difficult to tell exactly to what kind of faith this or that Japanese belonged; in other words, one was divided against one's self. To put it in the best light, religiously the Japanese were divided into a large number of different religious groups. Religion is generally spoken of in Europe as one of the characteristics of a nation. If it is insufficient to serve as an associating link of a nation, at least the difference in religious belief can draw a line of marked distinction between different nations, and thus the embracing of the same religion becomes indirectly a strong uniting force in a nation. Such a co-existence of heterogeneous forms of religious beliefs painted the confessional map of Japan in too many variegated colours, a condition which was directly opposed to the process of national unification, of which our country had been placed in urgent need for a very long time. In short, it was hard for us to expect from the religious side anything helpful in our national affairs.

Moreover, the religious spirit of the nation reached its climax in this later Ashikaga period.Except in the age of the introduction of Buddhism and the beginning of the Kamakura era, enthusiasm for salvation has never, in all the course of Japanese history, been stronger than in this period.We witness now several religious corporations, the most remarkable of which were those formed by two violent and influential sects of Japanese Buddhism, Jôdo-shinshû or Ikkô-shû and Nichiren-shû or Hokke-shû.The followers of the latter, though said to be the most aggressive sectarians in our country, were not so numerous as the former, and were put under control by Nobunaga with no great difficulty.The former, however, was by far the mightier, constituting an exclusive society by itself, and its adherents spread especially over the provinces of central Japan, that is to say, wherever the arms of Nobunaga were triumphant.It presented therefore a great hindrance to the uniform administration of his domains.

Other Buddhist bodies, which had been not less formidable, not because their creed had numerous fervent adherents, but because they had an invisible historical prestige originating in very old times, were the monks of the temples and monasteries on Mount Hiyei, belonging to the Tendai sect, and of those clustered on Mount Kôya, of the Shingon sect. These two sects had long ceased active propaganda, but the temples had been revered by the Imperial house, and none had ever dared to put a check upon the arrogance of the priests and monks residing in them. As they had received rich donations in land from the court and from devotees, they had been able to live a luxurious life, and very few of them gave themselves up to religious works. Most of them behaved as if they were soldiers by profession, and were always ready to fight, not only in defence of the interests of the corporations to which they belonged, but also as auxiliaries of neighbouring territorial lords, when their aid was called for. Such had been the practice since the end of Fujiwara régime. The more their soldierly character predominated, the more their religious colouring decreased, and in the period of which I am speaking now, they were rather territorial powers than religious bodies. If we seek for their counterpart in the history of Europe, the republic founded by order of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia would fairly correspond to them, rather than ordinary bishoprics or archbishoprics. For the unification, therefore, they were also obstacles which could not be suffered to remain as they had been.

In order to achieve the national unification and to effect the modernisation of the country, it was necessary to dispense with all the red tape, the time-honoured superstitions and all other encumbrances lying in the way. It was not, however, an easy task to do away with all these things, for they had been held sacrosanct, so that to set them at defiance was but to brave the public opinion of the time. And none had been courageous enough to raise his hand against them, until Nobunaga decided to rid himself of all these feeble but tenacious shackles.

In the year 1571 Nobunaga attacked Mount Hiyei, for the turbulent shavelings of the mountain had sided with his enemies in the war of the preceding year, and burned down the Temple Yenryakuji to the ground. The emblem of the glory of Buddhism in Japan, which had stood for more than seven centuries, was thus turned to ashes. The next blow was struck at the recalcitrant priests of the temple of Negoro, belonging to the same sect as Kôya and situated near it. As for the Ikkô-sectarians with the Hongwanji as centre, the arms of Nobunaga were not so successful against them as against the other two temples, so that in the end he was compelled to conclude an armistice with them, but he was able in great measure to curtail their overbearing power. Of all these feats of arms, the burning of the temples on Mount Hiyei most dumbfounded Nobunaga's contemporaries, for the hallowed institution, held in the highest esteem rivalling even the prestige of the Imperial family, was thus prostrated in the dust, unable to rise up again to its former grandeur. It is much lamented by later historians that in the conflagration of the temple an immense number of invaluable documents, chronicles and other kinds of historical records was swept away forever, and they calumniated our hero on this account rather severely. It is true that if those materials had existed to this day, the history of our country would have been much more lucid and easy to comprehend than it is now, and if Nobunaga could have saved those papers first, and then burnt the temple, he would have acted far more wisely than he did, and have earned less censure from posterity. But history is not made for the sake of historians, and we need not much lament about losses which there was little possibility of avoiding. A nation ought to feel more grateful to a great man for giving her a promising future, than for preserving merely some souvenirs of the past. The bell announcing the dawn of modern Japan was rung by nobody but Nobunaga himself by this demolition of a decrepit institution.

It was not only those proud priests that defied Nobunaga and thereby suffered a heavy calamity, but the flourishing city of Sakai met the same fate. As the city had been accustomed to despise the military force of the condottieri, who abounded in the provinces neighbouring Kyoto and were easily to be bribed by money to change sides, it misunderstood the new rising power of Nobunaga, and dared to defy him. The insolence of the citizens of this wealthy town irritated Nobunaga and was punished by him severely. The defence works of the city were razed to the ground, and the city was placed under the control of a mayor appointed by him. The only city in Japan which promised to grow an autonomous political body thus succumbed to the new unifying force.

Nobunaga was born, however, not to be a mere insensate destroyer of ancient Japan. He seems also to have been gifted with the ability of reconstruction, an ability which was not meagre in him at all. That his special attention was directed to the improvement of the means of communication shows that he considered the work of organisation and consolidation to be as important as gaining a victory. The countenance which he gave to the Christian missionaries might have been the result of his repugnance at the degradation or intractability of the Buddhists in Japan. Could it not be imagined, however, that he was prone, in religious affairs as well as in other things, to seek the yet untried means thoroughly to renovate Japan? It is much to be regretted that he did not live long enough to see his aims attained. When he died, his destructive task had not reached its end, and his constructive work had barely begun. It was he, however, who indicated that Japan was a country which could be truly unified, and that what had come to be preserved and revered blindly should not all necessarily be so; and the grand task of building up the new Japan, initiated by him, was transferred to his successor, Hideyoshi.

It was in 1582 that Nobunaga died in Kyoto, and in the quarrel which ensued after his death among his Diadochi, Hideyoshi remained as the final successor.The year after, Ôsaka was chosen as the place of his residence.He was of very low origin, so that he had even less footing in the conventional old régime than his master Nobunaga, and therefore was more fitted to become the creator of the new Japan.He continued the course of conquest begun by Nobunaga, and annexed the whole of historic Japan within eight years from his accession to the political power.The most noteworthy item in his internal administration was the land survey which he ordered to be undertaken parallel to the progress of his arms. The great estates of Japan were one after another subjected to a uniform measurement, and thus was fashioned the standard of new taxation.This land-survey began in 1590 and continued till the death of Hideyoshi.The proportion of the tax levied to the area of the taxable land must still have varied in different localities, but the mode of taxation was now simplified thereby to a great extent, for the old systems, each of which was peculiar to an individual estate, were henceforth mostly abrogated.The manorial system of old Japan was entirely swept away.