HISTORY OF JAPAN LIBRARY

JAMES MURDOCH' HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM THE ORIGINS

TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE IN 1542 AD

CHAOTER VI

JAPAN FROM TENCHI TO KWAMMU.

(662 TO 782 A.D.)

THE Reformers of 645 may well have cherished the hope that a strong centralised government would enable Japan to resume the prosecution of her enterprises in the Korean peninsula and to carry them to a successful completion. At the very time of the great Japanese coup d'état, another Chinese attack on Koguryu was being foiled by the stubbornness of the warriors of Northern Korea. Shortly after the accession of the Tang dynasty in 618 all three peninsular States had professed themselves to be the vassals of the Middle Kingdom, which continued for some time to extend its favours, or its indifference, to all three in tolerably equal measure. However, as usual. Silla diplomacy proved too astute for her rivals; and from about 64o Silla influence was in the ascendant at the Court of Hsian. Pakche and Koguryu now began to co-operate in their attacks on Silla; and the Chinese expedition of 644-5 was dispatched partly to relieve Silla, and partly to effect the conquest and the annexation of Koguryu to China. On this occasion the Chinamen received another severe lesson; and although they were minded to make an end of Koguryu, they became very cautious in their dealings with her. During the next few years China kept pressing on the north-western frontier of her daring little neighbour, but with little tangible results beyond making a diversion in favour of Silla, at war with both Pakche and Koguryu. So at last in 659 the Pang Court adopted the counsel of Silla, and in conjunction with the latter resolved to make an end of Pakche, as a preliminary to attacking Koguryu from the south as well as from the north simultaneously.

A Chinese force of 130,000 men was transported to the Pakche coast in 659, and this, in co-operation with the Silla troops, effected the ruin of Pakche in the following year, 660. The King and four of his sons were captured and sent to China, while the country was divided into five prefectures, controlled by governors selected from among the conquered people, with a Chinese Viceroy to superintend them. However, a son of the King had been living as a sort of hostage in Japan for a good many years; and when the Pakche patriot Poksin organised a revolt to some good purpose, envoys were dispatched to the Japanese Court to ask that this Prince should be sent over as King and at the same time to implore Japanese aid. The appeal was by no means fruitless; an expedition was equipped, and Saimei, the Empress, then 65 years of age, proceeded to Kyushu to superintend its dispatch. However, her death at this juncture (661) delayed matters somewhat; but two months later the Korean Prince was dispatched with 5,000 Japanese auxiliaries to support his cause, while liberal supplies of provisions and munition of war were forwarded to the insurgents. As both China and Silla were now fully occupied with their joint attack upon Koguryu, the prospects of the Pakche patriots ought to have been more than fair. But just at this point an intrigue proved fatal to Poksin, who was ignominiously executed; and the death of Poksin rang the knell of the patriot cause. A Japanese expeditionary force of 27,000 men crossed the sea; but it met with premature disaster. A Chinese fleet of 170 sail encountered it at the mouth of the Pékchon river, and practically annihilated it. And this put an end to all official Japanese attempts upon Korea for 930 years.

A few years later (668) Koguryu fell before the combined Chinese and Silla attack; and the latter State now found itself undisputed mistress of the greater part of the peninsula. A united Korea becomes so strong that from time to time we find her regarded as such a menace by Japan, that the national gods are invoked whenever a Sillan invasion threatens.

One result of the fall of Pakche in 660, and of Koguryu eight years later on, was the influx of considerable bodies of Korean immigrants into Japan. In 665 as many as 400 Pakche plebeians were assigned land and houses in the district of Kanzaki in Omi, while in the following year a still more considerable colony of them, 2,000 strong, was settled in “the East country. Without distinction of priests or laymen they were all maintained at Government expense for three years.” Three years later still, 700 more were established in Omi. And these are only a few of the notices of immigrants we meet with at this time. From a decree of 681 it appears that these new subjects were exempted from all taxation for a space of ten years; in 681 they were freed from the obligation of rendering forced labour for ten years more. As for the Korean nobles, they were put on the same footing as the .Japan­ese aristocrats; in 671 we hear of official rank being conferred on as many as 70 of them at once. In short, the treatment meted out to the refugees was something more than merely hospitable; it was exceedingly generous.

In the feudal ages and down to the Meiji era we meet with frequent mention of the Eta, who formed a very considerable fraction of the pariah class in Japan. The origin of these people is mysterious and has been the subject not only of much curiosity, but of a good deal of lively debate. Some will have it that they were of Korean extraction. In the old records we have met with nothing that lends any support to this supposition. Koreans of gentle birth were invariably treated as gentlefolk in Japan; while their plebeian countrymen, so far from being discriminated against, were accorded immunities and privileges which must have made their condition a subject of envy to the native tillers of the soil and the native craftsman and trader. Their position in the country of their adoption was emphatically an honourable one,—honourable not only to themselves, but to Japan and the Japanese.

Tenchi Tenno, under whom this great influx of refugees took place, was perhaps the ablest man, and was certainly one of the most enlightened sovereigns that ever sat upon the throne of Japan. It was only, then, to be expected that his welcome to these intelligent Koreans should have been as warm as that extended by the Great Elector of Brandenburg to the Huguenots in 1685. Tenchi Tenno, as the Prince Naka no Oye, had begun his public career with the assassination of Soga no Iruka (645). Subsequent events, however, bore eloquent testimony in support of the plea that the motive that prompted his crime was neither a personal nor an interested one. The Prince really aimed at nothing but the promotion of the public good, and the creation of a strong and just central power that could make itself feared and respected, and perhaps ultimately regarded with sincere affection by a unified and united people. He might very well have assumed the Imperial dignity in 645; but he refused to do so. In 654 it was his undoubted right to do so; but he once more stood aside, and reinstated his mother on the throne, allowing her to enjoy all the glory and all the splendour of the position, while he contented himself with all the hard and thankless work. After her death in 661, he went on quietly as Prince Imperial for several years, and it was only in 668 that he consented to assume the style of an Emperor of Japan. And even then he continued to live in a house built of trees with the bark on. His premature death in 671, seemingly hastened by the fatigues of unremitting toil, was emphatically an irreparable national loss.

On this occasion there was yet another of those dire and deadly succession disputes. In addition to his Empress, Tenchi had had four consorts, by whom he had eight children, and besides these he had had six others by four of the palace women. Prince Ohotomo, the son of one of these women, seems to have been the ablest of the family, for shortly before his father’s death he was appointed Chancellor of the Empire, although then only twenty-two or twenty-three years of age. But it was Tenchi's younger brother, afterwards Temmu Tenno, who had been nominated Prince Imperial. The latter, forty-five years old at the death of Tenchi in 671, had been careful to strengthen his position by marriage. Of his nine wives, four were daughters of Tenchi, and hence also nieces of his own, two were daughters of Kamatari, and yet another a Soga lady. Still, in spite of all this, his position was by no means a sure one; and when summoned to Tenchi’s death-bed, he refused to accept the throne, and begged for permission to renounce the world and practise religion. Meanwhile the Ministers of the Right and of the Left and three other great nobles confederated with Prince Ohotomo to support his cause, no matter what might betide; and it was perhaps a knowledge of this that induced the messenger sent to summon Temmu to his brother’s sick-bed to counsel him to “ think before he spoke.” Be that as it might, the future Temmu Tenno deemed it expedient to renounce the succession and the world,—for the time being at all events. On that same day he “collected his private weapons and deposited them every one in the Department” and ‘‘put on the priestly garb.” Two days later he set out from the Shiga capital for Yoshino, escorted by the Great Ministers. When they bade him good-bye at Uji some one said: “Give a tiger wings and let him go.”

A month later Tenchi Tenno died, and his son, Prince Ohotomo, betaine Emperor of Japan (Kobun Tenno) at the capital of Otsu in Omi. The “winged tiger” his uncle, however, was merely biding his time; and was evidently in active communication with his partisans in all parts of the Empire. Six months later, on the plea that the Omi Court had designs upon his life, he left Yoshino for Owari and raised the standard of revolt. Then followed the most desperate and extensive civil war that Japan had yet seen. For some time it raged with varied but on the whole equal fortunes; but at last the rebel cause proved triumphant and Kobun Tenno lost his life, while some of his surviving supporters were executed and the others banished. If Prince Ito’s theory is correct, Prince Ohotomo, the son of Tenchi Tenno, had a much better title to the throne than Temmu, who was merely a younger brother of Tenchi’s. It must not be overlooked that it was this Temmu who organised the historical commission of 681, and that it was under a daughter of his that the Nihongi was completed in 720. Hence the Nihongi’s account of the events of this time must be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion.

“ Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason ?

For If it prospers, none dare call it treason.”

The Nihongi, compiled as it was by Temmu’s orders, and completed under what was virtually a Temmu dynasty, naturally enough endeavours to exalt Temmu and the merits of his administration. Yet a careful perusal of the annals of Temmu and a comparison of them with those of his elder brother only serve to intensify our conviction of the extreme seriousness of the loss sustained by the nation in the death of Tenchi Tenno. Between 672 and 686 the Imperial mind was evidently much occupied with the grave question of millinery; even the dress of commoners, the method in which ladies should wear their hair, and their seat on horseback became subjects of legislation. In 681 a sumptuary law was promulgated, which ran to no fewer than 92 articles, and this was only one of many such edicts issued during the reign. Several times the Ministers were summoned to Court and “made to gamble”; and on another occasion they were called upon to solve conundrums! In more important matters there was a great deal of what the Japanese call Chorci Bo-kai (revising in the evening the edict issued in the morning) legislation. For instance, in 683 the Emperor made a decree, saying:

“Henceforth copper coins must be used and not silver coins.” On the very following day it was decreed that the use of the silver coins should not be discontinued! Temmu’s inconsistent attitude towards the endowments of Buddhist temples has already been referred to.

On the death of this Emperor in 686 there was yet another succession difficulty. He had made six of his sons by different mothers vow eternal concord. But the succession went to none of these, and a month after Temmu’s death one of them, Prince Ohotsu, was “executed” because he aspired to the vacant throne. This was presently occupied by one of Temmu’s widows, who is known in history as the Empress Jito. On Prince Ito’s theory she had no right to the position whatsoever. She abdicated in 697,—the second authentic instance of the abdication of a Japanese sovereign,—and was succeeded by Mommu Tenno (697-707), her grandson, a boy of fourteen,—the earliest case of a minor on the throne. On his demise in 707, his mother, a sister of Jito Tenno, and at the same time her daughter-in-law, reigned for eight years (Gemmyo 708 -715), and then abdicated in favour of her daughter (Gensho Tenno, 715-723), who in her turn surrendered the throne to her nephew, Shomu Tenno. The latter, after a reign of 24 years, resigned the Imperial dignity to his unmarried daughter, who, like Tenchi Tenno’s mother, occupied the throne on two occa­sions. From the year 749 to 758 she appears as the Empress Koken; from 765 to her death in 769 she is known as the Empress Shotoku. The interval between 758 and 765 was occupied by the reign of the Emperor Junnin, a grandson of Temmu, and a son of Prince Toneri. At present, thanks to the Imperial House Law, the succession question decides itself automatically, as has been said. Twelve centuries ago this was by no means the case. In 756 the ex-Emperor Shomu had died, leaving instructions that Michi-no-Oho, a grandson of Temmu Tenno, should be made Prince Imperial. His injunctions were indeed carried out; but in less than a year afterwards, the reigning Empress Koken stripped him of the title; and when it was urged that the degraded Prince was her father’s nominee she merely replied that she was dissatisfied with him and wished to have nothing more to do with him. The Prince now known as the Emperor Junnin was thereupon installed as Heir to the Throne; but when the Empress abdicated in his favour in 758, she kept control of all the most important affairs of State, including the right of punishing culprits and of accord­ing amnesty. And after a reign of six years Junnin gave such offence to the exEmpress that she summarily deposed him, exiled him to the island of Awaji, where he was strangled, and reascended the throne herself as the Empress Shotoku (765- 769). Her death in 769 brought what may be called the Temmu dynasty to a close. In the course of it there had been eight sovereigns, four of whom had been females, four abdications, one re-ascension of the throne, and one minor sovereign. To elucidate matters more minutely we venture to trespass upon the patience of the reader by the insertion of yet another very dry genealogical chart.

On the death of the Empress Shotoku (769) “the Minister of the Left, Fujiwara no Nagate, and the Minister of the Right, Kibi-no-Mabi, deliberated as to which of the Princes of the Blood should succeed her; but they found none of them capable of the position. Thereupon Fujiwara no Momoka and Fujiwara no Yoshitsugu proposed Prince Shirakabe, and he was proclaimed Emperor at the age of 02.” He was the son of Prince Sliiki, and the grandson of Tenchi Tenno. “In the troubles of 672 Prince Ohotomo (Kobun Tenno) having been slain, and Temmu having been proclaimed Emperor, the relatives of Tenchi Tenno had been held in small esteem; with the elevation of Konin to the throne they regained their former splendour.”

It was at this period in her history that Japan had her first great city and her first permanent capital. In 710 Nara was laid out as a replica of the Chinese capital of Hsian, and with its seven great Buddhist fanes, its Shinto shrines, its palace and other public buildings, soon assumed an appearance of magnificence and splendour. With an interval of two years under Shomu Tenno it continued to be the seat of the Court tor three-quarters of a century,—from 710 to 784; and thus in the history of Japan, and especially in the history of Japanese literature, the eighth century is spoken of as the Nara epoch. It was at the beginning of this epoch that the Kojiki was committed to writing (712), and that the Nihongi was compiled and published (720), while this century has also given us the oldest Japanese anthology. It has also given us some of our most valuable material for the history of old Japan in the Code of Taiho, which, however, having being issued in 702, ante-dates the Nara period by eight years. It was the work of a Fujiwara statesman who was the grandfather of the young sovereign (Mommu) he professedly served.

This Code of Taiho was, however, not the earliest body of Japanese law, for we are told that that great worker Tenchi Tenno had compiled a code of law in twenty-two books, which was revised and issued to all the provincial governors in the time of the Empress Jito (686-697). But the Code of Taiho is the earliest body of Japanese law that has come down to us, although unfortunately it has not come down to us either in a complete or in its strictly original form. How far it incorporated Tenchi’s code we are not in a position to say; but what can be asserted with some confidence is that it was largely based upon the famous Chinese Code of the Yung-Hwui period (650-655). The old Japanese Penal Code of 702 has been lost, and exists today only in scattered quotations in other old documents. The Civil Code has come down to us almost in its entirety, but not in the original edition of 702. What we possess is the edition of 833, which contains the text of 702 interwoven with the official commentaries compiled in 718 and in 833. To disentangle the text from the commentary is now and then a somewhat difficult task, but not an insuperably hopeless one. The Code, even as we possess it, covering as it does almost every branch of public and private law, from the organisation of the central and local government down to such matters as the regulation of markets and funerals and the practice of medicine, is an invaluable treasure to any painstaking historian endowed with a modicum of common-sense, and so, ever mindful of the fact that there is often a wide gap between the enactment and the enforcement of laws.

A word about the primary authorities for the history of the period subsequent to 697 a.d. may not be out of place. To begin with we have five official histories:

Two years before Nara was laid out as a replica of the Chinese capital of Hsian, the Japanese authorities reproduced another important adjunct of Chinese civilisation. In 708 the discovery of copper in the Chichibu range in Musashi made it possible for them to establish a mint and to strike coins of their own. This mint, which was in the province of Omi, began by striking both silver and copper pieces; but although there was another issue of silver coins as well as a first issue of gold ones in 760, copper became the current coinage of the realm almost exclusively. At first the ratio between silver and copper was one to four; later on, it was fixed at one to twenty-five, and finally at one to ten. In 712 an edict fixed the price of rice at six sho for one cash or mon. As a koku of rice, which now costs about 15 yen or 30s., contains 100 sho it could then have been purchased for 16 or 17 of the earliest copper coins, which must thus have had a purchasing value of about one thousand times what they would have at the present day. In this same year, 712, official salaries were partly fixed in terms of the new money; a holder of the eighth rank was to receive one hiki of cloth and 20 mon per annum. At the same time various grades of official rank were offered to such as had amassed amounts of cash from 5,000 mon upwards, while in the following year it was enacted that no official could hope to rise beyond the grade of rank he then held unless he was the possessor of 6,000 mon. In contradistinction to this legislation we find the Emperor Kwammu enacting severe penalties against hoarders of the coin of the realm (798)! Between 760 and 958 eleven new coinages were issued by the mints of Omi, Harima, Nagato, and Dazaifu. With the exception of that of 765, each new issue was valued at one to ten of the previous denominations, so that the Government, or those interested in the matter, must have made a huge profit out of the transaction, apart from the fact that the coins of the last eight issues were only about half the size of those of the earlier ones.

The establishment of a mint served to add not inconsiderably to the penal legislation of Japan. Within a year of its erection counterfeiters were busily at work. In 709 those who counterfeited silver coin were to be enslaved; and two years later all counterfeiters were to be beheaded, and those accessory to the crime made Government slaves. In the general amnesties of 784, 804, 827, 853, and 804 forgers were specially excepted.

With the year 958 the operations of the Government mint ceased for more than six centuries, no coins being struck by or for the Kyoto authorities until Hideyoshi’s time in 1587. The fact seems to have been that by the middle of the tenth century the native supplies of the red metal had become exhausted. This may well sound strange when we are told that it was only on very rare occasions that the needs of the mint absorbed as much as 20 tons of copper per annum, and that for considerable periods it stood totally inactive. It was the Buddhist Church that made it impossible for Japan to maintain her metallic currency. Temple furnishings and utensils, bells, and idols came to absorb more and more of the necessary material for it. The great bell of the To-dai-ji at Nara, east in 732, weighs 49 tons; and although this still continues to be the monster bell of Japan, and one of the monster bells of the world, it was only the chief of many similar contemporary efforts. Altogether it is probable that in old Japan very much more copper was consumed in the casting of bells than in the minting of coin. And it must be remembered that bells were much less voracious than idols. The To-dai-ji bell of 49 tons contained less than one-eleventh the amount of copper that went to the fashioning of the To-dai-ji Daibutsu, which weighed something between 550 and 560 tons. Daibutsu and bell to­gether might thus very well have sufficed to have kept the mint going for a full half-century more; and Daibutsu and bell together, although dwarfing all individual rivals by the massiveness of their proportions, represented but a mere fraction of the metallic wealth of the Buddhist Church.

Just as the Vatican Laocoon group provided Lessing with a starting-point for one of the most suggestive and luminous criticisms of the principles and limitations of the various fine arts ever written, it has often struck us that an ingenious writer might well contrive to mass a fairly complete account of eighth century Japan around the story of this Nara Dai butsu. For in one way or another it appears to come info contact with almost every phase of the contemporary national activity.

It will be remembered that the nascent fortunes of Buddhism in Japan depended in no small measure upon the efficacy or non-efficacy of the continental cult as a prophylactic against pestilence. Now, five generations afterwards, the first great epidemic of smallpox in Japan afforded it another rare opportunity to add to its prestige, its power, the revenues of its priesthood, and the consideration in which its religieux were held. This dire scourge had been introduced into Kyfishu by a fisherman who had returned from the Korean kingdom of Silla. Thence it gradually spread eastwards, and in 735 it began to devastate the aristocratic circles in the capital of Nara. Among the illustrious victims it claimed were the four Fujiwara brothers, all sons of Fujiwara no Fubito (the compiler of the Code of Tai ho, and the grandfather and father-in­law of the reigning Emperor), from whom the various houses of Fujiwara stock descend. Every effort was made to check the ravages of the epidemic, and among other devices the propitiation of the gods was not neglected. Offerings were made at most of the temples by the Emperor, and the Buddhist High-priest was called upon to offer prayers in behalf of the sovereign and his people. It was at this conjuncture that Shomu Tenno bethought himself of constructing a colossal Buddha. However, the native gods had to be reckoned with, and so the famous Gyogi Rosatsu was sent to the Sun-goddess in Ise to present her with a shari (xarira), or relic of Buddha, and to ascertain how she would regard the Imperial project. After Gyogi had passed a week at the foot of a tree close to her gate, her chapel doors flew open, and a loud voice pronounced an oracular sentence which was interpreted in a favourable sense. On the night after Gyogi’s return the Emperor dreamt that the Sun-goddess appeared to him in her own form, and said, “The Sun is Biroshana (Vairdkana),” and at the same time announced her approval of his plan of erecting a Buddhist temple.

This Gyogi, it may be remarked, spent the best part of a long life of 80 years (670--749) in promoting new industrial enterprises in Japan. He is generally credited, although quite erroneously, with the introduction of the potter’s wheel into the country. What is tolerably certain is that he followed the tradition of Hosho (the founder of the Hosso sect of Buddhists, of which he was the second patriarch) in building bridges, in scaling mountains, and in opening up the hitherto untrodden wilds of Japan to settlement and civilisation. His also was the idea of reconciling' Buddhism and the aboriginal Shinto cult, and of making them lie down together like the lion and the lamb. The operation was to be performed with the strictest regard to the economy of space; and as a matter of fact that Shinto lamb pretty soon found ample accommodation in the interior of the Buddhist lion, for Gyogi taught that the aboriginal divinities were merely so many Avatars or temporary manifestations of Buddha; and, as the result of this, numerous Shinto shrines presently assumed the appearance of Buddhist fanes, served by a staff of shaven- pa ted yellow-robed ecclesiastics, who got fat upon their revenues. This was the beginning of that Ryobu Shinto or Shin-Butsu-Konko, which continued to flourish down to the year of grace 1868.

But to return to the Nara Daibutsu. The Emperor’s project was interrupted by a serious revolt in Kyushu in 740; but, in 743, he issued an edict ordering the people to contribute funds for the undertaking. Gyogi on his part scoured the greater part of the Empire collecting contributions. In 744 the Emperor in person directed the construction of the model; but this image, begun at Shigaraki in Omi, was never completed. In 747, after the Emperor had gone back to Nara, he began the casting of another image, when he carried earth with his own Imperial hands to help to form the platform. Seven unsuccessful attempts to cast the image were made; and then the services of Kimimaro, the grandson of a Korean immigrant, as superintendent, were enlisted, and the huge idol was at last successfully cast (749). The image, which represents Lochana Buddha in a sitting posture, is fifty-three feet in height; and we are informed that the metals used in its construction were 500 Japanese pounds of gold, 10,827 pounds of tin, 1,954 pounds of mercury, and 986,180 pounds of copper, in addition to lead. It is safe io assume that with the possible exception of the Byzantine Empire, no country in contemporary Europe could have been capable of such a gigantic effort. The question naturally arises, “How was it done ? ”

Ordinary sized images were cast in a single shell. But the Daibutsu was not fashioned in this manner. The artists cast it in a number of segments,—plates ten inches by twelve, and of a thickness of six inches. They built up the walls of the mould as the lower part of the casting cooled at the rate of a foot at a time, there having thus been forty-one independent layers, for the head and the neck, some twelve feet in height, were cast in a single shell. It is not surprising, then, to learn that it was only at the eighth attempt that a full measure of success was achieved.

The 500 Japanese pounds of gold, as well as the mercury, were used for gilding purposes solely. The Emperor was greatly concerned as to how this amount of the precious metal could be procured, when a fortunate discovery set his mind at ease. At the beginning of 749 gold was sent to the capital by the Governor of Mutsu, in whose jurisdiction a mine had been found, and by the third month, as much as 900 ounces had been employed in gilding the great idol. Messengers were sent to all the temples to inform the gods of the lucky find, and the Minister of the Left, Tachibana no Moroye, went in person, and taking his stand before the Buddha specially communicated to him the good news.

In the following month Nara witnessed a strange and startling sight. Attended by the Empress, by his only daughter, and by all the grandees of his Court, Shomu Tenno proceeded to the To-dai-ji,—and there before the Great Buddha, and facing him from the south,—that is, in the position of a subject at an Imperial audience,—the Emperor professed himself to be the humble servant of the Three Precious Things, —Buddha, the Law, and the Priesthood! After such an object-lesson as this, it is but small winder that Shomu’s subjects should come to consider a breach of the Statute of Mortmain to be, not a crime, but a highly meritorious and exceedingly pious and profitable act. We have inventories of the belongings of two of the chief metropolitan temples in 747; and it appears that besides immense treasures of various kinds, one of them held no fewer than 46 manors and 5,000 acres of the most fertile land in the Empire, while the other’s landed possessions were almost equally extensive. Inasmuch as the monasteries and all their belongings were exempt from the attentions of the revenue officers, and from all national or local burdens, their domains, if only moderately well managed, must have brought them an immense annual return. Furthermore these estates were rapidly expanding. Peasant cultivators overborne with taxation were always eager to hand over their plots to a temple, and to hold them as its tenants. They paid a rent, it is true; but they no longer paid taxes, and the rent was to the taxes as the little finger to the thigh-bone.

The small-pox epidemic of 735-737 had been a rare godsend for the priests. Tn the latter year, in consequence of this visitation, the Emperor decreed that each of the provinces should erect a large monastery to be called Kokubunji, while shortly afterwards he ordered the construction of a seven-storied pagoda by each local government. Apart from the lucky chance of the outbreak of an epidemic, the ascendency of the Buddhist priesthood was greatly favoured by the crude state of contemporary medical knowledge,—or, to put it more accurately perhaps, by the dense ignorance of the time. In the eighth century disease was attributed to two great causes,—namely, to evil spirits and to food and drink. Smallpox and intermittent fever and all nervous diseases were the work of the evil spirits of the dead or of demons; and in the treatment of these and of similar maladies exorcism was the supreme remedy. Hence the priest-doctor had abundant scope for the exercise of his craft—in the two fold sense of the word. Under the Empress Koken, the daughter and successor of that very pietistic Emperor Shomu, there were no fewer than one hundred and sixteen of these clerical medicos attached to the Court, and every one of them with plenty to do in the matter of evicting devils and unclean spirits, and of propitiating avenging ghosts unmannerly enough to trouble the repose of the blue-blooded aristocracy of Yamato. To the reader of the twentieth century all this may savour of comedy; but in old Japan it was really a very serious matter indeed, and the would-be historian who fails to appreciate this phase of the intellectual life of the time will assuredly misinterpret many of the most significant entries in the old chronicles of Japan. It is amusing to find the very highest ecclesiastics now and then figuring as the impotent victims of those evil spirits and avenging manes over which they claimed to exercise such a plenary power. What is to be made of the following notice, for example?

“In 746 the priest Gembo died in Kyushu. He had formerly been in China, whence he brought to Japan more than 5,000 Buddhist books and many holy images. The Emperor had granted him a purple kesa, and had bestowed on him many tokens of respect. Gembo treated everybody with disdain; he had forbidden the laity to imitate the manners and the usages of the monks. He was hated by everybody; and it is said that the spirit of Hirotsugu had killed him as an act of revenge.”

This Gembo was the Northern Patriarch of the Hosso sect. After a sojourn of nineteen years in China he returned in 736. and soon contrived to make himself a power in the Imperial Court. As it was improper for the sovereign and his consorts to repair to temples frequented by the people, a chapel (Nai-dojo) was erected within the precincts of the Palace, and priests were summoned to perform their rites there. Gembo was frequently employed in this office, and took scandalous advantage of his position to debauch the ladies of the Court. Overtures were made by him to the beautiful wife of the young and accomplished Fujiwara Hirotsugu, then acting as Viceroy of Dazaifu. Hirotsugu had petitioned for Gembo’s removal before this; and on being informed by his wife of what had happened he mobilised the forces of the Viceroyalty to lend weight to his reiterated demands. An army of some 21,000 men was dispatched to deal with Hirotsugu, and he fell in making head against it. His spirit proved to be a very rough one indeed, working all sorts of mischief; and so a temple was erected to him in Hizen, and due provision made for appeasing his vindictive ghost, which, as may be inferred from the above citation, was popularly believed to have very effectually rid the lieges of Gembo and his sacerdotal arrogance.

Gembo, however, was by no means the most formidable priestly rival that crossed the path of the Fujiwara, at this time laboriously and strenuously engaged, not so much in consolidating as in laying a basis for their power. At this date the great clan, although indeed powerful, had by no means reached that position of omnipotence with which it is erroneously credited in the eighth century, and to which it actually attained in the middle of the ninth. The great Kamatari’s son, Fujiwara Fubito (659-720), had been the father- in-law of one sovereign and the grandfather and father-in-law of yet another, and had certainly been influential in the councils of the Empire. But it was not till 708 that he became Minister of the Left, and his elevation to the position of Dajodaijin or Chancellor was a posthumous one. This great office since its creation in 671 had always been occupied by Princes of the Blood; since Jito’s time (686-697) down to 745 by the sons and a grandson of the Emperor Temmu. The death of Fubito’s four sons Muchimaro, Fusasaki, Umakai, and Maro, all then occupying high office, in 737 proved a serious check to the fortunes of the family.

Prince Suzuka, a grandson of Temmu Tenno, then became Chancellor and held the office for eight years. In 738 the famous Tachibana no Moroye was appointed Minister of the Right, and after being promoted Minister of the Left in 743 he wielded all but supreme power down to 756, the year before his death. He was no deadly rival of the Fujiwara, however; in fact, it was to a very intimate and very peculiar blood and marriage relationship with the great rising house that he owed the opportunity for advancement which his sterling capacity as a statesman and administrator enabled him to turn to such good account. Yet withal he owes his niche in the Japanese temple of fame more to his literary than to his political abilities, for it is as the compiler of the oldest anthology, the Manyoshu—that his name is still a familiar household word in the Empire. Moroye’s son was a man of promising parts, but his implication in one of those wearisome and ever-recurring succession plots occasioned his ruin in the very year of the death of his father, an event which removed a serious rival from the stage where several of the sons of the four Fujiwara who had died in 737 were now aspiring to the role of protagonist.

However, powerful as the Fujiwara were now becoming, they proved no match for an astute and aspiring Buddhist priest during the next decade. When Shomu Tenno’s strong-minded daughter professedly abdicated in 758, her successor the Emperor Junnin lavished favours upon Fujiwara Oshikatsu, to whom he mainly owed his position. But the real power in the land was not the young Emperor, but the ex­Empress Koken, and Koken’s spiritual adviser and right-hand man was the handsome monk Dokyo, whom certain English writers have somewhat amusingly dubbed the Wolsey of Japan!” In 762 Fujiwara Oshikatsu had been promoted to The first grade of the first class of rank. When it is remembered that his was one of the only three instances in the whole course of Japanese history of a subject attaining this supremely exalted position in his lifetime, the importance of this very bald entry in the annals will perhaps be recognised.

This very unusual promotion gave great umbrage to Oshikatsu’s brother and cousins and other relatives then all eagerly engaged in the scramble for power and place, and what was even more serious, it excited the bitter jealousy of the good-looking, albeit shaven-pated, favourite of the ex­Empress, who presently showed that lie was even more adroit at political intrigue than his predecessor, Gembo, had been. Oshikatsu, learning of Dokyo’s manoeuvres, secretly possessed himself of the Imperial seal, and issued a commission to raise troops with a view of making a summary end of the meddlesome monk. This step at once roused the ex-Empress to vigorous action; and officers, among them several Fujiwara, were charged with the punishment of Oshikatsu. In the civil war that followed there was a good deal of fierce fighting round the south-east corner of Lake Biwa before the Fujiwara chief was overpowered and executed with thirty or forty of his chief supporters. On the plea that the Emperor (Junnin) had entered into designs with Oshikatsu against her life, the ex-Empress now deposed the sovereign (765) and exiled him to Awaji (where he was shortly afterwards strangled), and emerging from her retirement ascended the throne for a second time (Shotoku, 765-769).

Dokyo was now the most powerful subject in the Empire,—head of the Church, spiritual director and chief physician to the Empress, with a controlling voice in the decision of all high questions of State, and feared and courted by every official minded to make his way in the world. The relations between the monk and the sovereign were perhaps even more equivocal than those which subsisted between Mazarin and Anne of Austria; in fact gossip did not refrain from asserting that Shotoku Tenno was Dokyo’s Imperial mistress in more senses of the term than one. At last in 769 he was taken into the Palace and magnificently lodged there, made Chancellor of the Empire with the style of Dajo-daijin Zenji, and the title of Ho-o, reserved for Emperors. Incredible as it may sound, the monk was aiming at nothing less than supplanting the line of the Sun-Goddess on the Imperial throne of Japan. It was a century when much could be effected by an adroit use of dreams and omens and portents,—an age when the very air men breathed was heavy with an enervating superstition in which the brood of the brazen-fronted charlatan found the rarest and richest of opportunities. Dokyo began by prompting an obsequious hanger-on of his own to assure him that Hachi-man, the God of Usa in Buzen, had appeared to him in a dream, and announced to him that the land would enjoy everlasting repose if Dokyo became Emperor. Twenty years before this, in 749, the Empress had also had a nocturnal visit from Hachiman Daijin, who instructed her to erect a temple to him in the district of Hirakori in Yamato. This fact no doubt bulked largely among the considerations leading Dokyo to select the oracle of Hachiman as his instrument. The monk at once repeated the story of his confederate, or rather tool, to the Empress, who, however, proved less complaisant than he had expected. She told him that although she held him in the highest estimation, she had no power to make him Emperor, but that she would consult the god, and act according to his decision. She thereupon summoned Wake no Kiyomaro, and after telling him that Hachiman had appeared to her in a dream and ordered her to send him to Usa to consult the divinity about the choice of an Emperor, dispatched him on the mission. Before he set out, Dokyo saw him privately, told him the Empress was deliberating about his (Dokyo’s) elevation to the throne, and that he (Kiyomaro) should be careful in his report. If Dokyo became Emperor, Kiyomaro should be entrusted with the administration of the Empire; if he did not bring a proper report,—here there was an aposiopesis, and the monk glared fiercely and laid his hand on his sword­hilt. Kiyomaro saw through the intrigue, and like the fea­less and daring man he was, he brought back the response: “In our Empire, since the reign of the celestial spirits, and under their descendants, no one not of their stock has ever been honoured with the Imperial dignity. Thus it was useless for you to come here. Retrace your steps; you have nothing to fear from Dokyo.” Thus baulked in his overweening projects the priest was furious. He had Kiyomaro mutilated and condemned to exile in the remote and inhospitable province of Osumi, meaning to have him killed on the way to his place of banishment, as was not unusual at the time. However, Dokyo’s kind intentions proved abortive, and Kiyomaro found a strong friend in Fujiwara Momokawa, “on whom the country of Higo depended.” In the following year the Empress died; and Dokyo’s fall was then assured. At first he took up his abode beside the Empress’s tomb; but at the beginning of the new regime he was banished to Shimo-tsuke, where he became the priest of “the god who presides over remedies” (Abbot of Yakushiji).

This startling episode served to impress the statesmen of Japan with a due sense of the advisability of circumscribing the power and pretensions of the ecclesiastics. All the members of the Temmu dynasty had been far too much under the influence of their ghostly advisers. On the death of the Em­press Shotoku in 770 without children, there were several male descendants of Temmu with good claims to the throne; but they were all set aside, and a grandson of the great Tenchi was invested with the Imperial dignity. This Prince, known as Konin Tenno (770--782) was a mild and easy-going old gentleman of the age of sixty-two. He mainly owed his elevation to that Fujiwara Momokawa who had done honour to himself by espousing the cause of the disgraced patriot, Wake no Kiyomaro. Momokawa’s rank was a comparatively humble one; but his probity and his force of character made him a man that had to be seriously reckoned with. In short, everything we know about him tends to strengthen the conviction that he was one of the most worthy descendants of the illustrious Kamatari. It is tolerably plain that it was not in the person of the good-natured old man he had contrived to raise to the throne that he expected to find the saviour of the Empire. It was Konin’s successor that he had his eyes fixed upon. As Konin was old, it was all-important that the succession question should be promptly settled. The Empress at once began to plot in favour of her own son; and when the Em­peror did not listen to her pleadings she tried to get him poisoned. As a result, mother and son were sent into banishment. Konin thereupon expressed the intention of transmit­ting the throne to his daughter. But Japan had had more than enough to do with female rulers. During the preceding seventy years or so, she had had four of them; and under every one of them there had been a great advance in the authority wielded by the priests. What was wanted upon the throne at this juncture was a man,—and not only a man, but a strong man. Konin then expressed the wish to make his second son, Hiyeda, Prince Imperial; and most of the Ministers were inclined to agree with the choice. But Momokawa objected strongly. When it was urged that the eldest son, Prince Yamabe, was disqualified by reason of the low extrac­tion of his mother, Momokawa hotly contended that the rank of the mother did not enter into the question at all; and so vigorously did he press the cause of the elder Prince, that Yamabe was designated as Konin’s successor.

This Prince Yamabe, then thirty-four years of age, had for long been earning his own living by honest and honourable work. He held a very low rank,—no more than the junior grade of the fifth class. But as Rector of the University (in which institution, as has been said, Buddhism found no footing), he had showed fine ability as an administrator; and even at this date he had the reputation of a Nimrod, for Yamabe set small store by a certain one of the Buddhist commandments when he found himself in a game preserve. As things turned out, Momokawa died at the early age of 48, three years before his nominee came to the throne, for Konin Tenno lived longer than was expected. By no one was Momokawa’s memory more fondly cherished than by the school­master he had virtually raised to the Imperial dignity. And the schoolmaster Emperor, Kwammu, exerted himself to some purpose to vindicate Momokawa as a man of judgement and a reader of character. Kwammu must be counted among the very few Emperors of Japan who have proved themselves to be statesmen, and men possessed of a degree of native of acquired ability sufficient to enable an obscure man to raise himself to a position of fame and influence. Of the one hundred and twenty-three sovereigns of Japan Tenchi Tenno and the Emperor Mutsuhito alone have shown themselves possessed of an equal or superior measure of capacity as rulers.

Before taking leave of the subject of the Sinicisation of Japan, it may be well to advert to a few items of interest for which no place could be conveniently found in the preceding narrative.

And first as regards the names Nippon, Dai Nippon, and Japan. In the Kojiki not one of these names appears. In the Nihongi, “Nippon” does appears on several occasions before the seventh century a.d., but the use of the term is anachronistic. “Dai Nippon” first occurs in the Nihongi under the year 663 in a speech put into the mouth of the King of Pakche. In 671 the word “Il-bun” (Japan) makes its first appearance in Korean annals, while at the same date the Chinese bestowed the name of Jeupenn (hence “Zipangu ” and “Japan”) or Source of the Sun upon the Archipelago in the Eastern Ocean. For the way in which this “ Jeupenn ” became “Nippon” on Japanese lips, see Professor Chamberlain’s Moji no Shirube, p. 375. Thus the wholesale Sinicisation of old Yamato extended even to the very name of the country.

One thing which greatly exercised the official mind in this age was the correct pronunciation of Chinese. The earlier teachers of the classics had been Korean monks, who had adopted the Go-on, or pronunciation of Wu, an old kingdom in the east and south-east of China. But intercourse with the Tang Court at Hsian (now Segan Fu in Shensi) had led the Japanese to believe that the Kan-on, or Northern pronunciation, should be adopted. So in 735 they brought over a Northern scholar, and the students in the University were ordered to place themselves under his instruction. He presently naturalised, took the Japanese name of Kiyomura, and rose to be President of the University, Head of the Gemba Bureau, and Governor of the province of Awa. This naturalised China­man probably owed his official advancement to the influence of his friend Kibi no Mabi, who after a sojourn of nineteen years at the Court of Hsian had returned to Japan in 735, bringing with him the game of go (Japanese checkers), the knowledge of the art of embroidery, and the biwa or four­stringed lute. To him also is sometimes ascribed the invention of the Katakana or Japanese syllabary. In 701 the fete in honour of Confucius had been celebrated for the first time, and it had been celebrated in the University yearly at the equinoxes since that date, but it was not till the ceremonies had been settled by Kibi no Mabi’s dictation that “the forms and etiquette came to be performed with propriety.” His appointment as tutor to the strong-minded lady who afterwards figures as the Empress Koken and the Empress Shotoku established his fortunes on a sure foundation. In 752 he again proceeded to Hsian as second Ambassador, and on his return he was appointed Viceroy of Kyushu, where he worked hard to promote the prosperity of the provinces committed to his trust. Among his other services to Kyushu was his organisation of the great school of Dazaifu, in which he did not consider it inconsistent with his dignity to deliver lectures to appreciative classes of students. In 766 he rose to be Minister of the Left; and so became the first of the trio of outsiders who attained to Ministerial rank in old Japan by sheer native ability. In every respect he was a greater man than Sugawara no Michizane. And yet the latter is now a god, with scores if not hundreds of shrines on whose altars young Japan burns incense to him, while to young Japan the memory of Kibi no Mabi is of much less consequence than a kibidango.

In the Middle Kingdom it has been the immemorial wont to reward meritorious services to the State by the grant of posthumous honours, or posthumous promotion in rank. This practice was introduced into Japan in 673, on the occasion of the death of a certain Sakamoto Takara no Omi, who was then advanced a step in consideration of his achievements in the great civil war of the preceding year.

In Marco Polo we meet with frequent mention of the burning of the dead in China, but such a custom is no longer practised there except in the case of priests. In Japan cremation is still practised, although inhumation is much more common. In this country cremation was unknown until 700, when the monk Dosho left orders for his corpse to be committed to the flames. Two years later the body of the ex-Empress Jito was cremated, and by the beginning of the ninth century the burning of the dead was a general practice throughout the Empire.

Still one point, but a very important point, remains to be noted. In the Tokugawa age, among the Samurai or two-worded class the most important of all the virtues was loyalty; hearty, unquestioned, whole-souled devotion to one’s feudal superior. But among the commoners who constituted nineteen-twentieths of the population of the Empire the virtue of loyalty was overshadowed by the claims of filial piety. And (hat, antecedent to the rise of that military class which it had been one of the aims of the Reformers of 645 to prevent, had been the virtue on which most stress had been laid by all classes. In ante-Reform Japan it had not evidently been of such transcendent consequence; at all events, under the year 562 the Nihongi tells us that “at this time between father and child, husband and wife, there was no mutual commiseration.” Now, between 749 and 758, the Empress Koken ordered each household to provide itself with a copy of the Kokyo, or Classic of Filial Piety, while every student in the Provincial Schools and the University was bound to master it. Of this Kokyo (Chinese Hsiao Ching), which is assigned partly to Confucius and partly to Tseng Ts'an, although it probably belongs to a much later date, Professor Giles remarks:—“Considering that filial piety is admittedly the keystone of Chinese civilisation, it is disappointing to find nothing more on the subject than a poor pamphlet of common­place and ill-strung sentences, which gives the impression of having been written to fill a void?’ However, it ought not to be forgotten that what is the commonplace and the platitude of today may very well have appealed to the imagination and the moral sense of the age in which it was originally propounded with all the staggering force of a brilliant discovery or a divine revelation. “The Master said: There are three thousand offences against which the five punishments are directed, and there is not one of them greater than being unfilial?” Din this into the ears of a child, day by day, from the time it begins to lisp, and think of the result! And forty successive generations of Japanese have been gathered to their fathers since Kibi no Mabi’s pupil made the Kokyo an indispensable item in the limited amount of furnishings possessed by every Japanese household.

CHAPTER V. THE GREAT REFORM OF 645.

CHAPTER VI. FROM TENHI TO KWAMMU. (662 TO 782 A.D.)

CHAPTER VII. THE EMPEROR KWAMMU. (782 TO 805 A.D.)