HISTORY OF JAPAN LIBRARY

JAMES MURDOCH' HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM THE ORIGINS

TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE IN 1542 AD

CHATER IX

THE GREAT HOUSE OF FUJIWARA.

THE rise of the Fujiwara to supreme power in Japan was very much slower than it is usually represented to be by foreign writers. It was only in the sixth generation from Kamatari (died 669) that the fortunes of the great clan were placed on a sure and unshakable foundation.

The work of Fubito, Kamatari’s heir, had been undone by the death of his four sons in one single year (737). In the next generation there had been no lack of aspiring, ambitious Fujiwaras; but they had to deal with formidable rivals. What proved most fatal to them, however, was internal dissension and mutual jealousy; Oshikatsu at the plenitude of his power, in 764, owed his overthrow as much to the hostility of his brother and his cousins as to the state craft of the monk Dokyo. In the course of the next half-century certain members of the clan did indeed attain high and responsible office; but these were more remarkable for honest untiring work and ungrudging devotion to the best interests of the sovereign and the State than for aspiring personal or family ambition.

Two of Kwammu Tenno’s consorts had been Fujiwara ladies; one of these was the mother of the Emperors Heijo and Saga, and the other of Junna Tenno. But Kwammu was not the man to be unduly dominated by any one, whether consort or Minister. His eldest son and successor Heijo, on the contrary, was entirely under the influence of the Lady Fuji­wara Kusuri, who prompted him to make his abortive effort to regain the throne in 810. This proved to be a very unfortunate affair for the Fujiwara clan, since its chiefs again found themselves ranged in opposing camps. Nakanari sup­ported his sister; Uchimaro held fast by the new Emperor, Saga. The death of Nakanari was a serious blow to the prospects of the house. Then, Saga’s Empress was not a Fujiwara, but a Tachibana,—a lady of strong will and fine intellect. During the reign of her son Nimmyo (833-850), her brother, Ujigimi, was a power in the land.

Meanwhile the Northern branch of the Fujiwaras had been slowly consolidating their position. Uchimaro had been Minister of the Right from 806 till his death in 812; and, after much laborious and meritorious work in subordinate but very responsible positions, his son Fuyutsugu attained the same high office in 821. He died in 826, leaving several sons, of whom the eldest, Yoshifusa, was then 22 years of age. It was with this Yoshifusa that the real power and splendour of the great house of Fujiwara began.

Yoshifusa married a daughter of the Emperor Saga, and he was careful to keep on very intimate and friendly terms with her younger brothers. These four youths occupied a somewhat peculiar position. The support of the innumerable Imperial princes had become a serious strain upon the treasury, and it had long been felt that some device must be adopted to case it. Saga Tenno accordingly bestowed a family name upon his seventh and subsequent sons, reduced them to the status of subjects, and thus left them free to make their own way in the official world. The name given them was Minamoto; and this was the origin of the clan that was destined to play such an all-important part in the future history of Japan.

However, it was only one branch of it, and that by no means the most famous one, that was founded by Saga. It was to the Seiwa-Genji that Yoritomo, the Ashikaga, and the Tokugawa Shoguns belonged. Besides these two branches the Uda-Genji and the Murakami-Genji were of consequence. Of these four great lines, the Saga-Genji were civilians; the Seiwa, soldiers; the Uda and the Murakami partly civilians and partly soldiers. Besides these there were many other Minamoto families. The name was bestowed upon five sons of the Emperor Nimmyo (834-850), eight of Montoku (851-858), three of Yozei (877-884), fourteen of Koko (885-887), four of Daigo (898-930), four grandsons of Sanjo (1012-1016), and upon a great number of princesses; but most of these lines became extinct in the course of a few generations.

Three of these earliest Minamoto attained Ministerial rank and office, and were at one time or another the colleagues or subordinates of Fujiwara Yoshifusa in the Great Council of State. And very pleasant and accommodating and complaisant colleagues they proved to be in sooth! Without their connivance, if not their overt support, in his devious intrigues of the harem, Yoshifusa could never have soared to supreme power on unruffled wing so smoothly and so easily as he did. Of late the succession to the throne had been regulated in a very peculiar way. Saga Tenno, instead of nominating his own son as Prince Imperial, had abdicated and made way for his half­brother, the Emperor Junna. This sovereign surrendered the throne, not to his own son, but to the son whom Saga had passed over in his (Junna’s) favour. Now this son (Nimmyo Tenno) adhered to the same course and designated the Prince Tsunesada, Junna’s son, as his own successor. Nimmyo, however, had an unusually large family of his own, and, unfortunately for Prince Tsunesada, some of his sons were the progeny of his two Fujiwara consorts, one of whom was Yoshfusa’s sister. The main and deliberate purpose of the Fujiwara had now become to secure the ascendency of their house. If the Prince Imperial, Tsunesada, became Emperor their rising fortunes seemed likely to meet with a set-back. However, during the first half of Nimmyo’s reign of sixteen years two ex­Emperors had to be reckoned with; and Yoshifusa, still in a very subordinate position, was not prepared to risk any trial of strength with them. But when Junna died in 840, and Saga in 842, he began to intrigue. Certain of the Prince Imperial’s too devoted adherents, on discovering this,—among them the “talented Tachibana” Hayanari—conceived the project of putting their master on the throne by force,—plainly without his cognisance, much less with his authority. The plot was communicated to the Tachibana ex-Empress, who at once sent for Yoshifusa (then a Chunagon) and requested him to take proper measures to suppress it. He succeeded in making it appear that the Prince Imperial was implicated in it; the result being that Tsunesada was ousted from the Eastern Palace (the official residence of the Heir-Prince) and Prince Michiyasu, Yoshifusa’s nephew, then a lad of fifteen, installed in his stead. This episode served to lift Yoshifusa from Chunagon to Dainagon; and on the death of Tachibana Ujigimi in 848 he found himself Minister of the Right at the age of 45, his colleague being his very accomplished but somewhat weak minded bosom friend Minamoto Tsune, eight years his junior.

Two years later (850) the Emperor Nimmyo died, and Yoshifusa’s nephew, Prince Michiyasu, ascended the throne as Montoku Tenno (851-858). To still further strengthen his position Yoshifusa married his own daughter Akiko to the young sovereign, who by the way already had a consort and three children. Early in 850 Akiko gave birth to a child in the Fujiwara mansion; and nine months afterwards the baby, known as Prince Korebito, was nominated Prince Imperial. Subsequently the Emperor wished to revoke this arrangement in favour of his eldest son Prince Koretaka; but the sovereign found himself helpless in the hands of Yoshifusa and of his subservient henchman, Minamoto Nobu. In 857 Yoshifusa was raised to the Chancellorship of the Empire (Dajo-daijin), a position that had not been filled since the fall of Dokyo in 769. But Yoshifusa was still only on the way to the pinnacle of power and grandeur he was to attain.

When Montoku died, in 858, Seiwa Tenno (Prince Korebito) was only nine years of age, and a long minority afforded his grandfather the best of opportunities to consolidate his power. He at once assumed the Regency, and when the sovereign attained his majority in 866, Yoshifusa was by Imperial decree invested with continued authority and the formal title of Regent (Sessho). In 871 his revenues were supplemented by the grant of a house-fief of 3,000 families; he was put on a footing of equality with the “Three Palaces” as regards pre cedence; his office was declared to be for life, and he was assigned a body-guard of between forty and fifty men.

Here we are face to face with a whole complex of innovations. Regents there had indeed been appointed before, but they had always been of the Imperial stock. Shotoku Taishi had been responsible for the administration of the Empire under the nominal rule of his aunt the Empress Buiko, as Prince Naka-no-Oye (Tenchi Tenno) had been under his mother Saimei. But Seiwa was the first male sovereign to reign under any such tutelage. Furthermore he was the first child Emperor of Japan. And it was now for the first time that the great office of Regent was filled not by an august descendant of the Sun-Goddess but by a mere subject. Furthermore, the precedence assigned to this subject, as well as the term of office and the body-guard, was something of grave constitutional import.

Thus was the basis of Fujiwara greatness and grandeur firmly laid at last. Thus the great clan came virtually to hold the throne of Japan in fee, and to occupy that position of supreme authority for which the Soga had erstwhile plotted and struggled and murdered in vain. Whatever may have been the vices or enormities of Yoshifusa and the long line of de­scendants that succeeded him in place and power, bloodthirstiness or bloodguiltiness cannot justly be reckoned among them. The Fujiwaras rarely if ever sought the annihilation of opponents; they usually rested content with their removal. Banishment to some remote quarter of the Empire or immurement behind the gates of some convenient monastery was about the severest penalty they exacted from the very few daring spirits who showed any tendency to cross their path, or to thwart their purposes.

The Fujiwara power was maintained from generation to generation mainly by the unceasing exercise of the device which Yoshifusa had employed so adroitly and so effectively in laying a sure and stable foundation for the fortunes of his house. Fujiwara ladies were imposed as consorts upon successive Emperors or prospective heirs to the Crown; and it was only the progeny of these consorts that could hope to be placed on the throne. And the tenure of the Imperial dignity was precarious at the best, for any sovereign who showed an inclination to rule as well as to reign generally found himself constrained to retire to a monastery and accept the tonsure. The Fujiwara domination remained virtually unquestioned for 209 years—until Go-Sanjo Tenno asserted himself and the rights of the Imperial dignity, in 1069. Between Montoku and Go-Sanjo there were fifteen Emperors, and of these no fewer than seven were minors. And of these fifteen sovereigns as many as eight either abdicated or were compelled to abdicate. During these two centuries the Fujiwara ascen­dency was exposed to only one danger,—occasional rivalry between the various branches of the clan as to which should furnish, not so much the Empress or the future Empress, as the mother of the future Emperor. The details of these domestic bickerings are often sordid and mean; and they are as often as not insufferably tiresome. Brief incidental reference to a few of those that led to more or less serious developments is all that can reasonably be attempted here.

Yoshifusa, as has been said, was Seiwa Tenno’s grandfather. Shortly after attaining his majority the young sovereign wedded his own aunt, Yoshifusa’s younger daughter, and thus became his mother’s brother-in-law and his grandfather’s son-in-law. As Yoshifusa had no son, he had recourse to adoption, and installed his nephew Mototsune (836-891) as his successor in the chieftainship of the clan. Mototsune was Minister of the Kight at the death of his uncle and adoptive father in 872.

For the next four years Seiwa Tenno paid a good deal of atten­tion to the work of administration, and Mototsune’s position was not specially pre-eminent. But when Seiwa abdicated and took the tonsure in 876, and his son, then a child of nine, succeeded as Yozei Tenno (877-884), the new Fujiwara chieftain became the real head of the State. He was at once appointed Regent; and this office as well as that of the Minister of the Right he held for the next three years—down to 880. Then he was advanced to the Chancellorship, and either at the same time or eight years later he was made Kwampaku. This appointment made him the Mayor of the Palace and the real ruler of Japan. After 941, whenever there was a minority, the Fujiwara chieftain was made Regent, and when the sovereign attained his majority he invariably found it to be necessary to appoint the Regent Kwampaku if he wished to prolong his own tenure of the seat of the august descendants of the Sun-Goddess

It is really somewhat difficult for a non-Japanese writer to arrive at any just or definite estimate of Mototsune. That he was a man of commanding force of character cannot be doubted for a moment. It is true that the historian of Mototsune’s administration can scarcely be regarded as absolutely impartial, for that historian was Mototsune’s own son, Tokihira. On the other hand, we must remember that this Tokihira is one of the most maligned and most unfairly dealt with of the many great men of Japan who have reaped nothing but ingratitude and insult from the small-minded pedants who have presumed to pose as historians. And all because Tokihira felt himself imperiously called upon to lay an ungloved hand upon an arch­pedant who was utterly incompetent to read the signs of the times, and who yet aspired to the administration of the Empire.

The young Emperor Yozei soon became a very serious and a very troublesome problem. As a child his conduct had given signs of a cruel and depraved nature, and as he grew to manhood he began to emulate those wanton and disgusting outrages that have made the name of Buretsu infamous—making people climb trees and then bringing them down with his bow as if they were so many sparrows, and punishing onlookers who did not see fit to laugh at the sport; seizing girls in the street, tying them up with lute strings and casting them into ponds; running amok on horseback through the capital and lashing all and sundry with his riding-whip,—such were perhaps the most flagrant of his lunatic enormities, but they by no means exhausted the catalogue of his Imperial Majesty’s peculiar amusements. In the circumstances Mototsune might very well be excused for coming to the conclusion that the only possible redeeming feature such a reign could present was that of a dry and prosy sermon,—brevity. Accordingly he took the momentous step of dethroning this budding Japanese Nero. This was the first instance of a practice that later became not uncommon under the Hojo,—the deposition of the sovereign by a subject.

Koko Tenno (885-887), the new sovereign, a son of the Em­peror Nimmyo and an aunt of Mototsune, was then fifty-four years of age. He had many children, but none of these were by Fujiwara mothers. On his death-bed in 887, he left the selection of the Crown Prince and his successor on the throne to Mototsune, who forthwith advocated the claims of Koko’s seventh son, then a young man of twenty-one. This prince had already received a surname .and descended to the position of a subject,—a fact that was held to debar the bearer of the name from all claims to the Imperial succession. This constitutional point was disregarded by Mototsune on this occasion, although he had used it as an effectual argument against the pretensions of one of the Minamoto two years before.

For the first three or four years of his reign, Uda Tenno, as the new sovereign was called, remained under the tutelage of the astute and all-powerful Kwampaku. On the death of Mototsune in 891 the sovereign’s natural advisers would have been the Ministers of the Left and of the Right. But the greatest offices of State were then occupied by two decrepit dotards of seventy years of age, neither of whom had been remarkable for ability or force of character at any time. Between these and the youthful sovereign there was not much sympathy, and so the Emperor went elsewhere for advice. In 893, when a Prince Imperial was selected and proclaimed, the only one who had been consulted about this very important matter had been Sugawara Michizane, then a Sangi or Junior Councillor of State. This brings us to one of the most singular episodes in the history of Japan.

The Sugawara family professed to be of old Izumo origin, deducing its pedigree from Nomi no Sukune, that doughty exponent of savate, who is credited with beneficial reforms in the matter of the evil burial customs of the mythical age. The first Sugawara, who received that name in Ronin’s time, had been tutor or lecturer at the Courts of Ronin and Kwammu and that post was transmitted to his son and grandson. This last, Sugawara Koreyoshi, was also head of the Bunsho-in founded by his father in 823, as well as Rector of the University. His third son, Michizane, is represented as having been a Shindo,—a god-child,—in plain language, an infant prodigy; and at an early age he had acquired the reputation of being one of the first, if not the very first, scholar in the Empire.

The circumstances of the time were exceptionally favourable for the prospects of the young and brilliant Michizane, for at no time in the history of Japan was scholarship held in such esteem as it was in the ninth century. Thanks to the tradition established by the learned Emperors, Saga, Junna, and Nimmyo, an ability to read Chinese books and to compose in Chinese had become indispensable for any one who aspired to employment and preferment in the public service. Hence the University and the great private schools became thronged with the sons of the privileged and official classes. Candidates for office were many, and positions were comparatively few in number. Hence the annual examination in the Shiki-Bu-Sho came to be an event of grave importance. We hear of the great Mototsune, in the plenitude of his power, taking a straw mat into the courtyard of his mansion, going down upon it on his knees, and there praying to the gods for the success of the alumni of the Kwangaku-in, the college of the Fujiwara clan. This Shiki-Bu-Sho examination was not unlike certain University examinations of the eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries in one respect: in it the composition (Chinese) paper was by far the most important. Now the speciality of the Sugawara and the Oye families was Kambun, Chinese literature,—and especially Chinese composition. Thus we can very readily understand that Michizane’s reputation as a Shindo, and as the finest scholar in Kyoto, must have stood him in the very best of stead. From an early date his lecture-hall was crowded to overflowing, and being in a position to select his own material, and to make an early end of dullards and blockheads, he proved to be a highly successful “coach.” He doubtless knew his books thoroughly and he was reputed to be a great stylist in Chinese. But he had never been in China; and it is not unlikely that if he had been suddenly transferred to Hsian to pursue his avocation there he would have had an uphill battle to fight for some considerable time at least. However, as none of his rivals had been trained abroad, Kyoto was then in a fashion that “country of the blind, where the one-eyed man is King,” and Michizane was fully able to hold his own among the competing doctors. Japanese schools and colleges are wont to develop a peculiar kind of politics of their own; and at this time, the various professors and their followings kept assailing each other in speech and writing with a virulence and an acrimony that amounted to a scandal. One or two of the more modest among them, however, held scornfully aloof from all criticism of their fellows, and pursued a course of their own with unruffled serenity. But Michizane was not one of these.

About the age of forty he was made Governor of Sanuki, and on returning to the capital he speedily acquired the confidence of the new Emperor, Uda. In 891, the year of Mototsune’s death, he was made Chief of the Kurando Bureau, a position of great consequence, inasmuch as it gave him ready access to the Imperial presence. Two years later he was Rangi, Vice-Minister of the Shiki-Bu-Sho, and Tutor to the Prince Imperial, while other minor posts of considerable importance were at the same time entrusted to him. In this year, also, his daughter became one of the Imperial consorts. In 894, after a lapse of 55 years, it was arranged that another embassy should be dispatched to the Chinese Court, and Michizane was appointed head of the mission. But no embassy was ever sent either at that time, or indeed subsequently. Michizane presented a memorial urging the abandonment of official intercourse with the Middle Kingdom. At that time China, he represented, was in disorder, and travelling there was unsafe. Such benefits as might accrue from that or future embassies were slight when weighed in the balance against the attendant disadvantages. One possible motive actuating Michizane on this occasion was a reluctance to withdraw himself from the Court where his fortunes now seemed to be so promising. In 897 he became Gon Dainagon (Acting First Councillor of State); and as both the Ministers of the Left and of the Right had died of sheer senility just before, Michizane found himself really, though not in name, one of the first two Ministers of the Empire. His colleague was the young Fujiwara chief, Tokihira, then twenty-seven years of age, who had just been gazetted Dainagon. At the same time, Michizane was also Mimbukyo (Home Minister) and—General of the Right!—certainly a peculiar appointment. At the same time he was made Chief of the Sugawara clan (Uji no Kami). This signified more than may appear at first. At this date only three clans had Uji no Kami, or official chiefs,—those of Fujiwara, Minamoto, and Tachibana, that of Tachibana finally passing by marriage into the house of Fujiwara. The com­paratively obscure clan of Sugawara was thus to be put on a footing of equality with the three most illustrious houses of Japan. Small wonder, then, that the high-born Fujiwaras and Minamotos should be becoming restive!

In the following year, the Emperor Uda abdicated and took the tonsure. The devout Shomu Tenno had done likewise a hundred and fifty years before, and Seiwa had done so in 876. Both these sovereigns had then ceased to interest themselves in the national administration. But Uda Tenno’s course was different. The first of those Ho-o or Cloistered ex-Emperors, who now and then came to be the real power behind the throne, he at first showed a strong inclination to interfere in the direction of affairs. In 899 Michizane had become Minister of the Right and Fujiwara Tokihira Minister of the Left. In the following year we find the young sovereign, Daigo Tenno, then fifteen years old, and educated or being educated by Michizane, consulting with his father about combining the two Ministries and putting the whole administration of the Empire into the hands of Michizane. When the subject was broached to Michizane, we are told he firmly declined to listen to the proposition. We also hear of him twice or thrice refusing to accept the various offices by the exercise of which he had risen to his commanding but highly perilous position. But such modesty was merely part of the game; it was in accordance with what the etiquette of the time and of the situation de­manded from such as aspired to have their names transmitted to posterity as paragons of propriety. Reference has already been made to the supreme importance of the Li Ki or “Book of Rites” in Chinese culture. Nothing was of greater consequence than “good form”; and “good form” demanded the exhibition of a coy modesty in connection with the acceptance of even the most eagerly coveted office. If Michizane had really been serious in his refusals and resignations of offices, there is no reason why he should have been less successful in having them accepted than his contemporary Fujiwara Yasunori, the pacificator of Ainuland, was, whose sole reward remained the consciousness of having done good work in his day and genera­tion.

The extraordinary rise of the ci-devant professor and successful “coach” occasioned jealous resentment in at least two different quarters. Michizane had been very ready to promote his former pupils and his own adherents, and this gave serious umbrage to the other civil service “coaches” and the candidates who did not come from the Bunsho-in. Against these envious and disappointed grumblers Michizane could doubtless very easily have held his ground, if he had had to face but these alone. But they were by far the less formidable section of his foes.

At the death of Mototsune in 891, the eldest of his three sons, Tokihira, was a stripling of twenty. One of two great Ministries was indeed occupied by a relative of his, but, as has been said more than once, this Fujiwara Yoshiyo was then little better than a dotard, utterly incapable of doing anything serious, either good or ill. The whole burden of maintaining the power and prestige of the great house must needs fall upon the youthful shoulders of Tokihira. From an early date he gave evidence that he had a fine capacity for hard work. At twenty-two he was a Chunagon or Second Councillor, and Head of the very responsible Kebiishi office; and five years later, in 897, he was Michizane’s colleague as Dainagon, then the highest office in the State, for in that year there was neither Chancellor nor Great Minister. At this time the relations between Michizane and Tokihira appear to have been perfectly harmonious, and after both of them were invested with the Great Ministries in 899 we meet with nothing to indicate that there was any friction between them. Michizane had seen fit to snub Fujiwara Sugane, a relative of Tokihira’s fifteen years older than he; while Minamoto Hikaru, a son of the Emperor Nimmyo, born in the same year as Michizane, had become very discontented at finding himself compelled to yield precedence to the parvenu professor. These two elder men had of late been eagerly endeavouring to catch Michizane tripping; and on learning of the discussion between the Emperor and his father about the Ministers they felt that their opportunity had come. They at once represented to Tokihira that he must take vigorous action if he set any store upon the maintenance of his position in the administration.

Just at this moment, Michizane was advanced to the junior division of the second grade of rank. Eighteen days after he found his mansion beset by guards, and an Imperial edict was tendered him ordering him to repair to Dazaifu at once, as Acting Viceroy of Kyushu; while at the same time twenty-seven members of his family or personal adherents were banished to various provinces.

The documents in connection with this episode were burned by the Emperor in 923; and so it is hard to arrive at the facts of the case. Accounts which became current later on represent Tokihira as having first vainly endeavoured to get rid of his rival by magic arts, and then having recourse to slander, his sister’s position as Empress giving him great facilities for pouring unnoticed into the Mikado’s ear his malicious calumnies. An eclipse of the sun which took place on New Year’s day in 901 afforded him a decisive opportunity. Persuading the Mikado that this phenomenon in which the female principle (the moon) obscured the male was the forerunner of an attempt on Michizane’s part to depose him and to place another Prince, his (Michizane’s) own son-in-law, on the throne, he procured Michizane’s degradation. Both Michizane and Tokihira were advanced in rank on the 7th of the first month; it was not till the 25th that Michizane was banished. It thus took Tokihira nearly a month to utilise his “decisive opportunity.”

The ex-Emperor, hearing of this startling turn of affairs, im­mediately repaired to the Palace, but was refused admission by the Imperial Guards. After loitering in the neighbourhood over night his ex-imperial Majesty had to retire without accomplishing anything; and this development put an effectual end to the endeavours of the first cloistered Emperor to direct the policy of the State. Henceforth he retired deeper and deeper into solitude, faithfully practising the Law of Buddha, and died thirty years afterwards at the age of sixty-five.

At Dazaifu Michizane could have found a fine field for the exercise of his abilities. The fortunes of nine great provinces and two considerable islands were still committed to his charge. Kibi no Mabi had done real sterling service here four generations before him, and only a few years before Fujiwara Yasunori, the pacificator of Ainuland, had earned the heartfelt gratitude of the people by his wise and beneficent rule. Even if Michizane felt disinclined to devote attention to the commonplace details of taxation and local government, the re­organisation of the great school of Dazaifu, in which Kibi no Mabi had not scorned to teach while acting as Viceroy, might well have furnished him with a congenial occupation. But the interests of the University of Dazaifu appealed to him no more than did those of the people of Kyushu. He shut himself up in the Government House, and spent most of his time in vain repining and the composition of piteous little poems which lie forwarded to Kyoto in the expectation that they would effect his recall to the splendour and magnificence of the capital. In this he showed no foolishness, but rather a great deal of astuteness, for in those times a grateful poem was the most potent of arguments. However, the device in this case proved ineffectual, and Michizane was left to die in what an American historian somewhat humorously calls “the horrors of poverty and exile” (903).

Now follows the strangest part of the story. In 908 Fuji­wara Sugane died at the age of fifty-two, in 909 Tokihira died at thirty-eight, while in 913 Minamoto Hikaru was gathered to his fathers at the not unripe age of sixty-eight. Michizane had died at fifty-eight; yet in what was called the premature death of his foes the superstition of the time saw the intervention of a retributive and avenging Providence! Then during the next twenty years there were several terrible droughts varied by devastating floods, while there were fires in the capital and other minor calamities. In 923 the young Prince Imperial died; and his premature death was ascribed to the curse of Michizane’s angry ghost. The Emperor repented bitterly of his conduct in sanctioning the decree of banishment in 901, burnt all the documents in connection with the ease,—to the great inconvenience of subsequent historians,—and restored Michizane (posthumously) to his former position. But this was not enough; in the popular imagination the outraged spirit still continued to scourge the Court and the nation. Subsequently (947) the temple of Kitano was reared in his honour and added to the official list of the twenty-two great shrines of the Empire, and Michizane was presently promoted to the highest grade of rank and to the Chancellorship.

Much of the sympathy lavished on Michizane by foreign writers is excited by the tradition that he was a reformer who was bent on breaking the power of the Fujiwaras in the best interests of the sovereign and of the State. But he was in no sense a reformer; if the Fujiwaras had then gone to the wall the only administrative change that would have taken place would have been in the personnel of the executive. There is nothing to indicate that Michizane had any real grip upon the essentials of the great problem of the time,—the economic and local administrative evils that were rapidly sapping the founda­tions of the Imperial power, eating into the vitals of the State, and reducing it to anarchy from which it could only be rescued by the rise of the feudal system and that privileged military class it had been one of the main objects of the Reformers of 645 to prevent. Here Michizane appears to sad disadvantage alongside of Miyoshi Kiyotsura, while his record as head of a provincial executive is a barren one when compared with that of his elder contemporary Fujiwara Yasunori, who preceded him in the Governorship of Sanuki and the Viceroyalty of Kyushu.

“In the 5th month of 863 sacrifices were offered in the palace to the angry spirits of Sora-no-taishi (Kwammu's brother), who died in 785, of Prince Iyo, who died in 807, of the Lady Fujiwara, who died in 807, of Tachibana Hayanari, who died in 843, and of Fumuya no Miyatamaro, who died in 843. This solemn fete was called Goryoye. For several years the country had been scourged by a contagious dis­ease, which carried off many people in spring. These disasters were attributed to the influence of these angry spirits; so sacrifices were offered to appease them.”

This extract furnishes further evidence of the deep hold the “offended ghost” superstition had upon the mind of the time. An adroit use of this in connection, with the natural calamities and other portents of Daigo’s reign would readily enable Michizane’s friends and pupils to rehabilitate the memory of the fallen statesman. One incident they turned to specially good account. “On the 26th of the 8th month of 930, a black cloud coming from the direction of Mount Atago advanced, accompanied by terrible peals of thunder. A thunder­bolt fell on the palace, and killed the Dainagon Fujiwara no Kiyo-tsura, and many junior officers. The Emperor took refuge in the Shuhosha. The disaster was attributed to the wrath of Michizane’s spirit.”

The prevalence of this superstition may partly serve to account for the extreme reluctance of the Fujiwara statesmen to proceed to the last extremity against the rivals who presumed to cross their path.

“Après cela (the banishment of Michizane) Tokihira gouverna seul à sa fantaisie”, writes a distinguished French author. If this means that Tokihira abused his power and position it is certainly unjust. Minamoto Hikaru, who succeeded Michizane as Minister of the Right, was influential down to his death in 913, and the Emperor himself was far from being the mere cypher in the administration of the State that the sovereign presently became. It is not difficult to account for the evil odour into which Tokihira fell with certain of his contemporaries. He was a reformer; and not merely a reformer, but a vigorous one who did not hesitate to grapple with abuses merely because they were profitable to those high in place and power. Before the removal of Michizane we find Tokihira dealing very drastically with corrupt practices among the officials and checking the arrogance and curbing the pre tensions of the Imperial Guards, especially of the time-expired men who had returned to their native places and were there carrying things with a high hand. By this time it had become common for rich farmers in the country to bribe the officers to enrol them for nominal service in the Guards; as soldiers they were exempt from the corvee. In Harima in 900, more than half of the peasants had adopted this course; while similar complaints came in from Tamba and several other provinces. Later on, Tokihira made a sweeping attack upon the manor system, sparing neither princes nor Ministers nor courtiers nor monasteries nor shrines who were infringing the law. Peasants convicted of selling or conveying their lands to the owners of manors were to be flogged and the lands confiscated, while the erection of new manors was strictly forbidden. It is easy to understand that such a measure must have occasioned grievous discontent among the needy, greedy crowd of courtiers eagerly vicing with each other as to who should make the greatest display in the profusion of the luxury-ridden capital. Then under Tokihira it also seemed as though sumptuary laws, hitherto more honoured in the breach than in the observance, were to be rigidly enforced. After arranging the matter with the Emperor privately beforehand, Tokihira appeared in full Court in a costume that set the regulations at defiance; and in full Court he received a stinging Imperial rebuke and was ordered Ito retire at once, and thenceforth to set a better example. Tokihira shut himself up in his mansion for about a month; and the example he thus made of himself produced a very excellent effect—for a time.

He was the editor of the Sandai Jitsuroku, the last and the longest of the Six National Histories; and it was he who began the compilation of the Engi-Shiki, that storehouse of documents so invaluable for the history of mediaeval Japan. Toki­hira died at the age of thirty-eight, having achieved no small amount of strenuous work in the comparatively short span of his life. Five years after, in 914, his younger brother Tadahira became Minister of the Right, and it is from Tadahira that the long line of Fujiwara Regents descends. Under his chieftainship the Fujiwara clan attained to a seemingly still greater measure of power than it had wielded in the days of Yoshifusa and Mototsune. In the year of his death (949), Tadahira was himself Kwampaku and Chancellor, his eldest son, Saneyori, Minister of the Left, and his second son, Morosuke, Minister of the Right, all the great offices of the State being thus for the first time monopolised by a single family. And yet, withal, Tadahira was neither a statesman nor a man of any very great ability; in every way he was vastly inferior to his much-maligned elder brother, Tokihira. The first sixteen years of his Ministry fell under Daigo Tenno, who during his unusually long reign of two and thirty years (898-930) kept a tolerably firm grip upon the administration. On his death, his eleventh son, a boy of eight, and Tadahira’s nephew, ascended the throne (Shujaku Tenno, 931-946), and then the Fujiwara chieftain had full scope to display the depth of his incompetency.

Brigandage and piracy had been drastically dealt with in Tokihira’s time, and allowance being made for the disturbing effects of a succession of droughts, famines, inundations, and similar natural calamities, order had been fairly well maintained under Daigo (898-930). Now, under the boy sovereign and the Kwampaku, robbery and outrage once more became rife. Tadahira paid but little attention to this; what excited his apprehensions was a series of absurd palace omens and portents, on which the diviners placed equally absurd interpretations. According to them there was to be armed rebellion in the South-West,—a truly Delphic response inasmuch as the pirates had already made the Inland Sea impassable. Orders were at once dispatched to the Sanyodo, to Shikoku, and to Kyushu to levy troops, while offerings were sent to all the shrines in these quarters and prayers offered up for the prompt suppression of the disturbers of the public peace. But for these precious palace portents and omens Tadahira would have as surely left the South-West alone to settle things in its own way as he presently allowed the Kwanto to take care of itself when it was ablaze with palpable, open, grossly defiant rebellion.

The pirates of 934 were speedily brought to reason; but that was only the beginning of a farce that soon bade fair to assume the complexion of a national disaster. Fujiwara Sumitomo had been sent down from Kyoto io assist the Governor of Ivo to deal with the sea-rovers. This Sumitomo, instead of returning to the capital on the expiry of his commission, settled in the island of Hiburi in the Bungo Channel, and there established himself as a pirate chief (936). By the year 938, when Tadahira was treating the young sovereign to a great exhibition of cock-fighting, Sumitomo had as many as 1,500 craft under his flag, and had practically made himself master of the Inland Sea, from the Straits of Shimonoseki on to the Island of Awaji. Down to 939, all the punishment that had been inflicted by the Court (by which, of course, Tadahira is meant) on Sumitomo had been to send him a letter of warning and to raise him one grade in official rank . Thus encouraged by the great Kwampaku. Sumitomo next year burnt the mint in the province of Suwo, the Government House in Tosa, and drove the Governor of Sanuki to take refuge in Awaji, while the Sanyodo provinces were almost entirely at his mercy. At last, in 940, the Kyoto authorities appointed Ono Yoshifuru as Tsuibushi (Arresting-officer) to deal with the situation. The defection of one of his lieutenants who betrayed the secrets of the banditti and the weak spots in their defences led to the fall of Sumitomo. Driven from the Inland Sea he established himself in Hakata, and with plenty of support from Kyushu made a determined stand there. It was only after a most desperate engagement that his fleet was either burned, or captured, or dispersed, and Hakata taken by the Imperial troops. Sumitomo escaped to Iyo, but was there killed by the commandant Tachibana Toyasu (941), who at once sent his head to be exposed on the pillory in the capital.

That the Kyoto authorities should have lost all command over the Inland Sea for a space of five years was a pretty sure indication that the machinery of the centralised monarchy established by the Reformers of 645 was beginning to break down. And this episode was far from being the most serious or the most significant sign of the times. “In Heaven there are not two suns; in a State there cannot be two sovereigns.” This Chinese maxim propounded by Shotoku Taishi in 604 was now after the lapse of three centuries boldly, openly, and categorically challenged.

It was from the Kwanto that the challenge came. As already pointed out, the conditions here were vastly different from what they were in the rest of the Empire. On account of its proximity to Ainuland and its exposure to Ainu forays, it was at once unreasonable and impossible to enforce the law against the possession of arms by private individuals in this wild country, Kwammu’s famous Bando Brigade had been dissolved; but its tradition remained. Land was at once plentiful and fertile; it was not necessary to sacrifice the whole of one’s leisure in order to solve the problem of subsistence. Many of the richer farmers could handle a sword as easily as they could a mattock, and differences were now and then wont to be settled by a more primitive method than an appeal to the wisdom of the official representatives of law and order.

In 820, as already stated, the revenues of three provinces in this region,—those of Hitachi, Kodzuke, and Kazusa,—were assigned for the support of as many Princes of the Blood who, while bearing the name of Taishu of one or other of them, remained in Kyoto, the actual work of administration being entrusted to a Deputy or Vice-Governor (Suké). The earliest Taishu of Hitachi was Prince Katsurabara (776-853), a youn­ger son of the Emperor Kwammu. Of Katsurabara’s two sons, the elder had received the surname of Taira and been reduced to the rank of a subject in 824. The issue of this first Taira did not become specially famous; it was from his nephew Takamochi, who assumed the surname in 889, that the main branch of the great warlike clan descended. At an early period Takamochi’s five sons settled in the Eight Eastern Provinces, where some of them rose to the chief posts in the local administration, while all of them set vigorously to work to erect manors, amass landed property, and attract adherents. At Court their official rank was low; but their blue blood gave them vast prestige among the Eastern Boors, as the Kwanto people were called by the courtiers of Kyoto—a prestige which was not a little enhanced by their proficiency in those manly sports and military exercises in which the local gentry delighted.

The Taira were far from sundering all connection with the capital, however. Their sons were regularly sent up to Court to serve as officers in the Guards, or in the households of the Fujiwara chiefs. Of the twelve grandsons of Takamochi there were several in the capital about the year 930. One of these, Masakado, had attached himself to the Regent Tadahira, in the expectation that by this means he could raise himself to the much-coveted post of Kebiishi. Tadahira did not encourage him in this ambition, however; and so with a cherished grudge Masakado retired to the Kwanto. There he presently became involved in matrimonial and succession disputes with one of his uncles and other relatives, the result being that in 935 he mustered a band of adherents, attacked and killed his uncle Kunika, then Vice-Governor of Hitachi, and slaughtered several scions of the family that afterwards became the Seiwa-Genji. This brought Kunika’s son, Sadamori, from Kyoto to avenge his father’s death; but Masakado proved more than a match for the forces of Sadamori and his uncle Yoshikane, Governor of Shimosa. Formal complaint was now made to the central authorities. They indeed summoned Masakado to appear and answer to the charges; but he was adjudged to have done nothing wrong. Now, this was a very serious matter indeed, for here the Kyoto Government by implication sanctioned the right of private war, and in so doing showed itself prepared to abdicate one of its chief functions,—that of administering justice and maintaining public order.

On returning to the Kwanto in 937, Masakado promptly reopened hostilities with his uncle and his cousin. Both parties officially appealed to the Governors of the neighbouring provinces for aid to crush the “rebels”; but the latter did not see fit to take any part in the quarrel. Presently, however, others got implicated   family feud. The Vice-Governor of Musashi (who later on, m 961, became the first of the Seiwa-Genji) was at variance with his official superior, Prince Okiyo; and in this Masakado saw his opportunity. He entered Musa­shi at the head of his troops, formed a junction with Okiyo, and made Minamoto Tsunemoto take to flight. The latter hurried up to the capital, then in a great ferment on account of the omens and portents which were exercising the wits of the diviners, and reported that the East was in rebellion. A high-born courtier was at once dispatched to investigate matters on the spot; but he also came to the conclusion that there was nothing blameworthy in Masakado’s conduct.

Just at this time Yoshikane, who had been previously hunted from Shimosa, died (939); and Masakado, now virtually master of that province, found adventurers flocking from all sides to take service under him. Meantime, in the neighbouring province of Hitachi, a local official, Fujiwara Gemmyo by name, on being called to account by the Governor for long-continued malversation, appropriated the taxes of two districts and fled over the border line into Shimosa. The Governor called upon Masakado to arrest him; but instead of so doing Masakado took him under his protection and at the head of a thousand troops advanced into Hitachi to restore him to his position. The Governor was defeated and taken prisoner; the public offices were burned, and the official seals carried off. This outrage was so flagrant that it was recognised that even the Kyoto authorities could be hoodwinked no longer; and Okiyo pointed out to Masakado that the punishment for seizing the whole of the Kwanto would be no greater than that for seizing a single one of its eight provinces. The argu­ment went home, and Masakado promptly made himself master of Shimotsuke and Kodzuke. Then, just at that moment, an unknown man appeared from whence no one knew and went about shouting, “I am the messenger of Hachiman Bosatsu, who bestows the Imperial dignity upon his descendant, Taira Masakado.” Masakado, to the great joy of his following, at once assumed the style of the New Sovereign and sent off a dispatch to the Regent Tadahira informing him of the fact, and commanding him to bow to the inevitable, Tadahira, who had painted a cuckoo on his fan, and imitated the cry of the bird whenever he opened it, no doubt fanned himself languorously as he perused the missive. Then, we are told, he broke out into a soft well-bred laugh of derision at the ridiculous absurdity of the whole affair. It sometimes took a newly-appointed Kwanto Governor, travelling post-haste, a matter of sixty days to arrive in his jurisdiction; and with communications in that state what could this lunatic Masakado hope to achieve against the sacrosanct capital or the home provinces. And to Tadahira’s limited intelligence that was the only part of the Empire that was of any material consequence. So at first the New Emperor Masakado was allowed to organise his Court and his administration without any interference from Kyoto. As a matter of fact he very quickly overran the Eight Provinces, reduced them to subjection, and placed kinsmen or adherents of his own as governors over them. Furthermore he established a capital of his own, a Court of his own, and a central administration of his own, with its Ministers of the Left and of the Right, and its Heads of Bureaux, the only important official lacking being a Court Astronomer to compile the almanac and regulate the calendar.

This all now looks like so much opera bouffe; for Masakado was really a sort of Japanese moss-trooper who had all un­thinkingly blundered into open rebellion and a mushroom sovereignty of his own. There is a good deal of truth in Cromwell’s saying that he gees furthest who does not know where he is going.

Meanwhile Fujiwara Sumitomo, the Pirate Chief, on hearing of events in the Kwanto, had grown still bolder, and had dispatched secret emissaries to fire the capital, and night after night the Kyoto sky was red with the glare of burning houses. Disorder in the provinces was of no great consequence to Tadahira, but this touched him home; and priests, and temples and shrines, Buddhist deities and Shinto gods once more profited richly. At last the Regent appointed a Generalissimo for the suppression of the Eastern revolt in the person of Fujiwara Tadabumi, an old man sixty seven with no military experience.    .

Luckily, perhaps, for the aged Generalissimo there was no necessity for him to assume command, for on his way to the East he was met with the intelligence that Masakado had been killed and the rebellion crushed. This had been the work of one of the great national heroes, Fujiwara Hidesato, also known in history as Tawara Toda. De­scended from Uona, the son of Fusasaki, he had been banished to the Kwanto some ten years before, and had later on found official employment there. Upon Masakado’s setting up as sovereign Hidesato had proceeded to his camp and asked for an interview. Masakado was then having his hair dressed, but he was so overjoyed at hearing of Hidesato’s arrival that he at once jumped up and sallied out to receive him just as he was. This did not make a favourable impression upon Hidesato, who reasoned that a man so regardless of the proprieties would not be likely to accomplish great things. Ac­cordingly, instead of casting in his lot with the New Sovereign, he returned and determined to make head against him. Hidesato’s reputation quickly attracted a considerable force to his standard, and in conjunction with Taira Sadamori, who had meanwhile been biding his time, he broke Masakado’s forces in two successive encounters, and following hard on the fugitive’s traces shot him down and cut off his head, which was presently sent up to the capital. Like Fujiwara Fuyutsugu’s and Michizane’s, Masakado’s ghost was a very rough and unruly spirit; so a shrine was promptly erected, where he was worshipped as a god.

Episodes such as these might very well have been expected to herald the speedy downfall of the civilian government of Kyoto. But the strange fact is that its existence was not seriously threatened for two centuries, and that it was not till the lapse of two hundred and fifty years that Japan was reorganised on the basis of a feudal polity. Indeed it was between 995 and 1069 that the house of Fujiwara attained to the full splendour of its power and magnificence. The explanation is at least partly to be found in the dissension and mutual jealousy of the rising military families, and in the adroit statecraft of the Fujiwara Regents, who made a point of conciliating the most powerful warrior-chiefs of the time and of enlisting their services in their own support.

This, however, among other things led to a thorough change in the old system of provincial administration. As has been repeatedly stated, the Provincial Governor and his staff were civil officers, and were forbidden to carry weapons. In consequence of the outrages of the bandits towards the middle of the ninth century, when several Governors were murdered by them, this prohibition was withdrawn; but again towards the end of the same century, in Sugawara Michizane’s time, it was enacted that no civil officer should carry any weapon more formidable than a five-inch dirk. Now, after Masakado’s revolt (940), the provincial officers were again permitted to wear swords. This did not indeed convert the provincial offices into military ones; but it became more and more common to appoint members of the rising military families to these posts. If appointed to office in provinces where their own manors lay, these quasi-military Governors had at least the nucleus of an armed force in their own retainers. In the tenth century individual fiefs were still comparatively small; a chief who could call out 300 men was exceptional, while 600 is the largest number we find owing service to one lord. Such were the Daimyo (Great Names) of the time; a Shomyo’s following would be counted by units, or at most by tens. Naturally enough there was a tendency for the larger estates to expand at the expense of their smaller neighbours, the owners of which often found it advisable to “commend” themselves in times of stress. But withal the day of great military fiefs was not yet come.

In some of the provinces, then, there might be a score or so of these petty local magnates all keenly striving for power and pre-eminence; and in cases where forces were very nicely balanced, a commission to act as Governor would prove of no small consequence. In the first place it carried with it the fifth grade of Court rank; and Court rank has always been eagerly coveted by the average Japanese. Then there were official emoluments; and although with the rapid rise of the manors and other tax-free estates these had become woefully scanty, a local potentate with 200 or 300 horse-bowmen at his back would not unlikely prove a much more successful tax-collector than a helpless civilian from Kyoto. But above all the commission would serve to invest high-handed proceedings with a show of legality, and so make the adding of acre to acre and the increase of the retainers of the house and the peasants on the manor comparatively safe and easy.

It so happened that by this time it had become almost im­possible for the central authorities to find competent civilians willing to undertake the duties of provincial administration. The fine gentlemen of the capital looked upon these appointments with contempt; if they deigned to accept them, they re­mained in Kyoto and had the real work done, or more likely scamped, by deputy, they themselves resting content with a percentage of the sadly minished and minishing official emoluments and perquisites. Thus luckily there was no real clash of interests between Kyoto and those military chiefs in the provinces who aspired to the glories of local administrative authority.

It is questionable whether the dull brain of the Kwampaku Tadahira ever grasped this consideration. But there can be no possible question that his great-grandson Michinaga greatly owed his commanding position to his early recognition of the change in the constitution of provincial society.

At this point it may be found advantageous to dispose of the history of the Fujiwara Regents as briefly as possible. The following incomplete genealogical tree may help to elucidate this dry subject.

On the abdication of Shujaku Tenno in 947, his uterine bro­ther, the 17th son of Daigo Tenno, ascended the throne as the Emperor Murakami (947—967). After the death of Tadahira in 949, there was no Sessho or Kwampaku, or Chancellor, for eighteen years. Then, with the accession of Reizei Tenno (968-969) the real autocracy of the Fujiwara began. It was nearly wrecked at the outset by a squalid quarrel between the two brothers Kanemichi and Kaneie, and again in 995 by another of those family squabbles which were ultimately destined to prove fatal to it (1155). But in that year of 995 Michinaga, the fifth son of Kaneie, thrust aside the real head of the clan, his nephew Korechika, and carried the autocracy of the Fuji­waras to its apogee. For more than thirty years (995-1027) his word was law, if not in Japan, at least in the capital.

In 999 Michinaga’s eldest daughter was married to the Emperor Ichijo; and on the death of that sovereign in 1011, the Regent raised his cousin to the throne as Sanjo Tenno, and made him take his second daughter as consort. Sanjo became blind and abdicated in 1016, and then Go-Ichijo, the Regent’s grandson (1017-1036) had to marry his own aunt, the third of Michinaga’s five daughters. The fourth sister was married to Go-Ichijo’s brother Go-Shujaku Tenno (1037-1045); while Io make assurance more than doubly sure, the fifth was bestowed on Ko-Ichijo, a son of Sanjo who at one time was heir presumptive to the throne. This Prince had already been married to a Fujiwara lady, a daughter of Michinaga’s cousin, Akimitsu. In wrath she at once returned to her father, whose hair turned grey at the shock, and who promptly went to work to make an end of Michinaga by magic. Michinaga intimidated all his possible rivals so thoroughly that none of them ventured to offer their daughters as possible Empresses or “National Mothers.” He thus became the father-in-law of four Emperors and the grandfather of as many. Yet in 1069 the succession slipped from Fujiwara clutches for a season.

It would have been impossible for Michinaga to exercise the traditional Fujiwara device so effectually if he had not been able to read the signs of the times and to enlist the devoted support of the most powerful captains of the rising military families. It was upon the Minamoto of the Seiwa branch that he placed his reliance. This house was then of comparatively recent origin. From before the middle of the ninth century the Fujiwaras had acted harmoniously with certain Minamoto satellites with whom they occasionally shared the great offices of State. But these had been of Saga-Genji and Nimmyo-Genji stock,—scholars, courtiers, and peace-loving civilians like the Fujiwara chieftains themselves. From the very first, the traditions of the Seiwa-Genji were vastly different. The first descendant of Seiwa to bear the name of Minamoto was that Prince we found acting as Vice-Governor of Musashi at the time of Masakado’s revolt. It was not till twenty years later (961), in the very year of his death, that the surname of Minamoto was bestowed upon him. Before this he had served as Commandant in Mutsu and Dewa, and had held other military posts. It was his son Mitsunaka (912-997) who had the Higekiri and the Hizamaru blades, the famous heirlooms of the family, forged, and it was Mitsunaka’s two sons Yorimitsu and Yorinobu, mighty men of valour in their day, who became the “Nails and Teeth” of the Kwampaku Michinaga.

By this date the central authority had ceased to have any trustworthy military force of its own. There were indeed the six companies of the Imperial Guards still in Kyoto; but the so-called Guards had degenerated into a disorderly rabble of armed loafers. They were now mostly recruited from rich farmers, or the sons of rich farmers, who obtained admission to the ranks by the exercise of unblushing bribery,—their main object being to put themselves into a position to escape taxation and forced labour and to ruffle it among their neighbours on their return to their native villages after a brief term of nominal service. We have seen Sugawara Michizane acting as Commandant of the Guards, and the practice of giving com­missions to such civilians, destitute of the least tincture of military knowledge or experience, tended to become more and more common. With the ranks filled with such materials, and with such officers to command, it is small wonder that all discipline presently disappeared. The men would roam about the streets and through the suburbs of the capital, forcing their way into private houses and there eating and drinking their fill; brow beating and outraging the lieges in the street, extorting gifts of money or clothes or anything that took their fancy from those that were not strong enough to resist. Sometimes they were assigned the duty of patrolling the city and arresting thieves. The usual result was that the Kebiishi had to be called out to arrest the thief-catchers. But at this time the Head of the Kebiishi Bureau was a minor, a youthful Fujiwara minion with no earthly qualifications for the onerous post; and the Kebiishi was quickly becoming one more of those administrative institutions that had broken down so hopelessly and helplessly.

What the state of discipline was among the Guards may be inferred from the fact that they had actually blockaded the Palace gates more than once, allowing no one to pass out or in, because their pay was in arrear. Sometimes it was the Chancery, or one of the Eight Boards, that they beleaguered in this fashion. Once, in 986, however, the usual proceeding was attended by consequences that can only be described as disastrous. Their rice-rations were a charge upon Echizen and a few of the neighbouring provinces to the north of the capital; and about that time all these provinces had been famine-stricken, and so no rice could be sent. The Governor of Echizen, a Fujiwara, who was doing his work by deputy, was promptly besieged in his Kyoto mansion by the hungry guardsmen, who placed their camp-stools in the courtyard all round the porch, and vowed they would allow no one to enter or leave the house till they had got their dues. The Governor presently appeared with a huge tub of sake borne before him. This was ladled out and handed round, and the besiegers quaffed their bumpers and smacked their lips. Then the Governor began to address them in a long apologetic speech,—giving them the soft answer that turneth away wrath. Before he had spoken long an expression of pain—and wonder—marked the features of more than one of his audience. This quickly became general and intense; and then one man arose, and leaving his camp-stool behind him made for the gate like Lot fleeing from the doomed city of Sodom. He was speedily followed by another, and another, and yet another, and presently the Governor’s courtyard was a solitude, tenanted by nothing but lofty camp-stools. However, if we are to believe the realistic and Rabelaisian original account, the gallant warriors left more than their camp-stools behind them in their precipitate retreat, for that hospitable tub of sake had been well mixed w ith an exceedingly strong and quick-working purgative. Nothing in Japan kills so quickly and easily as ridicule; and as next morning the gallant guardsmen were met with a universal roar of mocking laughter wherever they showed themselves, they were ruefully constrained to admit that they had met more than their match in his very soft-spoken Excellency, the Governor of Echizen.

It was only nine years after this incident that Michinaga had to contend with his nephew Korechika for the chieftainship of the clan, and the chief post in the administration of the Empire. Michinaga had very quickly perceived that to trust to the Imperial Guards was to place his reliance upon a broken reed; so he carefully provided himself with “Nails and Teeth” of his own, and it was to these “Nails and Teeth” that he owed his success in the very few open contests in which he had perforce to engage. These open contests came very early in his career; the knowledge that Michinaga’s “Nails and Teeth” were very strong, very trustworthy, and always promptly available restrained more than one of his own kinsmen from entering the lists to oppose him. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Nowhere has the truth of this hoary maxim been more exemplified than in the history of Japan, which almost from first to last has been the history of great houses.

Minamoto Yorimitsu (944-1021), who had already acted as Governor in some half-dozen provinces, was appointed to the command of the Cavalry of the Guards, and with the aid of his trusty henchmen, the “Four Heavenly Kings,” Watanabe, Sakata, Usui, and Urabe, he soon made it a highly efficient force. It has been already remarked that one of the causes that made the feudal system not only possible but necessary was the mistaken mildness of the Penal Code, or rather of its administration. There was the greatest reluctance to inflict the death penalty, and some excuse for commutation of sentence was almost invariably found. General amnesties, often for the most trivial reasons, were frequently proclaimed. The natural result was that the contemporary annals are full of tales of robbery, arson, and murder, for the bandits on their part had often very little compunction about taking life. The capital was perhaps as bad in this respect as any part of the Empire ; not only private houses, but even the Government store-houses had been plundered, the Palace itself broken into, and officials slaughtered. Yorimitsu and his brother dealt with this state of affairs very drastically, for these warlike Minamoto had even less compunction about taking life than the bandits themselves. Towards the end of his life Yorimitsu’s father, Mitsunaka, had “entered religion” and received the commandments of Buddha. When it came to the injunction against taking life, the old warrior pretended not to hear, afterwards explaining to the Chief Priest that his acceptance of that special command would be prejudicial to the martial spirit it was the prime object of his house to foster among its members and adherents. The new military families established rules and regulations of their own for the guidance of their vassals, and when there was any clash between these rules and the law of the land or the precepts of the Church, it was the household regulations that were obeyed. The nation was thus drifting into a state of society analogous to that which prevailed before the Reform of 645, when the sovereign could address his mandates to his subjects only through the head of the Uji, or clan to which they belonged.

There was a strong tendency for the military men of the time to group themselves under the standard of some one of the many branches of three great houses. The latest of these, the Minamoto, had their manors in Settsu, Yamato, and Mino, and in other provinces around the capital. At this date they were not strong in the Eastern Country, which later on was to become the chief seat of their power. At this time the Kwanto was largely held by the Taira with their eight great septs or sub clans. However, they were not without very for­midable rivals there, for there were Fujiwara there of a breed very different from that settled in the luxurious capital. The four great generals of the time were Minamoto Yorinobu, Taira Korehira, Taira Muneyori, and Fujiwara Yasumasa. This Yasumasa was one of the numerous descendants of the great Hidesato, from whom some half-score of powerful Daimyo families subsequently traced their origin. At this date Hidesato’s grandchildren were exceedingly influential in the Kwanto and still more so in Mutsu, where they ultimately established a power that could afford to offer defiance to the great Yoritomo at the head of more than 200,000 men. The name of Fujiwara is generally identified with self-indulgent effeminacy. However, we are apt to forget that the clan was by far the greatest in Japan and that the ramifications of its various component houses were exceedingly numerous. The Fujiwara of the capital were indeed effeminate; but not a whit more so than their satellites the civilian Minamoto, with whom they shared the spoils and honours of high office and preeminent rank. On the other hand the Seiwa-Genji produced no more able and brilliant captains than the chiefs that came of the stock of Fujiwara Hidesato. Only it was the policy of the Kyoto Fujiwara rather than of the service of their distant kinsmen, whom they were careful to keep at a respectful distance from the capital, where their presence might very well become highly inconvenient. A Minamoto could have no pretensions to the headship of the Fujiwara clan; but a Fujiwara captain with a thousand Samurai of his own behind him might prove a serious menace to the grandeur of a Michinaga or a Yorimichi.

Two points should here furthermore be noted. In the first place, although there was a growing tendency for the Duke to group themselves around the Minamoto, the Taira, and the military Fujiwara, these three families at this time held only a comparatively small portion of the soil of the Empire. In 1050 the largest single fief in the Empire belonged to none of these families, and there were many manors in various parts of the Empire with broader acres than those owned by the warrior­chiefs of Imperial or Fujiwara descent. And secondly neither the Minamoto nor the military Fujiwara nor the Taira as yet acted as a single clan, presenting a united front against a common foe. On the contrary quarrels between the heads of the septs or sub-clans were frequent. This was especially the case among the Taira.

In 999 the Tairas, Korehira and Muneyori, two of the four great captains of their time, convulsed the Kwanto with their family feud. In 1028, at the other end of the Empire, the province of Higo was the scene of devasting frays and forays, in which Tairas and Fujiwaras were involved in inextricable confusion. At the same date Taira Tadatsune began that series of aggressions on his relatives that in three years’ time reduced the Kwanto to a tangled wilderness. There in the province of Shimosa in 1027 there had been as much as 58,000 acres under cultivation; in 1031 this had shrunk to 45 acres; and it was only in the course of several years that as much as 5,000 acres had been got under crop again. It was ibis episode that enabled the Minamoto to obtain their footing in the Kwanto, de­stined to become five generations later on the seat of their power.

Taira Tadatsune, whose manors were in Kadzusa, had acted as Vice-Governor of that province, and also as Constable of Musashi. While in office he had conceived a not unreasonable contempt for the weakness and inefficiency of the central authorities, and had come to the conclusion that it would not lie a very difficult task to carve out a pretty extensive domain for himself in the peninsula between the Gulf of Tokyo and the Pacific. So he set upon and killed the Governor of Awa, seized both Kadzusa and Shimosa, and prepared to extend his “conquests” still further. It was a relative of his, Taira Naokata, the Kebiishi, that the Government sent to reduce him to subjection: but Tadatsune made very short work of his kinsman and his Tokaido and Tosando levies. After a long delay the central authorities commissioned the Governor of Kai, Minamoto Yorinobu, to bring Tadatsune to order, and Yorinobu gained a great reputation among the warriors of the Kwanto in consequence of the brilliant manner in which he executed the difficult task assigned him. Astounded at the skill and daring with which operations against him were now conducted, Tadatsune recognised that he had at last met with more than his match, and so he shaved his head and surrendered. Yorinobu started to conduct his prisoner to Kyoto; but on the way Tadatsune fell ill in Mino and died there. His head was then struck off and sent to the capital, whore it was pilloried on the gate of the common jail. Exposing the heads of flagrant wrong­doers was a comparatively new feature in Japanese criminal practice. We hear of both Taira Masakado and Fujiwara Sumi­tomo being subjected to this indignity. But the practice did not become common till 986, when Fujiwara Nariakira was punished in this way for lopping off a few of Oye Masahira's fingers in a brawl within the precincts of the Court. The traditional mildness of the mediaeval administration was now giving place to a stern rigour that was soon to degenerate into ferocity, a remarkable index of the change that was coming over the ethos of the nation.

To the six old Buddhist sects with their seats in the ancient capital of Nara two newer ones had meanwhile been added. In 810 the famous Kukai, afterwards known (since 921) as Kobo Daishi, had been appointed Abbot of the To-ji in Kyoto, and six years later on he had founded the great monastery of Koyasan in the wild but picturesque mountain-tract between Kishu and Yamato. From these centres the Shingon doctrine was pro­pagated. In the reign of Kwammu, the monk Saicho (Dengyo-daishi, from 866) had founded the Enryakuji, on the steep hill of Hi-ei-zan to the north east of Kyoto, and had there become the head of the Tendai sect. This great Monastery on Hi-ei-zan was to bear pretty much the same relation to most of the later sects established in Japan that the Church of Rome bears to the various forms of Protestantism. It was to be at once the common mother and the enemy of them all. Its earliest offshoot was the temple of Onjoji, more generally known as Miidera, picturesquely situated at the base of the hills on Biwa strand, beside the city of-Otsu. Founded in 858 by Enchin, it was not long before it found itself at deadly strife with the parent fane. High positions in the official hierarchy, the Abbacy of later established foundations in Kyoto and elsewhere, precedence and the right of officiating at certain Court functions, and occasionally such fleshly considerations as manors and other possessions, were the usual grounds of quarrel. If action be the criterion of belief, all this is a fine commentary upon the sincerity of the tonsured exponents of the religion whose central idea is the impermanency of all things and the vanity of human wishes.

In 961 Ryogen (afterwards Jie Daishi), the Abbot of Hi-ei-zan, had a dispute with the head of the Gion Temple in Kyoto, and settled it by sending troops to drive out his opponent. His Eminence then proclaimed that it had become apparent that in that degenerate age the Law of Buddha had fallen into such contempt that it was hopeless to think of defending its interests by ghostly arms alone. Accordingly he mustered a number of stout fellows, had them thoroughly instructed in the handling of such carnal weapons as swords, bows, and spears, and established them as a permanent force in the service of the monastery. The example was speedily followed by the other great ecclesiastical foundations; and thus another cardinal source of unrest was added to the perplexities of the Central Govern­ment and the distractions of the already disordered country. In 968, two of the great Nara monasteries, the Todaiji and the Kofukuji, had a disagreement about some rice-fields, and fought the matter out with sword and bow. In 989, the Government sent a messenger with a rescript appointing a certain priest to the Abbacy of Hi-ei-zan. The priests seized the document, tore it to pieces, and drove the messenger off with contumely. The Government did absolutely nothing and the priests triumphed. As time went on, the priests waxed still more and more turbulent and audacious, and it was felt that something really must be done to check the evil. In 1039, some 3,000 Hi-ei-zan monks, dissatisfied with the Regent’s distribution of ecclesiastical perferment, came down and besieged Fujiwara Yorimichi’s mansion. The latter then appealed to Taira Naokata, and Naokata promptly raised the siege, killed a good many of the priests, seized the ring-leader and lodged him in prison. This was the beginning of the feud between the priests and the military men,—and especially with the house of Taira. With the ministers of religion thus recklessly appealing to the argument of the mailed fist on the slightest provocation, it is but small wonder that the long-engrained horror of taking life—to a very great extent the result of Buddhist teaching—should quickly disappear.

At no time since the Reform of Taikwa had disorder and outrage been so rife, at no time had the popular misery at large been so great as under Michinaga and his son Yorimichi, who was Kwampaku from 1018 to 1069. And yet at no time had the Fujiwaras held more sumptuous and ostentatious state; at no time had their chieftains made themselves more remarkable for luxury, profusion, and prodigality. Their mansions, which they were continually erecting or reconstructing, vied with the Palace in the splendour of their architecture and the magnificence of their appurtenances; their banquets and feasts and fêtes were conceived on a scale that dwarfed the most gorgeous functions of former times into meanness and shabbiness. The very prosaic question naturally arises as to how all the lavish expenditure thus involved could be met at a time when the sources of the national income had become exhausted even to the point of absolutely drying-up.

Some light upon this puzzling matter may be obtained by taking due account of a few incidents recorded by the gossip­mongers of the time. It was Minamoto Yorimitsu, one of the captains who figured as Michinaga’s “Nails and Teeth,” who provided all the magnificent inner furnishings of his patron’s palatial mansion of Kyogoku. At, or about, the same time, on the occasion of a great banquet, this same Minamoto presented Michinaga with 30 fine horses for distribution among the guests. Michinaga’s son, Yorimichi, would appear to have depended fully as much upon the Tairas as the Minainotos. About 1030, a Taira Viceroy of Kyushu, and’his brother, a Kebiishi officer, caused a huge tract of land in southern Hyuga to be reclaimed,—of course by forced labour,—and this they presented to the Kwampaku. He converted that into a manor—his Shimadzu Shoen,—and sent officers of his household to take charge of it. A little later these Taira brothers extended its boundaries into the adjoining provinces of Satsuma and Osumi. The alliance between the Fujiwara statesmen and the Taira and Minamoto captains was thus highly profitable for all parties to the pact. It brought the warriors military office in the capital and Court rank, and this added very greatly to their prestige in the various circuits of the Empire when they proceeded thither to occupy provincial posts. Moreover the connection with the Fujiwara covered a multitude of administrative sins; complaints and impeachments fell upon deaf ears, provided the interests of the Fujiwara patrons were duly promoted by their protégés. They, in their turn, were careful to see to it that whatever might be the case with the national taxes, there should be no falling-off in the Fujiwara tribute.

That great house now had its manors in almost every quarter of Japan. In the great mansion in the capital, a Bureau was established for the management of these. At its head was the House Betto, who was invariably the most experienced and wily lawyer that, could be fouijd in Kyoto, and under him were stewards and other officers. By this Bureau, laws, regulations, ordinances, and what not were drawn up, jointly signed by the Betto and a steward, and transmitted for enforcement on the various manors. Here again was another imperium in imperio, all the more dangerous that it commanded abundant resources, and that the increase of these resources meant a corresponding shrinkage in the revenue of the crown. A century later many of these manors were destined to repeat the history of the old pre-Reformation Imperial miyake. Then the Fujiwara were no longer served but dominated by their quondam military allies, the Taira and the Minamoto; and availing themselves of the changed circumstances of the time, not a few of the Jito, or bailiffs of these Sho-en, disowned all connection with their Fujiwara masters and established themselves as Shomyo or Daimyo, as the case might be.

Towards the close of Yorimichi’s long administration of fifty years (1018 -1069) there was yet another commotion in that great storm-centre, the North-East of the main island. The various accounts of it are at once confused and confusing; but they are of interest as they furnish certain details which serve to throw a valuable light upon the progress of the transformation the social and political fabric of the State was slowly but surely undergoing.

In the ninth century, when the Ainu submitted to be organised in settled communities, the head of the Abé family, which traced its descent from the eighth mythical Emperor and had long been domiciled in the far North, was appointed to the newly created office of General Superintendent of the Aborigines. In 1050 the position was occupied by Abé Yoritoki, who by this time had built up for himself the largest single holding in the Empire. What had formed the nucleus of the immense Abé estates we are not informed; probably it had been Shinden, newly reclaimed land, which was tax-free in Mutsu and Dewa. However that may be, we are met by the startling fact that in 1050 Abd Yoritoki was absolute master of six great districts practically identical with what is now the most extensive of the forty odd prefectures of modern Japan. From his central stronghold, not far from the present Morioka, Yoritoki dominated nearly the whole of the 5,400 square miles now administered by the Governor of Iwate Ken. This formed only a fraction of the superficies under the nominal jurisdiction of the Governor of Mutsu, but it was by far the richest and most densely settled section of the vast territory he was supposed to administer. And within this special district Excellency after Excellency had found that his writ was only so much waste paper, good for a paper handkerchief at the best. In this year of 1050 his Excellency,—a Fujiwara by the way,—made an unusually heroic effort to collect some taxes from the Abd domain; and advanced into it in command of several thousand armed men. All that his Excellency came by as the result of his unwonted zeal and enterprise was an abundance of hard knocks, ignominious defeat, and inglorious disaster. Complaint after complaint had been forwarded to Kyoto, but it was not till 1050 that that thunderbolt of war Minamoto Yoriyoshi was sent down as Governor of Mutsu and Chinjufu Shogun to put things into proper order in Northern Japan in general, and in what is now Iwate Ken in particular. Yoriyoshi, then a grizzled veteran of 61, had won his spurs under his father Yorinobu, in the campaign against Taira Tadatsune a score of years before; and he now brought with him his own first and second sons, Yoshiie and Yoshitsuna, the elder of whom was then fifteen years of age. However, just at the time Yoriyoshi reached Mutsu, one of the frequent general amnesties had been proclaimed; and Abe Yoritoki, taking advantage of this, easily made his peace with the new Governor, to whom and his officers he made many valuable presents.

Next year, just as Yoriyoshi was on the point of returning to Kyoto, the camp of one of his lieutenants—a Fujiwara— was assailed by some horse-thieves, and the latter officer, wrongly as it turned out, suspected Abé Yoritoki’s son, Sadato, of the outrage, and induced Minamoto Yoriyoshi to dispatch a force to arrest and punish him. It was this ill-advised step that really occasioned the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War. Abé Yoritoki was killed by a stray arrow in 1057; but his son Sadato continued the defence of the Abé domains. At the beginning of the strife, old Abé, despairing of ultimate success against the renowned Minamoto captain, had determined to find some over sea settlement where the family could find refuge, and had dispatched one of his sons on a voyage of exploration. After drifting on the open sea the exploring party at last sailed up a huge river for thirty days. From the details given this was probably the Amur. But there was no pressing need for the clan to emigrate, for in the early years of the war Sadato plainly had the best of it. With 4,000 followers he had entrenched himself at Kawasaki; and here, in December 1057, he was attacked by Yoriyoshi at the head of a numeric ally inferior force of 1,800 men. The assault failed; and just when the beaten troops had retired to look to their wounds and recover from their fatigue, a terrific blizzard set in. Under cover of the driving snow Sadato promptly swept out and practically annihilated Yoriyoshi’s command; only the two Minamotos, father and son, three Fujiwaras, and two other officers being able to make good their retreat. It was on this occasion that the youthful Yoshiive’s derring-do earned for him his sobriquet of Hachiman Taro (the War-God’s Eldest-born).

Yoriyoshi’s second term of command expired with the Abés as defiant as ever. A blue-blooded Kyoto Fujiwara was then nominated to succeed Yoriyoshi; but the new commander, very wisely perhaps, declined the appointment, and found employment in the Ministry of War in the capital. Yoriyoshi then received a fresh commission; but at the end of that Sadato was still more than holding his own. A Tachibana was then sent down to supersede Yoriyoshi; but the troops insisted that they wanted no change of commander, and Tachibana had to return. Then Yoriyoshi, girding up his loins for a decisive effort, invoked the assistance of Kiyowara Takenori from the neighbouring province of Dewa. He came with 10,000 fresh troops; and Sadato then found himself seriously outnumbered. In 1062, after being broken in two successive engagements, he was killed in the defence of his stockade at Kuriyagawa. This was a most desperate affair, mere children of thirteen or fourteen fighting like grizzled veterans, and even the women participating in the deadly fray, which raged for two successive days and nights without intermission. According to all the accounts Sadato must have been no ordinary handful; over six feet in height, he was seven feet four round the chest, and it took six strong men to lift his corpse. He appears to have been a sort of rum-puncheon on legs. His head, and those of two of his brothers and Fujiwara Tsunekivo, his ally, were sent to the capita], where everybody crowded to see them. His second brother, Muneto, was accorded quarter; after being taken to the capital he was banished to Kyushu, where he became a priest. This did not prevent him from propagating his kind, however; for it was from him, according to the best authorities, that those Matsuuras of Hirado, so prominent in the story of early European intercourse with Japan, were descended.

Careful attention to the details furnished by the records of this struggle discloses the fact that at this date there were at least four great families in Mutsu and Dewa,—that is in Northern Japan. These were branches of the Taira, of the Fujiwara descended from Hidesato, the Abé, and the Kiyowara. It also appears that all these were intermarrying with each other, and that an ultimate fusion of the four stocks under a single head was not an impossibility. About the origin of the Taira, the Fujiwara, and the Ab6 enough has been said already. The Kiyowara were descended from the seventh son of Temmu Tenno,—that Prince Toneri who presided over the compilation of the Nihongi. At this time, the Kiyowara chief, Takenori, did a very dastardly thing. Abé Sadato’s eldest son, Chiyo Doji, a mere child of thirteen, had fought like a demon incarnate even after his rum-puncheon sire had been smitten stark and stiff. Minamoto Yoriyoshi, proud of his own Hachiman Taro, had nothing but admiration for the young hero and was minded to spare him. But Kiyowara, related by affinity to the Abés, and with the possibility of profiting immensely at the expense of the ruined family, insisted that Chiyo Doji in spite of his thirteen years would be the author of untold evils if spared; and so the gallant child was ruthlessly done to death. The result was that a score of years later Yoriyoshi’s Hachiman Taro had to enter upon another three years’ strug­gle to reduce, not the Abés, but the Kiyowaras to subjection!

During the three centuries subsequent to the Reform of 645, the Japanese could not justly be described as a warlike people. In the new polity adapted from China, it was the civil officer that held the pride of place. If his pretensions were contested, they were contested by the priesthood, and not by any military class; indeed the soldier counted for almost nothing. Time and again ordinances were issued proscribing the possession of arms by private persons. As it has more than once been already remarked, this fact, taken in conjunction with the strange reluctance to inflict the death penalty on capital offenders, goes a certain way towards explaining the pre valence of burglary, highway robbery, brigandage, and piracy. Now from this date the cult of Hachiman, the War-god, gets firmly established in the land.

The original seat of the worship of Hachiman was Usa in Buzen. According to a very late legend, towards the end of the sixth century, a god had there appeared to a child, announcing himself as “Hiro-hata Ya-yahata Maro, the 16th of the Human Rulers,” and in consequence of this the reigning sovereign, Kimmei, founded a shrine at Usa in his ancestor’s honour (570). There is no mention of any such incident either in the Kojiki or the Nihongi, however. This shrine comes into prominence in the eighth century, when its oracle played an important part in the politics and political intrigues of the time. It is in 801 that we first find Hachiman, which name is the Chinese reading of the Japanese Ya-hata, “Eight Banners,” venerated as a war-god, In that year after his victorious campaign against the Ainu, Saka-no-uye no Tamuramaro founded a shrine in the district of Izawa in Mutsu dedicated to Hachiman in which he hung up his bow and arrows. As has been said, this Tamuramaro was one of the very few soldiers whom military exploits had sufficed to raise to power and place in the councils of the State, and it was he that furnished the model on which successive generations of aspir­ing warriors endeavoured to form themselves. Before starting on their expeditions, later Shoguns (Generals) invariably went to worship at his tomb and invoke the aid of his spirit and of his special tutelary deities, Ta mon Ten and Hachiman. In 880 the shrine of Iwashimidzu was erected to Hachiman in the environs of the capital, and it was in it that Minamoto Yoshiive underwent the ceremony of Gembuku at the age of seven in 1048. In the last desperate encounter in front of Abd Sadato’s stockade of Kuriyagawa, Minamoto Yoriyoshi had, in his direst need, invoked the name of Hachiman Dai-Bosatsu, and vowed the erection of a shrine to him if he deigned to listen to the prayer. Accordingly in 1063, before repairing to the capital with his trophies, Yoriyoshi proceeded secretly to Tsurugaoka, and there founded that shrine of Hachiman which the great Yoritomo was to convert into one of the chief glories of his new feudal capital of Kamakura five generations later on.

CHAPTER VIII. THE LEARNED EMPERORS. (806 TO 850 A.D.)

CHAPTER IX. THE GREAT HOUSE OF FUJIWARA.

CHAPTER X. THE CLOISTERED EMPERORS.