Japanese Girls and Women by Alice Mabel Bacon (ebook reader for laptop txt) 📖

[32] Jingo Kōgō, like many of the heroic, half mythical figures of other nations, has suffered somewhat under the assaults of the modern historical criticism. Many of the best Japanese historians deny that she conquered Corea; some go so far as to doubt whether she had right to the title of Empress; all are sure that much of romance has gathered about the figure of this brave woman; but to the mass of the Japanese to-day, she is still an actual historic reality, and she represents to them in feminine form the Spirit of Japan. Whether she conquered Corea or no, she remains the prominent female figure upon the border line where the old barbaric life merges into the newer civilization, just as the present Empress, Haru Ko, stands upon the border line between the Eastern and the Western modes of thought and life.

The seclusion of the Emperors and the gathering of the reins of government into the hands of Shōguns was a gradual process, beginning not long after the introduction of Chinese civilization, and continuing to grow until Iyéyasŭ, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, through his code of laws, took from the Emperor the last vestige of real power, and perfected the feudal system which maintained the sway of his house for two hundred and fifty years of peace.

The Emperor's court, with its literary and æsthetic quiet, its simplicity of life and complexity of etiquette, was the centre of the culture and art of Japan, but never the centre of luxury. After the growth of the Tokugawa power had secured for that house and its retainers great hereditary possessions, the Emperor's court was a mere shadow in the presence of the magnificence in which the Tokugawas and the daimiōs chose to live. The wealth of the country was in the hands of those who held the real power, and the Emperor was dependent for his support upon his great vassal, who held the land, collected the taxes, made the laws, and gave to his master whatever seemed necessary for his maintenance in the simple style of the old days, keeping for himself and for his retainers enough to make Yedo, the Tokugawa capital, the centre of a luxury far surpassing anything ever seen at the Emperor's own court. While the kugé, the old imperial nobility, formerly the governors of the provinces under the Emperors, lived in respectable but often extreme poverty at Kyōto, the landed nobility, or daimiōs, brought, after many struggles, under the sway of the Tokugawas, built for themselves palaces and pleasure gardens in the moated city of Yedo. At Yedo with its castle, its gardens, its yashikis, and its fortifications, was established a new court, more luxurious, but less artistic and cultivated, than the old court of Kyōto. In the various provinces, too, at every castle town, a little court arose about the castle, and the daimiō became not only the feudal chief, but the patron of literature and art among his people, as the years went by filling his kura with choice works of art, in lacquer, bronze, silver, and pottery, to be brought out on special occasions. These nobles, under a law of Iyémitsŭ, the third of the Tokugawa line, were compelled to spend half of each year at the city of the Shōguns; and each had his yashiki, or large house and garden, in the city. At this house, his family must reside permanently, as hostages for the loyalty of their lord while away. The annual journeys to and from Yedo were events not only in the lives of the daimiōs and their trains of retainers, but in the lives of the country people who lived along the roads by which they must travel. The time and style of each journey for each daimiō were rigidly prescribed in the laws of Iyémitsŭ, as well as the behavior of the country people who might meet the procession moving towards Yedo, or returning therefrom. When some noble, or any member of his family, was to pass through a certain section of the country, great preparations were made beforehand. Not only was traffic stopped along the route, but every door and window had to be closed. By no means was any one to show himself, or to look in any way upon the passing procession. To do so was to commit a profane deed, punishable by a fine. Among other things, no cooking was allowed on that day. All the food must be prepared the day before, as the air was supposed to become polluted by the smoke from the fires. Thus through crowded cities, full and busy with life, the daimiō in his curtained palanquin, with numerous retinue, would pass by; but wherever he approached, the place would be as deserted and silent as if plague-stricken. It is hardly necessary to add that these journeys, attended with so much ceremony and inconvenience to the people, were not as frequent as the trips now taken, at a moment's notice, from one city to another, by these very same men.

One story current in Tōkyō shows the narrowing effect of such seclusion. A noble who had traveled into Yedo, across one of the large bridges built over the Sumida River, remarked one day to his companions that he was greatly disappointed on seeing that bridge. "From the pictures," he said, "which I have seen, the bridge seemed alive with people, the centre of life and activity, but the artists must exaggerate, for not a soul was on the bridge when I passed by."

The castle of the Shōgun in Yedo, with its moats and fortifications, and its fine house and great kura, was reproduced on a small scale in the castles scattered through the country; and as in Yedo the yashikis of the daimiōs stood next to the inner moat of the castle, that the retainers might be ready to defend their lord at his earliest call, so in the provinces the yashikis of the samurai occupied a similar position about the daimiō's castle.

It is curious to see that, as the Shōgun took away the military and temporal power of the Emperor, making of him only a figure-head without real power, so, to a certain degree, the daimiō gave up, little by little, the personal control of his own province, the power falling into the hands of ambitious samurai, who became the councilors of their lord. The samurai were the learned class and the military class; they were and are the life of Japan; and it is no wonder that the nobles, protected and shielded from the world, and growing up without much education, should have changed in the course of centuries from strong, brave warriors into the delicate, effeminate, luxury-loving nobles of the present day. Upon the loyalty and wisdom of the samurai, often upon some one man of undoubted ability, rested the greatness of the province and the prosperity of the master's house.

The life of the ladies in these daimiōs' houses is still a living memory to many of the older women of Japan; but it is a memory only, and has given place to a different state of things. The Emperor occupies the castle of the Shōgun to-day, and every daimiō's castle throughout the country is in the hands of the imperial government. The old pleasure gardens of the nobles are turned into arsenals, schools, public parks, and other improvements of the new era. But here and there one finds some conservative family of nobles still keeping up in some measure the customs of former times; and daimiōs' houses there are still in Tōkyō, though stripped of power and of retainers, where life goes on in many ways much as it did in the old days. In such a house as this, one finds ladies-in-waiting, of the samurai rank, who serve her ladyship—the daimiō's wife—in all personal service. In the old days, the daughters of the samurai were eager for the training in etiquette, and in all that belongs to nice housekeeping, that might be obtained by a few years of apprenticeship in a daimiō's house, and gladly assumed the most menial positions for the sake of the education and reputation to be gained by such training.

The wife and daughters of a daimiō led the quietest of lives, rarely passing beyond the four great walls that inclose the palace with its grounds. They saw the changes of the seasons in the flowers that bloomed in their lovely gardens, when, followed by numerous attendants, they slowly