An Artist's Letters from Japan. John La Farge

of honors, for, as with the greater gods, the victrix causa pleased.

      Meanwhile the protection of the son of the great Taiko Sama, for which all this war had been supposed to grow, had not been effected, and even this one obstacle or reminder was to disappear from before Iyéyasŭ, but not for several years, and only just before his death.

       AVENUE TO TEMPLE OF IYÉYASŬ.

He had, in Japanese custom, resigned his apparent power to his son, for behind him he could act more obscurely and with less friction. Then began the drama of the extinction of Christianity; slowly, for many reasons, not the least being that several Christian princes, with their vassals, had supported Iyéyasŭ in his struggle. And at length the son of Taiko Sama, Hidéyori, indirectly connected with the Christian side, fell before Iyéyasŭ. His strong castle at Osaka was said to have become a place of refuge for the persecuted and the discontented, even to the very Christians whom his father had cruelly persecuted.

      Which was in the wrong and disturbed the waters, the wolf or the lamb, I do not know, but only that in June, 1615, the great castle was attacked by Iyéyasŭ and his son in as bloody a battle as was ever fought; and notwithstanding that for a moment victory hung in the balance, the Tokugawa Luck prevailed, the castle took fire, thousands perished, and Hidéyori and his mother disappeared.

      Whether Iyéyasŭ was the author of the code of laws or rules at which he is supposed to have worked during these years of waiting, with the aid of learned scholars, to bequeath them to his descendants for the maintenance of the order of things he left, I do not know; nor perhaps was the information I once had about them at all accurate. They, or their spirit, however, served to guide the nation for the next two hundred and fifty years; that is to say, until the second Commodore Perry came to Japan, with the increased weight of an outside world much changed.

       SKETCH OF STATUE OF IYÉYASŬ TOKUGAWA.

      Meanwhile the great man died, leaving a great personal fame behind him, over and above the powers he could transmit. He was buried here, as I said. The place was chosen in 1616; at the end of the same year the buildings were begun, and in the beginning of the next year were partly completed. When the funeral procession arrived, in nineteen days from Iyéyasŭ's former resting-place, amid great ceremonies and religious rites, the title of "Supreme Highness, Lord of the East, Great Incarnation," was given to the hero and ruler and son of the small laird of Matsudaira.

      While he was being thus deified the persecution of the Christians increased in violence, passing into a hideous delirium of cruelty; wiping out its victims, but unable to affect their courage. There can be apparently no exaggeration of the sufferings of the martyrs nor of the strength of mind shown by them—a courage and constancy ennobling to Japan.

      Hidetada, the son of Iyéyasŭ, is buried at Yeddo (Tokio); but Iyémitsŭ, the grandson, has a temple and a tomb here in the forest, alongside of his grandfather's.

      He succeeded to power in 1623, and lived and ruled some thirty years more with an energy worthy of Iyéyasŭ, and carried the system to completion. The laws known as the laws of Iyéyasŭ are sometimes made out to be his. These laws, based on the old feudal habits, and influenced and directed by the great Chinese doctrines of relationship and duties, are not laws as we think of law, nor were they to be published. They were to be kept secret for the use of the Tokugawa house; to serve as rules for conduct in using their power, so as to secure justice, which is in return to secure power, that exists for its own end in the mind of rulers. These laws, some of which are reflections, or moral maxims, or references to the great man's experience, made out a sort of criminal code,—the relations of the classes,—matters of rank and etiquette, and a mechanism of government. They asserted the supremacy, and at the same time destroyed the power, of the Mikado, and by strict rules of succession, residence, and continued possession bound up the feudal nobles. They reasserted the great individual virtues of filial piety and of feudal loyalty, and insisted on the traditions of military honor. "The sword" was to be "the soul of the Samurai,"[3] and with it these have carried the national honor and intelligence in its peculiar expressions.

      Full recognition was given to the teaching, "Thou shalt not lie beneath the same sky, nor tread on the same earth, with the murderer of thy lord." The rights of the avenger of blood were admitted, even though he should pay the penalty of his life.

      Suicide, which had long been a Japanese development of chivalrous feeling and military honor, was still to be regarded as purifying of all stain, and, for the first time, allowed in mitigation of the death penalty.

      Indeed, half a century later, the forty-seven Ronin ("wave-people"—Samurai who had lost their natural lord and their rights) were to die in glorious suicide, carrying out the feudal idea of fidelity.

      You know the story probably; at any rate, you will find it in Mitford's tales of old Japan. It is a beautiful story, full of noble details, telling how, by the mean contrivance of a certain lord, the Prince of Ako was put in the wrong, and his condemnation to death and confiscation obtained. And how, then, forty-seven gentlemen, faithful vassals of the dead lord, swore to avenge the honor of their master, and for that purpose to put aside all that might stand in the way. For this end they put aside all else they cared for, even wife and children, and through every obstacle pursued their plan up to the favorable moment when they surprised, on a winter night, in his palace, among his guards, the object of their vengeance, whose suspicions had been allayed by long delay. And how his decapitated head was placed by them upon his victim's tomb, before the forty-seven surrendered themselves to justice, and were allowed to commit suicide by hara-kiri, and how they have since lived forever in memory of Japan.

      These laws, then, destroyed nothing; they reasserted certain Japanese traditions and customs, but made out, through many details, the relations of dependence of all classes of society upon the shogun, as vassal indeed of the Mikado, but supreme ruler who held the key of all. All this did Iyémitsŭ carry out, as well as the consequent seclusion of the country; the only manner of avoiding ideals which might clash with those upon which this consolidation of the past was based. And to many of these ideals, to the idea of the sacredness of the family, to the idea of subjection to the law of the ruler, Christianity, by its ideal of marriage, by its distinctions of the duty to Cæsar,—to name only a few reasons,—might be found an insidious dissolvent. Therefore, if it be necessary to find a high motive, Iyémitsŭ did what he could to trample out the remains of Christianity, which were to expire, a few years after his death, in a final holocaust as terrible and glorious as Nero himself could have wished to see.

      From that time, for two centuries, all went on the same, until the arrival of the foreigners found a system so complete, so interlocked and rigid, as to go to pieces with the breaking of a few links.

      That break was supplied by the necessity of yielding to the Christian and foreign demand of entrance, and in so far abandoning the old ways.

      With this proof of weakness the enemies of the Tokugawa and those of the system began to assert themselves, circumstances aiding, and in 1868 the last of the race resigned all powers and retired to private life.

The details of the enormous changes, as they followed one another, are too many and sudden, and apparently too contradictory, for me to explain further. Even now I repeat this deficient summary of the Tokugawa story only because of wishing to recall who they were that have temples and tombs about us, and to recall, also, that such has been the end of the beginning which is buried here.