Page:A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design (1880).djvu/22

4 In many instances the hatamoto were branches of the oldest and most illustrious families of the empire. The gokénin though superior in numbers, were a much inferior body to the hatamoto, both in rank and income. These two large bodies of the military class, forming the hereditary personal following of the Shôguns, and numbering, with their families and dependents, certainly not less than half a million of souls, were supported from generation to generation by the incomes assigned to them, in lands or in rice, out of the property of their lord. Below the classes already mentioned were the great bulk of the samurai, the “two-sworded” military retainers. They were reckless, idle fellows, acknowledging no obedience but to their lord, for whom they were ready at any moment to lay down their lives, either on the field of battle, in defending him from assassination, or (whether at his order, or of their own free will) by suicide, to save themselves and their families from what, according to the strict code of Japan, was deemed dishonour. The classes below them they treated with the utmost contempt and brutality, and it is obvious that permanent harm was done to the country by this large unproductive class, and that Japan remained poor in consequence.

The rest of the population was divided into three principal classes, in the following order: farmers, artisans, and merchants. There were also two sets of people below these in the social scale, the eta and the hinin. The eta were a class of outcasts, living in separate villages or settlements apart from the general population, with whom they were not allowed to intermarry. Their means of livelihood consisted in working skins, and converting them into leather, which was considered a degrading occupation. Working in prepared leather was not so considered, it was the handling of the raw hides which was deemed to be such. Some accounts state these people to be the descendants of foreign immigrants. The hinin (or “not humans”) were a class of paupers, who only came into existence after the commencement of the Tokugawa dynasty of Shôguns. They were allowed to squat on waste lands, and to build huts for themselves. They gained a livelihood by begging, and were employed to carry away the dead bodies from the execution grounds. They were not allowed to intermarry with the ordinary people. It was however possible for a hinin, by industry, to raise himself from this degraded condition, although instances were rare.

In June 1871, a proclamation was issued permitting all ranks to ride on horseback, a privilege hitherto jealously monopolized by the upper classes; in July permission was given to the people to wear the hakama and haori, the distinctive garments of the samurai; and finally, in November, permission was given to nobles to take their wives and families abroad. The privileges of citizenship were given to the hitherto proscribed eta class, and removed from them the ban which they had laboured under for centuries. Provision was made at the same time for the hinin class (mendicants, leprous persons, etc.), and the number of destitute, and at times loathsome-looking objects who infested alike the streets of Yedo and Yokohama, have been removed to places where they are fed and employed as far as circumstances permit.

The early religion of Japan was Shintôism, or the worship of the powers of Nature, the latest development of which has been preserved in a work on Sin To, by a learned Japanese woman of the twelfth century. The Shintô idea of creation is that out of chaos the earth was the sediment precipitated, the heavens the ethereal essences which ascended, and that man appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-toko-tatchi-no-mikoto. Jimmu Tenno, the son of Fukia-wasezu-no-mikoto, was the first Mikado ( 667), and from the date of his accession the Japanese ki gen commences. The present Mikado is the 123rd of the line. In the sixth century, Buddhism, which had been introduced into China from Corea some four centuries earlier, was carried into Japan, and was disseminated rapidly