Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/213

THE HEIAN EPOCH to the instinct of charity. Servants attacked by serious maladies were sometimes shut into a secluded building and left to die without succour, or were even carried to an unfrequented place and abandoned to their fate. A man having driven his sick brother from his house, the patient, failing to obtain admittance to the residence of any friend, was ultimately transported to the cremation ground, where he lay till death came; and an apparently credible record tells how the corpse of a mendicant friar lay unburied for a month in the belfry of a temple, neither priests nor parishioners venturing to incur defilement by removing the body. Such indifference to the prompting of mercy is strange to Japanese character. It was an artificial mood bred of the superstitious vapours that obscured men's moral vision in that singular age.

The effeminacy of the Court nobles was as great as their superstition, and their eccentricities suggest that sensual indulgence had reduced them to a state of imbecility. Tadahira, the younger brother of Tokihira, the great Fujiwara chief, painted a cuckoo on his fan, and imitated the cry of the bird whenever he opened the fan. At the time when he distinguished himself by these callow antics he held high military rank. Another of the Fujiwara nobles (Yasutada) made a habit of carrying hot rice-dumplings in the bosom of his garment, for the sake of their warmth, and throwing them away when they cooled, for the 187