Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/285

 for chambers opening upon inner courts, or looking out on miniature back-gardens, so that the front effect was sombre and monotonous. Many of the houses were roofed with shingles, but some had slate-coloured tiles, and the Palace itself was rendered conspicuous by green glazed tiles imported from China. The conception of such a city at such an epoch—half a century before Lodbrok the Dane sailed up the Seine, and fifty-five years before the birth of Alfred the Great—bears eloquent testimony to the highly civilised condition of Japan and to the Emperor Kwammu's greatness of mind and resources.  —Such persons were named ronin, literally, "wave men;" that is to say, individuals without any fixed status or employment. They are met here for the first time in Japanese history, where they thenceforth figure as a perpetual element of unrest.  —He employed able men without any regard for the part they had acted in his own life. He gave the command of the Bando troops to Tamura-no-maro, whose father had intrigued to procure the Throne for a different prince, and he appointed as tutor to the Heir apparent a man who had twice endeavoured to thwart his purposes.  —It is noticeable that this spirit of exclusiveness did not take any account of alien origin. Tamura-no-Maro, who commanded the Emperor Kwammu's Bando soldiery, was descended from a naturalised Chinaman. Yet, on returning to Kyotō after the final defeat of the Yezo, he received the Emperor's daughter in marriage, and became the father of the next sovereign, Heizei.  —The extreme possibilities of this system were illustrated in the case of the Fujiwara chief Michinaga. He held the office of Regent during the reigns of three Emperors (987-1037); his three daughters became the consorts of three successive sovereigns, and he was grandfather simultaneously of a reigning Emperor and of an heir apparent. Nothing was allowed to interfere with the consummation of this nobleman's designs. Desiring that his daughter, Aki, should enter the Palace where his elder brother's daughter, Sada, already held the position of Empress, and unwilling that his child should have inferior rank, he devised for Aki a special title, carrying with 