Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/218

 hand. Learn from me how to die, that you may know it when your time comes." Then taking off his armour, he cast it from the tower, and cutting open his stomach, tore out his intestines, dashed them against the battlements, and fell with his sword in his teeth. His son Yoshitaka would have followed his example, but the father forbade him to make any needless sacrifice of his life, which belonged to his Prince. Yoshitaka, therefore, joined the Prince, and subsequently, when the latter was hard pressed, Yoshitaka planted himself in the path and held off the pursuers until, having received ten wounds, he finally leaped into a bamboo grove and committed suicide.

When Kamakura fell, the Hōjō chief, Takatoki, with eight hundred and seventy of his principal vassals, repaired to the temple Tōshō-ji, where they all committed suicide. Many other followers of the Hōjō died by their own hand in various parts of the town. Among the latter was Andō Sayemon. Driven from his post with a remnant of his troops, only a hundred men, and finding his house destroyed, his wife and children gone, and Takatoki's castle in ruins, he prepared with his comrades to commit seppuku beside the smoking ruins, for, not knowing that Takatoki and his men were even then dying at Toshō-ji, he complained bitterly of the disgrace that the flames which destroyed the castle of the lord of all Japan had not been watered by the blood of at least a