Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/225

 evoked and against the instances of heroic loyalty with which the records abound, the excess is certainly not on the evil side.

The expedients resorted to by combatants and political rivals during the Military epoch evinced a liberal rendering of the principle that everything is fair in war. Oda Nobunaga did not hesitate to forge documents containing false accusations against men whom he wished to destroy. Hideyoshi, the Taikō desiring to purchase the friendship of Iyeyasu, by whom he had been defeated in battle, took his own sister-in-law from her husband, one of his vassals, and sent her to Iyeyasu. The girl's husband committed suicide, but Iyeyasu, though cognisant of these things, accepted her for the sake of her beauty and because of the purpose of the gift. More instructive, however, than the multiplication of historical instances is the text of the Chinese treatises from which the bushi derived military instruction. It is there laid down that the spy is the highest product of skilled strategy, and five varieties are minutely described, the greatest expert being he that, simulating disaffection to the master he really serves, wins the confidence of the enemy, and, living in their midst, deceives them into adopting suicidal courses. Obata Kagemori, one of the most celebrated tacticians of Japan, played that role successfully when, a secret emissary of Iyeyasu, he lived in the castle of Osaka, and succeeded in thwarting,