Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/229

 race in the presence of the alien reinforced their weakened pride of manhood and held them faithful to their engagements. But it has ever been the experience of the foreigner that no such fidelity can be expected as a common trait of the business man's character in Japan.

The devoted fealty of the samurai towards his feudal chief cannot be said to have extended to is attitude towards the sovereign. To the majority of the military class the Throne seems to have presented itself in the light of a comparatively unimportant abstraction. If the great Court nobles made a puppet of the Emperor in the early eras, the bushi showed even less reverence in their bearing towards him in mediæval times, and that the tendency of their minds was not in any sense monarchical is a conclusion which forces itself upon the attention of any careful reader of Japanese annals. Kiso Yoshinaka, the "Morning Sun Shōgun," who struck the first strong blow at the power of the Taira in the twelfth century, openly declared that the ex-Emperor was a monk, the Emperor himself, a baby, and the Regent (Kwampaku) a greater man than either of them. This mood showed itself very strongly in the time of the Hōjō. At the outset of their career they came into collision with the Throne, and they marked their victory by deposing an Emperor and banishing three ex-Emperors to remote islands. Such arbitrary proceedings did not shock the bulk of the samurai.