Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/80

 added here for the sake of the plaintive picture it presents of the ruin caused by the furious and continuous fighting which the great trio, Oda Nobunaga, Hashiba Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Iyeyasu, at last brought to an end:—

From the time of the Ōnin (1467) struggle, the samurai turned their back on the capital and returned to the provinces. The days of the Imperial city's splendour were over. The Emperor's palace was rebuilt, but on a greatly reduced scale, and Ashikaga Yoshimasa caused some fine edifices to be erected. But when the war grew still fiercer, in the Kiroku era (1528–1532), every street became a battle-field; the soldiers applied the torch to sacred temple, stately mansion, and spacious palace alike, and the citizens fled for their lives to remote places. Desolation grew more desolate. The two rivers of Kamo and Kibune joined their streams and flowed into the street of Madeno-koji, so that a dyke had to be built to stem the floods, and willow-trees having been planted on it, people built their houses there and thought it a fair place, so humble had their ideas become. The Imperial Palace was a roughly constructed edifice. It had no earthen walls, but was surrounded with bamboo fences. Common people boiled tea and sold it in the garden of the Palace under the very shadow of the Cherry of the Right and the Orange of the Left. Children came and made it their playground. On the sides of the main avenue to the Imperial pavilion they modelled mud toys; and sometimes they peeped inside the blind that hid the Imperial apartments, but no one was visible within. The Emperor himself lived on money gained by selling his autographs. The meanest citizen might deposit a few coins together with a written