Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/97

 but in a kind of cul-de-sac, where he became the target for bullets, arrows, and other missiles poured upon him from all sides by a hidden foe; and in the face of such a fire he had to turn and force another gate at right angles to the original entrance. This method of division into spaces separately defensible, somewhat on the principle of the watertight compartments of a modern war-vessel, was extensively applied to the inner keep, so that an assailant had to establish his footing square by square. There stood also high towers on either side of the gates, with numerous loopholes opening in every direction, and among the weapons of defence was a movable tower which could be wheeled to any point at will. The roof of the donjon was tiled with copper, and the gates were sheeted and studded with iron.

It is scarcely possible to conceive a greater contrast than that which this noble structure presented to the so-called "castle" of one of the Minamoto or Hōjō chieftains, where the only stones employed were for the foundations of the wooden pillars, and the only protection was a thin wall of clay-plaster easily penetrable by a musket bullet. That an architectural revolution so wholesale should have taken place within a period little longer than a generation, bears strong testimony to the reforming courage of the Japanese, to their elasticity of conception, and to their fertility of resource. One imagines that men whose military edifices had not hitherto possessed