Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/162

 kakiyo had conceived this plot, borrowing a model from the policy of the Hōjō in Kamakura. His ambition was to secure for himself and his descendants the position of Vicegerent. But the insignia of the Shogunate—a Masamune sword and a Kunimitsu dagger—were handed by the dying Shōgun at midnight to Hotta Masatoshi, and when morning broke the conspirators found the dead man's office occupied by his brother, Tsunayoshi.

This is a particularly interesting epoch of Japan's history. It saw the first manifestations of a public opinion destined to culminate in the remarkable radicalism of the nation's nineteenth-century career. The Shōgun's ministers, when they placed upon the Emperor's shoulders responsibility for his subjects' suffering, furnished an unwitting proof of the tendency of the time, for it was from the writings of the Chinese philosophers that they borrowed such an idea. On the other hand, the outrage thus offered to the traditions of imperialism reacted in aid of a revival then commencing, the revival of the Shintō cult. Fate, as usual ironical, placed the Shōgun (Tsunayoshi) himself in the forefront of this movement, though no great perspicacity should have been needed to show him that a cult based on the divinity of the Emperor was irreconcilable with the Tokugawa's pretensions to administrative supremacy. Perhaps, if his appreciation of Shintō had not been prompted