Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/182

 skill in dancing and singing constituted the highest title to consideration. The plutocrat took precedence of the bushi. The officials that conducted the administration were corrupt and incompetent. For a moment this evil state of affairs was checked by the shock of natural calamities. In the autumn of 1771 a hurricane swept over the country and destroyed a great part of the crops. In the spring of 1773 a pestilence killed ninety thousand people in four months. In 1782 a volcanic eruption (Mount Asama) buried a number of villages under mud and rocks. In 1783 a famine reduced the people to such extremities that they subsisted on dogs, cats, rats, herbs, roots, and bark. Matsudaira Sadanobu, chief minister of the Shōgun Iyenari (1787–1838), called to power by these catastrophes, introduced drastic reforms, and might have effected a lasting improvement had he not wrongly gauged the tendency of the time. He failed to detect the forces working to produce a reaction against the despotic sway which Chinese literature and Chinese philosophy had exercised almost uninterruptedly since the beginning of the Tokugawa epoch, and he devoted all his energies to an attempt to bring the nation into one ethical fold with Chu, the great Confucian commentator, for pastor. Any procedure, however arbitrary, seemed justifiable in the eyes of this statesman, provided that it conduced to his great aim of unifying national thought. He