Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/84

Rh upon words. This fatal facility has certainly tended to produce shallowness of thought by tempting men to substitute mere puns for wit and humour, though it is an extravagance to say, as some have said, that both of these latter qualities are wanting in the mental equipment of the Japanese. Wit is rarely found among any people, wherever it be sought, but it is not rarer in Japan than in Occidental countries, and humour abounds. What is spoken of here, however, is ironical levity which brings all subjects, grave or gay, terrible or trivial, within legitimate range of a jeu-de-mot. Thus, when, in the middle of the tenth century, the arch traitor Masakado was killed and his head exposed in Kyōtō, one of the Fujiwara nobles composed a couplet owing its attraction solely to the facts that Masakado had been struck down by a blow on the "temple" (kome-kami), which is a homonym for "rice eating," and that his conqueror was Tawara Tôda, whose first name is synonymous with "rice bag." It is comprehensible that such trivialities should provoke a smile, but this punning couplet actually became a popular song so well did it fit the fancy of the time. Frequently such effusions were anonymous: their authors wrote them in a disguised hand and posted them in some public place. Thus, when a certain Saito Dôsan of Mino in the province of Owari killed his liege lords, one of whom had married his daughter,