Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/85

Rh and appropriated their estates, he found a couplet placarded throughout his camp:—

"Mi-no-owari" has also the significance of fate," or "the end of all things," and in this punning allusion is to be found the whole point of the verse.

It may almost be said that in the absence of a newspaper press public opinion found in the composition of anonymous verselets a vehicle for expressing itself. They did not all derive their interest solely from jeu-de-mots. Many were political criticisms undisfigured by any such verbal devices,—political, that is to say, in the sense attaching to the term among men who gave no thought to such matters as popular representation, forms of government or party platforms, since they had only one orthodox, though often violated, code of action, fealty to a liege lord; only one ideal of success, the assertion of military prowess, and only one object of pursuit, the assertion of family interests.

When Kiyomori created a social panic by removing the capital from Kyōtō, with all its classical associations and sensuous delights, to the bleak, uninteresting, and vulgarly new Fukuhara, an indignant critic set up by the wayside a plac