Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/147

LIBERTY, JUSTICE, SLAVERY female experts to sing dramatic songs, and of causing refreshments to be served by pretty and fashionably dressed girls, while the raconteurs accommodated themselves to these innovations by adding a salicic spice to their stories. Then the authorities stepped in. They limited the number of yose in Yedo to fifteen; they forbade the presence of females in any capacity except as units of an audience, and they ruled that the subjects of recitative, whether song or story, must be chosen from the repertoire of Shintō mythology, of military annals, or of ancient legends. There can be no doubt about the sincerity of all these measures. They show that from the first quarter of the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, and above all during the period, the Tokugawa rulers in their endeavours to promote public morality evinced a degree of earnestness and practicality quite irreconcilable with the disposition hitherto attributed by foreign critics to Japanese officialdom prior to the fall of feudalism.