Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/173

 samurai. On the one hand, they turned night into day, loved fighting, drew the sword for a trifling cause, exacted deadly vengeance for a petty insult, indulged in sensual debauchery, lived mainly by gambling, thought no shame of indulging in drunken sleep by the wayside, and carried all their excesses and refinements to the utmost extreme. On the other, they scorned to break a promise; despised gain; would not demean themselves by counting money; incurred deadly risks for the sake of any stranger that appealed to their protection; deemed it a sacred trust to act as mediator in the quarrels of others, and never hesitated to espouse the cause of the weak against the strong. It is related of these men that they would go into a restaurant, eat and drink freely, and then beat the landlord if he asked for his reckoning, but, if he trusted them implicitly, they would come back at some future date and throw him a piece of gold without asking for change. The citizen otoko-date imitated most of these fashions, except that he lent his aid to civilians against samurai, and both classes of gallants constituted a perpetual obstacle to the preservation of public peace. Measures to suppress them were adopted at the close of the seventeenth century, but though their organisations were broken up, their spirit survived, finding exponents in the yedokko (Yedo "boys") of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who laughed at misfortune, sided with the weak