Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/181

 Naturally the munificent expenditure of these tradesmen gradually rendered them objects of much greater interest to the citizen at large than was the austere figure of the old samurai with his empty pockets and his pride of poverty. In the days when the profession of arms derived éclat from constant occasions to exercise it, the merchant's highest ambition was to wear a sword, to be mistaken for a soldier, and to give his daughter to be the wife of a samurai. But now, finding himself the samurai's creditor, he conceived a new idea of his own importance. He set the fashion, and the samurai adopted it. In the first century of the Tokugawa epoch, commoners alone went to a theatre or listened to a jōruri, and only a commoner's wife or daughter learned to play the samisen. The samurai's amusement was to listen to annals of fighting and heroism, to judge the merits of a sword, to attend to ceremonials, or to witness the dancing of the Nō, and a lady of the samurai class played the koto or occupied herself with needlework. But in the early part of the eighteenth century, a jōruri expert (Miyakoji Bungo) came to Yedo from Kyōtō, and sang love dramas with so sweet a voice and to such tender music that he created a furore in the Tokugawa capital. All classes went to hear him, and noble ladies, laying aside their koto and their needle, took up the samisen, and employed maidservants that could play it or dance to its sounds. At first there was question only of