Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/39

 sections against sparks and thieves. Measures almost savagely drastic were adopted to prevent disorder. Again and again regulations appeared on the notice boards at the cross-streets forbidding any save the nearest relatives to repair to the scene of a fire, and authorising guards to kill every person acting in defiance of that restriction. The incendiary was crucified, and any one causing a fire by negligence became liable to capital punishment, while the members of the five-family group to which he belonged shared his guilt to the extent of imprisonment. The most obvious precaution, however, was to improve the construction of the houses. At first the Government did not attempt to do more than advise the substitution of boarded roofs for thatched. But in the middle of the seventeenth century, there occurred a conflagration of dimensions so disastrous that the Shōgun, in addition to distributing large sums of money among the sufferers and throwing the State forests open for supplies of timber, postponed the rebuilding of his own palace in order not to increase the demand for workmen. It was then that the more wealthy citizens began to use tiles for roofing their houses. They had already been in the habit of laying along the ridge of the roof a beam on which buckets of water stood perpetually, and of providing a kind of huge box on wheels for carrying away their chattels and clothing at the supreme moment. But during the great fire already