Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/83

 the privileges of wearing a sword and taking a family name could be earned by a farmer who warned the authorities of seditious intentions on the part of his fellow-rustics, such as combining to present petitions or absconding in large numbers to elude taxation. Many other instances might be adduced of enactments designed to enlist coöperation for the detection of crime.

But although such measures were adopted to obtain evidence, the law required that an accused person must be induced to confess before his guilt was finally determined. It resulted that torture was freely applied. No instruments in the nature of the rack, the boot, the thumbscrew, etc., were employed. The commonest device was to bind a man with ropes in some con- strained position which became more and more agonising the longer he retained it; or to make him kneel upon a grating of wooden bars with their edges upward and then to pile weights upon his knees. In the case of minor criminals a method sometimes pursued was to insert the handle of a pen between the fingers, which were then pressed together forcibly, great pain being thus caused without inflicting any serious injury. But on the whole the tortures employed judicially in Japan were not at all so cruel as those used in medival Europe.

The first system of prison organisation in Japan seems to have been introduced at the beginning of the eighth century, when the Taihō Code was