Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/89

 and twenty-four assistants. Up to Iyetsuna's time it had not been usual to send samurai to jail. If a samurai's offence was not sufficiently grave to call for immediate suicide, exile, or decapitation, he was ordered to go into confinement (heimōn), which meant that all the doors and windows of his residence must be kept shut; that there must be complete cessation of ingress or egress; that no business might be transacted except such as was unavoidable, and then only at night, and that a physician must not be admitted during the day. In short, a man sentenced to heimōn was virtually imprisoned in his own house with all his family and servants, and had to live in perpetual exile from daylight. A milder form of the same penalty—hissoku, or compulsory seclusion—differed in the essential particular that windows need not be closed, and that ingress or egress was permitted by a narrow opening, while in yet a third form—enryō (retirement)—the shutting of the main gate alone sufficed. Another plan pursued with offenders of the samurai class was to entrust them, pending trial, to the charge of some family, which then became responsible for their safe custody. This practice continued to be used occasionally even to the close of the Tokugawa dynasty. It may be regarded as a kind of bail, and was, indeed, the only kind known in Japan. In the system suggested by Iyetsuna's advisers separate prisons were assigned for the accommodation of military men, but the fact that