Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/91

 transporting provisions as well as those of repairing jails were imposed upon the inhabitants of other districts in the vicinity. There were four grades of diet, the worst of them sufficiently tolerable; garments were furnished by the Government to criminals whose friends or relatives failed to supply them; machinery for preferring complaints was provided; on the 15th of July every year a feast of fish and vermicelli was given to all the prisoners, and in the Ishikawa-jima suburb a species of workhouse (ninsoku ori-ba) gave shelter to time-expired convicts lacking means of sustenance or not fit to be trusted at large. All this suggests a tolerably complete system of prison management. But there were many defects and abuses that do not appear upon the surface. The sanitary arrangements were inexpressibly bad, and the prisoners suffered intensely from exposure, the clothing supplied by the Government being withheld until a man's garments had been worn to shreds. Pitiless cruelty and extortion disfigured the administration of the Ro-nanushi and the Yaku-tsuke. Themselves generally hardened criminals, they freely exercised the power of flogging and torturing entrusted to them for the preservation of order, and as complaints could not be preferred except through the medium of the Yaku-tsuke, against whom they were generally directed, a prisoner had virtually no redress. All the duties connected with the prison, except those discharged by the Rō-nanushi and